I think the milk in my mocha is bad.

I had to get up at the butt crack of dawn this morning to feed Maya, for whatever reason I’ve agreed to dog sit the tugging wonder once again. She’s just up the street but leaving the house in the morning requires a stop for caffeine, regardless of my ultimate destination. This morning: notsomuch.

What does this have to do with putting fruit on a pizza, you ask?

Well the thing is, kiddies, something I haven’t told you before is that little Maya actually belongs to not just a friend of mine, but my priest.

There. I said it. I go to church.

Every Sunday I get up at 8am and putter until my 10am arrival at the place I fondly refer to as “the barn”. It’s not the Catholic Church of my youth - I wrote that off as a child when I was introduced to my family’s religious background - instead it’s a church I chose, or one that chose me. However you want to look at it.

My father was one of eight children born to a banker and his wife in Ireland. All the men in my fathers family that came before him and bore his name (John) were destined for the seminary, so my fathers course was plotted for him just as soon as he eked into the world and was given a name.

As he told me later, he had too many questions for his teachers, questions they couldn’t answer about why the writings of the bible read one way in English, another in Latin and yet another in French or whatever fancy third language it was he knew. He had deeper, bigger issues with the violence and how the church instructed you to love your fellow man when there - in the text of The Good Book - men were asking for strength in physical battle against their enemies. He needed to know things, to have the full picture, to understand. No one could explain.

In those days in Ireland, there were two men that “ran the town”: the banker and the priest. Surely this should have been an attractive career, had he been power hungry or content with a life of celibacy or one who didn’t question authority.

He was none of those, so he withdrew himself from the seminary and became an Atheist.

Shortly after, his father died and the family moved to the states. He pursued a career in banking like his father before him, ultimately meeting my mother at work and settling down in California.

My mother, unlike my father, was still tight with the church. She wasn’t a good, devout Catholic, but she believed all she’d been told without question and raised us with her faith.

My old pappa bear was an insightful, brilliant man who was wise beyond his years. He agreed with my mother to raise us Catholic (in honor of his heritage, even if he didn’t Believe) so we went through the motions of being baptized, having our First Communion and in the case of my siblings - our confirmations. I never made it that far.

The brilliant part comes in here, now, when we talk about my being raised a little differently than my siblings. He encouraged me to celebrate Passover with the Brauner’s across the street, attend bible school with the Lutheran family down the street, and to sample every other church I could walk into without being struck down by lightning (which was a remarkably high number, considering).

I became agnostic.

As my mother became more and more ill, as she suffered heart attacks and amputations, as my father suffered his own heart attacks and I became more and more confused about the world and why it would be OK for these things to happen to anyone I felt alone and apart and abandoned. Not just by my parents against their will, but by whatever higher power it was that was supposed to look out for me.

The years wore on, my parents both passed and at 23 I found myself alone in the world, on the other side of the continent from my brothers and sister, struggling to make it work for me, trying to find the bright side, knowing that if I couldn’t pay my rent/car insurance/grocery bill I had no one to call, no one to fall back on, no one to rely on but myself.

So I grew strong and I focused on my career and I survived. I learned invaluable lessons from friends, acquaintances, strangers, movies, books, music and the earth over the next nine years. I learned and accepted that everything happens for a reason, I understood that we each have a purpose. In December of 2004 I had my own break through, my own moment, and for the first time since I was a child I felt that I wasn’t alone in this big (sometimes ugly, always crazy) world.

The place I landed wasn’t the church of my youth though the ancestry is similar, instead I found a home in an Antiochian Orthodox church where the service is steeped in tradition and the teachings aren’t up for interpretation or debate. The teachings aren’t founded in guilt or judgment, but instead in being aware and empowering yourself every day to be a good person. The faith is similar to Roman Catholicism but we don’t report into the Pope and we operate on the Eastern calendar instead of the Western. There are countless other differences but these are the two I use most frequently to explain without complicating matters.

The priest is a kind man with a self-deprecating humor - a personality that readily admits his flaws with humor and charisma. The church itself isn’t big for the sake of being big, it isn’t filled with bling (as though that would impress God) and it isn’t sterile.

It’s a humble, small parish filled with wonderful people who have never been tainted by the pretentious behaviors I attribute to the church I knew in my younger years. I’m comfortable there. I don’t feel judged, I don’t feel awkward and I don’t feel that my imperfections make me unwelcome. “No man is without flaw” is a line that’s spoken by Father every Sunday, and each time I hear it I close my eyes and a sense of peace falls over me.

I don’t know why I’m sharing this with you now. It could be because Maya took me for a walk this morning and tried my patience, it could be because we’re on the cusp of Lent and I may make references to both Western and Eastern as I observe them in near tandem, it could just be because I was finally ready to let you in. Or maybe it’s because I hope that you have a similar peace.