I come from a long line of Protestants of varying degrees of fervor and belief, but I won’t be going to church on Sunday. I can’t remember the last time I went to a Sunday morning service.

As a teen and young adult I tried out various religious homes—flitting from church to church, trying them on like a dresses in a dressing room and then putting each back on the hanger. Presbyterian, Unitarian, Episcopalian. I went to temple with a Jewish friend and mass with a Catholic friend. I sat in the back of an evangelical church in Cincinnati and went to the alternative Episcopal service in a coffee house in Ann Arbor, tore hunks off the loaf of bread, sipped the wine.

I’ve continued this search, sporadically, throughout my adult life. Quaker meeting. Unitarian again. United Church of Christ with a left-leaning pastor and lots of talk of Jesus. Services at a monastery in Vermont where I sang the hymns, sat and rose, but didn’t repeat credos or approach the altar rail, not being Catholic, except for one Easter Sunday the year my friend Fran died, when I ate the bread, drank the wine—the body, the blood—needing communion, community.

Every other Sunday I get together with four friends to meditate. We talk—meditate—then talk some more. Spirituality. Faith in the power of connection.

Perhaps this trying on and casting off is in my genes. One side of the family descends from Mennonites but our line left the Mennonite faith behind and became Lutheran and then Presbyterian. The other side of the family includes Quakers who left the faith to fight in the American Revolution.

Do I believe in God? Maybe, kinda, sorta, god with a small “g”, a belief in something bigger than myself but I’m not sure what. Do I believe in an afterlife? Not really. Mostly I believe in here, now, life and if I have faith it is faith in myself, in those I love, in the power of connection.

Growing up, church was part of the fabric of the community. To be a good citizen, you went to church—my dad had faith in the value of civic involvement, doing the right thing. My mom might have had faith in God, although I’m not sure. In a journal she kept sporadically she wrote about her views on immortality—that we live on in the lives and memories of children, friends, and work.

So where does this leave me? I work at establishing a meditation practice, a writing practice. I stay connected to friends. I remind myself to slow down, to go for a late afternoon walk, stop to visit with my neighbor, to simply look and listen without planning and worrying and commenting, to be part of each moment as it unfolds. I tell myself that this is where divinity lives, in each small second. Sometimes it’s enough.