Every morning on Tybee Island, my wife walks the beach alone for about an hour. She’s been hunting shark teeth since she was a kid, and she’s extraordinary at it. She doesn’t rush. She doesn’t grid-search the sand like a crime scene investigator. She just walks, eyes loose and open, and finds them. Every time. She says they’re blacker than anything else on the beach. Once you know what you’re looking for, apparently, they’re impossible to miss.

I have never found a single one in my entire life.

I came to Tybee to rest, which is something I did not realize I needed until I got here and stopped moving. It’s Wednesday. We arrived Saturday. My mom brought me to this beach a handful of times when I was growing up, which means I’m now the adult returning to a childhood place — sitting on a porch drinking coffee with my mother while my wife walks the waterline and my nine-year-old niece swims up and down the backyard pool like she was born to be a fish. The geography is exactly the same. But I’m standing in it almost a completely different person.

I haven’t written a word since we got here until now. I haven’t thought about work once. And in the quiet, with no laptop open and no inbox demanding anything, I’ve finally had room to sit with a decision I made a recently.

I called a seminary.

General Theological Seminary, to be specific. I had a Zoom call with admissions. I went in curious. I had spent weeks before that conversation imagining what it might look like to actually study for ordination.

But there was a moment in that call when I knew none of it would work out.

The admissions counselor was lovely. Warm. He walked me through their hybrid M.Div. track — the one designed for people exactly like me, working professionals who can’t relocate to Manhattan for three years. He talked about online coursework and asynchronous formation. I was nodding. I was taking notes. I was already mentally rearranging my evenings to make it fit.

And then he said, even in the hybrid track, you’ll need to be on campus for two to three weeks every year for in-person classes we just can’t teach online.

Two to three weeks.

I did the math in my head right there on the call. Federal leave doesn’t multiply. I get what I get. Two to three weeks every year, for three years, on top of the time I need for actual rest, for my marriage, for my family, for the trip to Tybee I’m sitting on right now. The numbers did not add up. Not at DOJ. Not with my actual life.

That should have been disappointing.

It wasn’t.

What it actually was — and this took me a few days to recognize — was a relief I had not allowed myself to feel until something external gave me permission to feel it. Like getting a flat tire on the way to an appointment you didn’t really want to keep. You stand there on the shoulder looking at the deflated rubber and you realize you’re not upset. You’re relieved. And then you have to be honest with yourself about why.

Here is the honest part.

I sprint. I have always sprinted. I do not know how to live during a thing — I live after it, in the version of myself who has already accomplished the next milestone. I went to law school. I got the degree. I started another master’s at UVA before the first job was even comfortable. I moved from Mississippi to Virginia for the dream job and within months was already thinking about what should come next. The accomplishments stack up because I keep adding them, and the moment one is in hand I am already mentally elsewhere.

I started going to St. Luke’s around Easter last year. I got confirmed this April. Before spring I was on the vestry. By May I was Googling seminary admissions deadlines. I had been Episcopalian for thirteen months and I was already trying to figure out how to be a priest.

What was that?

What was I actually running toward?

Because here’s the thing — I love St. Luke’s. I love being a parishioner. I love the slow Sunday mornings and the same hymns and the same prayers and the way the liturgical year hands me a rhythm I never had to invent. I love my Substack readers. I love that I get to write about all of this and find people who want to talk about it. None of that needed to be improved upon. None of it needed to be credentialed.

But I had turned faith into something I was trying to finish. And I didn’t see it until a fella working in admissions while also pursuing his M.Div. said two to three weeks of residency and my body relaxed instead of tensed.

You all know by now that I was raised Pentecostal. My grandfather was the preacher. Church of God, Mississippi. The Spirit showed up loud and immediate. You did not wait for God in that tradition. God was here. Now. Hands raised, music going, the room electric with the possibility that the Holy Spirit might fall on you that night, in that room, in that exact moment. You came to church hungry for the encounter and you left having had it.

Everything in my childhood church was about now.

The Episcopal Church I joined is about maybe, not yet, on the way, we’ll see, you have to have patience, it’s possible, you can do it, we’re here for you, it can be now, but let that now be on your terms with God’s help, etc...

I don’t think I fully understood that until I sat down to write this. Advent before Christmas. Lent before Easter. Fifty days of Easter before Pentecost. The Spirit doesn’t fall whenever you summon it; the Spirit comes in the season the Spirit comes in, and your job is to wait. The whole liturgical calendar is one long instruction in not skipping ahead.

I came from a tradition where you ran toward God. I joined a tradition where you sit down and let God set the pace.

And then, eight weeks past confirmation, I tried to sprint through it anyway.

My grandfather would find this funny if he were still around. He’d also probably find it baffling. The granddaughter who grew up in his church now learning to wait — really, truly wait — for things he believed should arrive immediately. We loved each other deeply and we would have disagreed about almost everything I now believe. That’s its own kind of grief and I’ll write about it another day.

But the irony is not lost on me: I left the tradition that taught me God shows up now, joined one that teaches God shows up in time, and then immediately tried to skip to the end of it.

We drove to Savannah on this trip because we always do. St. John’s Cathedral is there, gorgeous and Catholic, standing against the skyline the way cathedrals are meant to — visible, unapologetic, an open door dressed up in stone. For years, I’ve gone in there and lit a candle and stood in the silence. Today, I thought about the fact that every Sunday at St. Luke’s I stand up and confess my belief in one holy catholic and apostolic Church — small c, universal, the whole Body of Christ across time and tradition. And then we pray responsively: We pray for your holy Catholic Church, that we may all be one.

That we may all be one.

Cathedrals aren’t built for a specific kind of person. They’re built tall and prominent because they’re meant to be seen from a distance and walked into from any direction. Sanctuaries of art and peace and love. They’ll take whoever shows up.

That’s the church I want to be a member of, not the church I want to graduate from.

My wife met my best church friend once, maybe twice and afterward said she finally understood everything. Not the liturgy or the theology. Just everything I love about being there. Because he never tried to convert me to anything. He talked to me about sports. He was my friend first, which is the only order that ever works on me. His friendship made St. Luke’s feel like home before I had any language for why I needed to be there.

My wife saw that in five minutes. She’s perceptive that way.

She’s also the one finding shark teeth every morning while I drink coffee with my mom.

My wife has been hunting shark teeth since she was a child. She finds them because she’s been at it long enough that her eyes know what to look for. She’s not trying hard. She’s just present, and patient, and walking slowly enough to see what’s already there.

The ancient things are on the beach. They’ve always been on the beach. They’re blacker than everything else around them, she says, once you know how to look.

I called a seminary. I said no. I sat on a porch in Tybee with my mother and my niece and a cup of coffee, and I let the no be enough.

I’m still learning how to look.

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I have been in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, all week for work, and I am about to tell you something nobody ever tells you about Florida unless they are lying on a real estate brochure.

I have enjoyed the heat and humidity.

I know. That sounds like the kind of thing a person says right before they pass out on a sidewalk. But I like that the air has water in it. I don’t drink enough water, so let me breathe it in. Yes, my face feels like it has been sweating since I walked off the plane, and yes, every outdoor stroll feels like I’m moving through warm wet air, but some people pay big money for creams and serums to achieve that hydrated, supple look. The South gives it to you for free. All you have to do is stand outside long enough to question your life choices.

It has been a productive week. Good work. Good people. Good meetings. The kind of week where you do what you came to do, eat tourist food like you are conducting a small anthropological study, and then go back to your room at night feeling both useful and worn thin.

But I’ve missed home.

I’ve missed my wife. I’ve missed the cattos. I’ve missed our house in Virginia and the simple little routine of being there. I want meatloaf, and I want it very specifically because nobody makes meatloaf better than my wife. I want to cut my grass. I want to tend to my tomatoes. I want to put my face up against little whiskers and let a cat act like I have personally offended them by leaving town for work.

But we have big plans this weekend, and I am excited about that too.

St. Luke’s has a workday coming up to clean up the campus, and this will be my first big project as the admin for Buildings and Grounds since joining the vestry. I am lucky, deeply lucky, to have people willing to play big parts in making the thing come together. James Reilly deserves a shoutout for shopping all the plant life, because that kind of job sounds easy until you realize somebody has to actually know what to buy, where to get it, how much of it makes sense, and how to haul it all to the church and get it safely unloaded.

I am hoping we have a good turnout. Actually, I know we will. St. Luke’s never lets you down.

While I have been in Florida, I have also been piddling around with a new Bible I recently bought. It has the Book of Common Prayer in it, along with the Bible and the Apocrypha. It has a little Episcopal shield on the side, so I suppose I can call it my Episcopalian Bible, even though I don’t know if that sounds too official or like something I made up in a hotel room.

But I like it.

I grew up with a King James Bible and no Apocrypha, and I didn’t even know the Apocrypha existed until a few years ago. Then I moved to an NRSV Catholic Bible with the Apocrypha, large print because these eyes of mine have always been dramatic. Now I have this Bible with the Book of Common Prayer tucked right into it, and there is something satisfying about that. It feels like having the prayers and the stories sitting shoulder to shoulder, like they have been waiting on me to figure out they belonged together.

I like reading the prayers. I like learning new things about the Book of Common Prayer. I like that there is a prayer for rain.

My garden will need that later.

But what I have really been thinking about are the pages in the front of the book. The usual ones are there, of course. “This Bible belongs to,” and all that. But there are other pages too, pages I have never had in a Bible before. There is a place to record your confirmation, which catches my attention every time I see it because that is something I would like to do. There is a place for baptism, though I do not know the date of mine, unfortunately. Somewhere in Mississippi, surely, there was a little pre-teen version of me being baptized by my Pappaw while somebody wrote the date down in a church record or family Bible or on a slip of paper that vanished into the same mysterious void that eats birth certificates, spare keys, and the one sock you actually needed.

And then there is a page for Christian marriage.

That page has been bothering me.

Do I have a Christian marriage?

My wife and I got married in Fort Morgan, Alabama, in 2022. We had our good friend Abby get “ordained” online, and she did an excellent job performing a very secular marriage ceremony. There were ten friends, champagne, mixed nuts, lemon cake, and the Gulf providing a beautiful sunset for us to walk down the pier singing Friends in Low Places.

I loved our wedding.

I loved that it felt like us. I loved that it was small and intimate, and we had time to really talk with our guests and enjoy their presence. There was no big reception afterward, no seating chart crisis, no DJ calling single ladies to the dance floor, no cousin asking where the buffet line started while somebody’s aunt cried over centerpieces. It was just us, our people, the beach, and a promise.

But now that I think about it, I do not believe a single prayer was said at my wedding.

At the time, that didn’t bother me. I was thinking about marrying the woman I loved. I was thinking about champagne and cake and catching a few fish before dark. I was thinking about how lucky I was to get to stand there with Janey and say yes to the rest of our lives.

(Funny enough, we renewed our vows in Vegas in 2024)

Then, on one of my mornings here, I got into an Uber on the way to the work location and met a man named Carlos.

He was an older gentleman with an accent I could not pin to any one country, though he had clearly been in the United States long enough to know the language well and hate the GPS in fluent English. A blue rosary hung from his rearview mirror. I was his first ride of the morning, he told me, and he needed some good luck to get more rides that day.

He was mad at his GPS.

Actually, mad may be too gentle a word.

“For the past 9 years and 4 months,” he said, “GPS has ruined my life.”

I thought, well, Carlos is having a rough morning. That sounds serious. I did not ask what happened 9 years and 4 months ago, because there are some doors you do not open unless you are emotionally prepared to move in.

We kept driving, and somehow, with no warning and no smooth conversational bridge, Carlos told me he had been married for 49 years.

I told him that was impressive.

I meant it.

Forty-nine years feels impossible to me in the way mountains feel impossible. You know they exist, but standing at the bottom of one makes you aware of how small your own two legs are. I have been married since 2022. I am still in the part of marriage where I miss my wife’s meatloaf and ask her to send me pictures of the cats. Carlos had been married longer than I’ve been alive.

Then he told me his wife was sick.

Six months ago, she was six feet tall and 179 pounds. Now she is 118 pounds. Stage 4 liver cancer. The doctors had originally given her two years, he said, but she was deteriorating fast.

And then Carlos started crying while driving me to work.

He kept talking about professionalism and he didn’t mean to feel this way. He cried like a man who had been carrying too much grief in too small a vehicle. He cried with both hands on the wheel and his wife somewhere in every breath he took.

“But they do not know,” he said.

The doctors, he meant.

“They do not know.”

He had heard the medical facts. He understood the diagnosis. He knew what the doctors had told him, but he was not ready to let them be the final voice in the room.

I told him the only one who gets to decide is the Good Lord.

And Carlos almost killed us immediately.

He turned around smiling at me so wide and with so much relief that he ran a stop sign.

There are many ways to become Episcopalian, I am finding, and one of them may involve affirming a grieving man’s faith in the backseat of an Uber while quietly hoping the Lord also intervenes in traffic safety.

But I understood why he turned around.

He needed someone to listen. He needed to cry. He needed someone to tell him that hope had not become foolish just because the news was bad.

I’m not typically one to offer to pray with folks outside of the dinner table. My prayer life, at least out loud and in public, still tends to arrive with bowed heads, hot food, and somebody politely waiting to pass the rolls. But Carlos seemed like he needed something a little more than the $10 tip Uber prompted me to give him after five stars.

So I told him we could pray about it if he wanted to.

He cried more.

By the time he dropped me off, he told me thank you. I told him I hoped it was his lucky day.

I have thought about Carlos all day since.

I have thought about the intimacy of strangers, and how sometimes people will tell you about the truest thing in their life simply because you happen to be the person sitting behind them when the grief rises up. I have thought about how marriage looks one way in a Bible page with neat little blanks and another way in the front seat of a Toyota RAV 4 with the GPS running its mouth.

Forty-nine years.

Stage 4 cancer.

A stop sign ignored in the name of holy relief.

That, I think, is a Christian marriage, whether or not Carlos has a page filled out somewhere to prove it.

A Christian marriage must be more than the ceremony, though I am beginning to understand why the ceremony matters. It must be more than who officiated, what scripture got read, or whether anybody remembered to write the date in the front of the Bible. Maybe it’s in the meatloaf and the medicine cabinet, the lawn and the liver scan, the beach vows and the hospital waiting room, the “text me when you land” and the “please, God, let her stay.”

A few years after my own wedding, I’m sitting in a hotel room in Florida with wet air outside the window and an Episcopal Bible on the bed, staring at that blank page again.

Christian marriage.

Well now.

Here I am, pretty invested in this whole Episcopalian thing. I have gone from showing up and trying not to look confused, to writing about it constantly, to joining the vestry, to getting excited about a church workday, to reading the Book of Common Prayer in a hotel room like it might tell me what to do with myself. I have become the sort of person who sees a prayer for rain and immediately thinks of her tomatoes.

So naturally, my brain has found a new question to gnaw on.

Can I get a Christian marriage now?

Would that be a vow renewal? A blessing? A church wedding after the fact? A small liturgy? A conversation with a priest that begins with me saying, “So, hypothetically, how weird would it be if I wanted to fill in this page?”

Can I put the 2022 date and still be valid? I do not know.

I also don’t know if I can swindle my wife into anything resembling a church wedding, even if it comes under the more reasonable heading of a vow renewal. She married me once already, and that took.

Maybe I can talk her into a parking lot church wedding.

I am only half kidding. But you know those trees in front of the church are pretty snazzy.

So, I may ask. I may not. Fr. “Big Dawg” Nick might read this blog post, click his heels twice and text me “You’re not in Kansas Mississippi anymore.”

I may ask what it means to have a Christian marriage blessed after the fact. I may ask whether there is a way to bring our little Fort Morgan promise into this new Episcopal chapter of my life. I may ask whether Janey would be willing to stand with me again, maybe not on a beach this time, maybe not with champagne and mixed nuts, maybe just somewhere at or around St. Luke’s where the prayers are familiar to other people and still new enough to me that they feel like discovering a language I somehow missed.

And if she says no to the church thing, I may pitch the parking lot.

And if she says yes, well, I’ll probably feel guilty for trying to force her into it and say no all by myself.

For now, I am packing up my Bible and heading home soon. Back to Virginia. Back to my wife. Back to St. Luke’s and the people who keep showing up with faith in motion.

I hope Carlos had a lucky day.

I hope his wife has more time.

I hope God was listening in that Uber, even over the GPS Carlos hated with the fire of nine years and four months.

And I hope that when I get home, I remember that holy things do not always arrive dressed like church. Sometimes they arrive in humid air, in a blue rosary, in a stranger’s tears, and in the blank page that keeps asking whether the life you already love might be ready for a blessing.

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Today I woke before daylight, left DCA, and flew north to Syracuse, New York. Until now, my only real experience with the state of New York had been New York City, and to be honest, that first meeting did not leave me lovestruck.

My wife and I went the day after New Year’s on a little weekend trip. We saw musicals, went ice skating, watched the Rockettes, and did what people do when they go to New York for the first time and feel some obligation to enjoy themselves at a respectable pace in a “New York minute.” It was fine. But the city itself never got ahold of me. It was crowded, dirty, hard around the edges, and starved of the things I look for without even meaning to. Trees. Grass. A little room to breathe. Some sign that birds and squirrels and all God’s lesser creatures had not been run clean out by taxis and scaffolding.

I did walk by St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and that nearly changed my mind. I could have spent all day looking at it. There are some buildings that do not just stand there. They testify. But we were on a schedule, so I admired the outside and kept moving. I will also say this in New York City’s defense: I had the best French meal of my life there (if we’re not counting the great French-Creole cuisine of New Orleans). Even so, I enjoyed the Amtrak ride there and back more than I enjoyed the city itself.

So, this week feels like meeting New York again, only in a different mood and with kinder weather.

I flew into Syracuse expecting something larger. Not Manhattan, of course, but at least a city with a little self-importance. I soon found myself rolling toward Seneca Falls, and the farther I went, the more the world opened up and emptied out. There were fields laid flat and wide. Wetlands stretched off into the distance. Lakes and rivers kept flashing into view like pieces of broken mirror. Every few miles I found myself thinking the same thing: I wish I had my fishing pole.

Then came the barns.

I don’t know if central New York invented the red barn, but it surely has custody of the patent. I have never seen so many in my life. They stood off the road in every direction, red as fresh paint, planted in the earth like something permanent and old-fashioned and true. It felt less like driving through a region than driving through an American memory.

And then I got to Seneca Falls, where the whole thing tipped into something stranger.

It is plain to see what matters to the people of this town. Murals of women rise up on the buildings. The National Women’s Hall of Fame is here. The Women’s Rights National Historical Park is here. There is even an It’s a Wonderful Life museum here, which feels perfectly ridiculous until you look around and realize that if any town was ever built to make people sentimental, it was this one. I had no idea I was stepping into such a history filled location - but apparently my wife did, because as soon as I sent her a photo of a mural, she told me who was in it.

It has all the trappings of a Hallmark movie, except nobody here seems interested in being cute about women’s history. They mean it. The place wears its convictions in public.

I found that out again on my way to supper, when I passed a store owned by women, operated by women, and stocked only with goods made by women. You do not see that every day. So naturally I went in. And naturally I bought my wife a pair of earrings, because it seemed foolish to come all this way and not return with proof that I had thought of her.

There was something bracing about it. The town is not vaguely proud of women. It is committed. You can feel that down in the pavement. Even the air of the place seems to say that whatever happened here did not stay buried in a textbook. It grew roots. These folks are proud of their hard-won fight for women’s rights here, as they should be.

Now, I had been sick for three straight days and felt terrible. Hay fever, or some northern variation of it, had settled into me with real malice. I had prescription pills in me, nose spray up me, eye drops on me, and none of it was doing much besides making me feel like a damp, medicated rag. I was hungry, tired, and generally unfit for company. I wanted to find something to eat and deposit myself in the hotel bed.

Oh, but the day could not end yet. I saw a really pretty and obviously very old church down the street.

It sat in the distance right on the water, old stone holding itself together against the evening light. What caught me first were the red doors. Bright as a wound. Bright as a welcome. Bright enough that I knew before I ever got close what I was looking at. Had to be an Episcopal Church. No doubt in my mind.

I saw those doors and whatever fog had settled over my overmedicated head lifted just enough to let me feel something besides misery. Special interest activated, I mustered the will to walk on.

What I found was Trinity Episcopal Church.

It was beautiful in the stern, old way certain churches remain beautiful and seem to age into only greater beauty in this trend forward world of faceless architecture. They don’t build beautiful places anymore that can stand the test of time. This was the kind of building that looked like it has held the same prayers through wars, funerals, potlucks, choir rehearsals, committee squabbles, and baptisms. The kind of church that has seen people come in burdened and leave carrying it a little better. Standing there, I could not help but think what fun that parish must have right there on the water. What a place to gather. What a place to belong.

There is comfort in recognizing your people from a distance.

Maybe that sounds simple to those who were born into the Episcopal Church and never had to learn its signals later in life. I was not. So, there is still something almost miraculous to me about knowing, from halfway down the road, that I am looking at one of ours. Red doors feel like a secret spoken aloud. A little sign that says you are not home, but you are not entirely away from it either.

Faith does not stay neatly folded at home while the suitcase goes on ahead. It rides with you.

And tomorrow I will go just ten minutes down the road to visit the Cayuga Nation of Indians, The People of the Great Swamp. I have been turning that name over in my mind since I heard it. The Great Swamp. It sounds like it’s definitely older than me. It sounds like a good place to go fishing.

I’m looking forward to meeting them.

For now, though, I’ll keep thinking about Seneca Falls. About wetlands and rivers. About red barns standing out against the land like old hymns. About a town that remembers women in public. About a church by the water with red doors that called to me before I was close enough to know its name.

I came to New York expecting one thing and found another.

This time, I like what I found.

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I flew into Redmond, Oregon, on Wednesday and got back to D.C. today. It was a whirlwind of a trip coast to coast, but I was thankful for the opportunity.

The first thing that greeted me when I stepped off the plane was a statue of Bigfoot standing in the airport.

Naturally, I took a picture.

Later I mentioned it to someone from the Warm Springs tribal community, and she told me, quite sincerely, that Bigfoot is believed by many tribal members to be one of their ancestors. She said she had never seen one herself, but that seeing one would be a deeply spiritual event.

I love that.

Because in a place like this, it somehow doesn’t feel strange at all.

It’s hard to describe what it feels like to see mountains that seem to reach all the way to the sky and maybe a little beyond. Back home in Mississippi, the land rolls gently and quietly. In the pacific northwest, the earth rises up like it has something to prove. Snow still clings to the peaks while the high desert stretches out beneath them. Polar opposites that somehow fit perfectly together.

Standing in a place like this made me think about something from when I was a kid.

Growing up in Mississippi, I used to lie on my trampoline out in the field and stare up at the sky. Every now and then a FedEx plane would pass overhead. At the time I had never been on a plane and had no reason to be. I could not imagine leaving Mississippi. Everything I needed felt like it was right there on that little farm in Carroll County.

But I remember watching those planes and wondering what it would be like to look down from one of them and see the rest of this big world. I used to call them “arrow planes” because that’s what my Ninnie called them because of the way they cut across the sky.

Now it is strange to think that traveling has become part of my job. I spend a lot of time in those arrow planes these days, looking down at places I never imagined I would see.

Driving through some of these small mountain communities, I noticed something else too.

There aren’t many churches.

And honestly, I don’t blame them.

When the land looks the way it does in Oregon, you begin to understand why. If you wanted to talk to Jesus, you could just climb a mountain and have the conversation there.

Standing in places like this also makes you listen a little more closely to what Indigenous communities have been saying about the land for generations. The land is not something to conquer.

We humans have a habit of taking.

We crush, build, and burn.
We dig and carve and pour concrete.
We raise steel monuments to ourselves.

But for what?

The land was already beautiful. Already sacred. Long before we arrived with blueprints and bulldozers.

Did you know the Episcopal Church even has a ministry devoted to caring for creation? They call part of that work “life-giving conservation.” The idea is simple. Caring for the earth is part of loving what God created in the first place.

Standing below these peaks, that feels less like a policy idea and more like common sense.

Because honestly, as majestic as the mountains are, you don’t even have to climb them. Just standing at their base and looking up feels like you are witnessing divinity, right here, right now.

Maybe the real task is not to improve the land.

Maybe the task is simply to love it. To cherish it. To remember that the world we were given was already extraordinary before we started trying to reshape it. We could probably apply that same principle to ourselves from time to time.

And sometimes the best way to remember that is simply to stand still and look up: at the face of the mountain, at the face of God, at the face of something older and bigger than us all.

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I just got back from Mardi Gras.

I went to New Orleans on Thursday and didn’t come home until yesterday, and somewhere between the beads, the brass bands, and the late-night pancakes and fried chicken, I remembered something important about myself:

New Orleans is the only city I’ve never lived in that still feels like home.

I didn’t plan to go to a church service while I was there. Mardi Gras has its own rhythm, and I was fully immersed in it — parade after parade, strangers becoming friends on sidewalks, music spilling out of doorways, and that unmistakable feeling that the entire city is celebrating together.

Carnival season is unmatched. Easily my favorite holiday.

Not because it’s extravagant (though it is). Not because it’s indulgent (though it can be). But because it reminds me how deeply human celebration is. How much we need shared joy. How generosity feels better when it’s collective. How beauty doesn’t have to be quiet to be sacred.

Still — somewhere in the middle of all that noise and color, I found myself sitting quietly in the back pew of St. Louis Cathedral. It’s always been one of my first stops when I’m in the city and easily my favorite quiet moments.

We slipped in and took seats near the back while a local high school choir sang to the small group of us touring through. Hymns and chants echoed up into the tall ceilings of America’s oldest Catholic community. The sound didn’t just travel — it lingered, wrapping itself around the arches and floating back down.

I couldn’t help it.

I got goosebumps. At some points I even felt like I was tearing up.

I’m not Catholic. I’m becoming Episcopalian. But in that moment, none of that felt like a dividing line. It just felt like beauty. Shared beauty between everyone visiting regardless of belief or denomination.

That felt familiar.

It reminded me of my first days at St. Luke’s — unsure, curious, a little out of place, and yet welcomed without interrogation. Sit where you like. Stand when everyone else stands. Try the coffee. Ask someone’s name.

You belong because you arrived.

Outside, beads were flying off floats and strangers were catching them like treasure. Inside, notes were rising into stained glass and settling over strangers like a blessing.

Different expressions. Same current.

Another thing about Mardi Gras — everyone is incredibly generous.

Think about it.

You walk up on the street to parade after parade after parade of people throwing free things to the masses.

Beads. Plush toys. Hand-decorated stilettos. Plungers and toilet bowl brushes. Moon pies. Light-up necklaces. Koozies. Sunglasses. Hats. T-shirts. Bouncy balls. Coins. Glass beads. Bags. Socks.

So much stuff.

And here’s the part most people don’t realize: the riders on those floats and the walkers in the krewes pay for it themselves. Being in a Mardi Gras krewe is expensive. They spend months preparing. They dress beautifully. They walk miles or ride slowly through packed streets, arms tired, voices hoarse, smiling behind masks.

And then they give it all away.

To strangers.

There’s anonymity on both sides. You don’t know who bought the beads you caught or who decorated the shoes that landed in your arms. All of the riders are masked. Names aren’t exchanged. Stories aren’t told.

No recognition.
No credit.
No expectation of return.

Just offering.

Standing there watching this happen over and over again, I realized how rare that kind of generosity is in everyday life. We usually give with strings attached. With receipts. With stories. With a need to be seen.

I can’t talk about Mardi Gras generosity without talking about my buddy Mike Cormaci, who rides every year with the Krewe of Endymion. Mike is quite literally one of the most generous people I’ve ever met, and I love him dearly. I genuinely believe that if I called him and said, “Hey Mike, doc says they’ve gotta cut off my leg tomorrow,” he’d already be booking a flight and asking whether they could just take his and attach it to mine. That’s who he is. God knows how much money he pours into that ride — plus the guest riders he brings along — but he just loves it.

I’ve never seen someone who gets more joy from giving than living. He’s genuine and true, all the time. And I don’t even know which face behind the mask is his when his float rolls down Canal Street — but I know there’s a man up there (“Mr. Fabulus”) who will always throw me something with a smile on his face. I won’t know which bead came from his hand. I’ll just know that somewhere in that moving sea of light and music, my friend is doing what he always does: giving freely, anonymously, joyfully. And honestly, that feels like the whole point.

Mardi Gras gives without explanation.

And honestly — that feels deeply Episcopalian to me.

It reminds me of communion. You step forward with open hands. You don’t earn it. You don’t prove yourself. You don’t explain your theology first.

You simply receive what’s being offered.

Grace, but make it plastic beads and Moon Pies.

The people throwing from those floats will never know who caught their gifts. They don’t ask what you believe. They don’t ask where you’re from. They don’t ask if you deserve it.

They just throw.

And you catch.

Or you don’t.

Either way, the giving continues.

That might be my favorite part.

There’s also something about New Orleans that refuses to separate joy from reverence. The city knows how to celebrate and how to kneel — sometimes on the same block.

Mardi Gras is loud and chaotic and glitter-covered. The Cathedral is still and reverent. But both are communal. Both are embodied. Both invite you to participate simply by showing up.

Becoming Episcopalian hasn’t made me less appreciative of other traditions. If anything, it’s widened my capacity to recognize God in more places — in chants that aren’t from my prayer book, in incense that isn’t mine, in architecture built centuries before I was born, in strangers offering generosity without ever revealing their faces.

It’s taught me how to linger.
How to notice.
How to say yes before I fully understand what I’m stepping into.
How to trust that showing up is sometimes enough.

At Mardi Gras, I let the music wash over me. I let strangers laugh with me. I let the moment exist without needing to assign it a lesson.

That feels new because for once, I don’t feel like I need to be prepared. That feels holy in its own quiet way.

I didn’t attend Sunday service this weekend.

But I sat in the back of a cathedral and listened.
I shared food with strangers.
I watched children light up over flying beads.
I felt connected to a city that somehow keeps holding me, even though I’ve never called it mine.

And I’m starting to think that’s the thread running through all of this — Mardi Gras, back pews, ushering, communion, becoming.

Community.
Presence.
Beauty offered freely.

I came home tired, happy, carrying fifty pounds of beads and a lot of gratitude — still very much becoming Episcopalian.

Which feels exactly right.

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