My first year at St. Gregory’s would begin, and end, with questions. Now I understand that questions are at the heart of faith, and that certainties about God can flicker on and off, no matter what you think you know. But back then I thought “believers” were people who knew exactly what they believed, and had nailed all the answers.

My first set of questions was very basic. I covertly studied the faces of people at St. Gregory’s when they took the bread, trying to guess what they were feeling, but I was too proud and too timid to ask either priests or congregants the beginner’s queries: Why do you cross yourselves? What are the candles for? How do you pray? And, more seriously: do you really believe this stuff?

My next question was not about God or church: it was nakedly about me, and my fears. What would my friends think?

In America I knew exactly one person who was a Christian. It turned out that my friend Mark Pritchard, an introverted writer with a tongue piercing, attended a Lutheran church with wooden pews where he sang old-fashioned hymns every Sunday. So I took some walks with Mark, trying to draw him out, but despite his orange Mohawk and wild sexual politics, he was a fairly Lutheran guy, not much given to discussing his emotions or spiritual life. “Sure, well, I believe in first principles,” Mark said to me, cautiously, when I probed him about his beliefs. He might as well have been speaking Greek. “Oh,” I said. I didn’t know anyone else who went to church.

Poor people certainly believed in God. San Francisco might be the least church-going city in the nation, but there were still plenty of churches within the run-down blocks around my house –the left-wing Chicano Catholic parish with its gorgeous altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe; the “Temple of the Lyre of the Valley,” an evangelical Salvadoran storefront; the black Pentecostal dive, the santeria chapel, the cruddy white-trash Assembly of God building with its dirty curtains. Poor people said “God bless you” and crossed themselves and stood on street corners singing loud, bad hymns; they bought their little girls frothy First Communion dresses; they buried their dead gangbanger brothers with incense and Scripture.

Nationally, middle-class Christians –even though many seemed to enjoy portraying themselves as a picked-on, oppressed minority, ceaselessly battling secular humanist regimes –weren’t exactly an endangered species, either. People who called themselves Christians comprised 85% of the population. Christian rock music alone was a billion-dollar a year enterprise; there were more than a hundred and fifty million Christian Web sites, and there had never been a non-Christian United States president.

But my own friends weren’t poor urban believers or smug God-talking suburbanites. My own friends, at the most, read about Buddhism or practiced yoga. They tended to be cynical, hilarious, and over-educated, with years of therapy and contemporary literature behind them, and I was afraid to mention that I was slipping off to church and singing about Jesus on Sundays instead of sleeping late, cooking brunch, and reading the New York Times Book Review as I’d been raised to do. I couldn’t tell them about communion, or that I had started to read the Bible I’d bought, furtively, at a used-book store. It would be years before I’d meet Paul Fromberg——a funny, profane priest who would become my closest friend. He believed that “the craziest thing about Jesus is that church life never gets in the way of feeling close to him,” and would teach me about the ironies of religion. At the time, though, I had no idea that I could be pals with anyone who described himself, unabashedly, as both “a big fag” and “Jesus’ man.”

My social circle was shocked when I first shyly broached the subject of church. An activist lawyer I knew sputtered. “Are you kidding?” he said. He launched a litany of complaints about the Church that I’d come to hear over and over: it was the most reactionary force in the world, anti-Semitic, misogynist, [...] Vatican…the Crusades…Jerry Falwell…child-molesting priests…Ralph Reed… I’d hated, during the 1980s, being expected to defend left movements or revolutionary parties, even when they were screwed up. I had no interest in defending another more fabulously corrupt institution. “It’s not about the Church,” I said. “It’s about...”

“Good deeds?” the lawyer asked, incredulously. My desire for religion just didn’t make sense to him. He worked harder than anyone I’d ever met, spending fourteen hours a day defending Haitian refugees and Muslim political detainees and the victims of war and empire. He’d listened to prisoners on Guantánamo sob as they described Christian jailers destroying the Koran; he had represented a Nicaraguan woman raped by evangelical soldiers who sang hymns as they took turns with her on a dirt floor. Whatever faith drove him forward in his vocation, it had nothing to do with the Almighty God so readily invoked at prayer breakfasts in Washington.

But the Christianity that called to me, through the stories I read in the Bible, scattered the proud and rebuked the powerful. It was a religion in which divinity was revealed by scars on flesh. It was an upside-down world in which treasure, as the prophet said, was found in darkness; the hungry were filled with good things and the rich sent out empty; in which new life was revealed through a humiliated, hungry woman and an empty, tortured man.

It was a picture that my friend Jose Suarez, who’d left his Cuban Baptist family in Texas to become a psychiatrist, had also glimpsed——but only briefly. Devout as a child, saved as a teenager at a Billy Graham rally, Jose made it through a year at a conservative Christian college before he began to feel “betrayed” by the inauthenticity of religion. “I’d go to services,” he said, “and it was all very social, unexamined, class-bound. I mean, didn’t they read the words of Jesus?”

But the hypocrisy and insincerity of church, what had driven my own parents away, was only part of it. “I was actively listening,” Jose said. “I really wanted to hear God. Ping­­ –nothing. Ping–nothing. I couldn’t find it. I’d drive out this highway into the country at night, lie back on the hood of my car and look at the stars, and have these arguments with God. It was like: say something, show me, give me a sign, some sort of experience. I’d watch the stars move across the sky, but I couldn’t find it inside. The container didn’t contain anymore.”

And so Jose had been wary, though curious, when I told him I was going to church: I was the first friend he’d had since high school who was anything close to a believer. It was talking with him that I was able to articulate, for the first time, something about what prayer meant to me: what I was searching for, beyond the psychological, with all my questions about faith.

Jose and I met for lunch at a small café with outdoor tables one afternoon, when he was in the middle of an excruciating breakup. We sat on the patio and talked, picking at some complicated California sourdough-and-vegetable sandwiches while the fog came in.

Jose was in analysis then, and seeing a dozen patients, and serving as the medical director at a community mental health clinic, and writing scholarly papers on Freud, and doing energetic yoga for hours every morning, and generally overachieving, but he couldn’t fill every minute, and whenever he paused, the heartbreak would pour in. “Maybe I should go sit at the Zen center again,” Jose said. He was a small, handsome man with wiry hair and little glasses and perfect posture. His eyes were wet. “I’m not sleeping so well anyway, I might as well get up at five, what the hell.”

We finished lunch and I took his hand. “Jose,” I said, “you should pray.”

As soon as I said it I felt like an idiot –worse, like a proselytizing busybody who knows, without ambiguity, what’s right for everyone else. Jose looked genuinely surprised. Then he put on his analyst face. “Hmm,” he said. “What do you mean?”

What did I mean by prayer? I didn’t mean asking an omnipotent being to do favors; the idea of “answered prayers” was untenable for me, since millions of people prayed fervently for things they never received. I didn’t mean reciting a formula: I loved the language of some of the old prayers that were chanted at St. Gregory’s, but I didn’t think the words had magical power to change things. I didn’t mean kneeling and looking pious, or trying to make a deal with God, or even praying “for” something. What was I telling him?

“Um, well,” I said. I was embarrassed. Then I looked at Jose again, and the word “tender” filled my mind –tender as in sore to the touch and compassionate, at the same time. After my father had died, Jose had listened to me cry with the deepest empathy and patience, not trying to “comfort” me, but just being present. As tenderly as I could, I said to him, “I really don’t know. I don’t know what I believe, or who I’m talking to. Sometimes I just try to stay open, sort of. Especially when it hurts. And I try to, I know this is corny, but I try to summon up thankfulness.”

“When you told me to pray,” Jose would remember later, “it was incredibly earnest. You said prayer was like having this intense, profound longing that you just had to be with. That you put the longing in the hands of God, in a certain way. That it was important to be receptive to the unfulfilled, and not fill it, or deny it.”

I had to be receptive, or go crazy: because even as I kept going to church, the questions raised by the experience only multiplied. Conversion was turning out to be quite far from the greeting-card moment promised by televangelists, when Jesus steps into your life, personally saves you and becomes your lucky charm forever. Instead, it was socially...