when we found polly murray's essay from her autobiography, she wrote about her struggles to become an episcopal priest as a woman, an african-american woman and a lot of the ups and downs, trials and tribulations she went through in seminary and not knowing if she was going to get to be ordained or not. for finally coming through that and having a transformative moment when she was ordained on that day and then getting to perform her first holy eucharist in the church of north carolina where her grandmother had been baptized. i guess what i think about that, the transformation can occur just over a few generations, major transformations can occur. at the time she was beginning to feel the call, the episcopal church was considering the possibility but not quite sure they wanted them yet. one of the things our book does is give voice to all these different contributors to people who feel a conflict between interpol insert inner promptings are understanding than what the rest of the world is telling them they can or can't do. i think that was her big conflict. she's fair, she's ready. sh

if we had somebody like -- jessica who wrote about being a jewish cantor or polly murray who wrote aboutg a religious faith. but what we wanted to emphasize more in this book wases spirituality in terms of individual experience. and how people make sense of the world. how they experience what you might think of as the wonder, mystery, the magic of being alive. how you connect to other people and the rest of the world, and so we didn't focus so much on -- what had some people might call a symbol system on a system of belief as on the experience that women were able to write about. one of the thongs that we try to talk about in this book is how pervasive religion is especially smaller towns. the churches often the focus of what happens in towns. maybe high school football and church is big influence in small towns, and so if maybe that's not a good fit for you, you might feel cutout from a major part of your cultural life. so that's important. so for a lot of people, being part of church it's part of your cultural. it's part of what happens where you live. to take one example african-ameri