I am taking classes to learn how to be an Episcopalian and I'm primed for the usual jokes: that I'll start taking the crust off my white bread, speak with a WASPy lockjaw accent, leave thank-you notes for the newspaperman. But I don't believe any of those things will happen. Roman Catholicism remains thick in my blood, from my Italian surname, to my respect for higher authority, to my belief in angels and saints.

As a child, I went to church every Sunday with my mother and six siblings. We were always late, usually coming in during the priest's invariably deadly dull sermon or, if we were lucky, afterward, during the interminable Apostles' Creed. I am old enough to remember the pre-Vatican II Council Masses that were celebrated in Latin, and at 4 years old I could respond to the priest's "The Lord be with you" with a respectable "Et cum spiritu tuo."

The only part of the Mass that held my interest was the transubstantiation -- the dramatic moment when the priest holds up the host and chalice and declares them to be the body and blood of Christ. The altar boys would ring the bells and everyone, except me, would bow their heads in reverential prayer. I always kept my head up watching and waiting. I was determined to witness Jesus coming down from the cross and becoming one with the offering.

For 12 years I attended Catholic schools. In grammar school I learned the Baltimore Catechism by rote. I made my first Holy Communion at 7, my confirmation at 13. As a freshman in high school (an all-girls one, taught by the sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary) I experienced my first crush on a nun -- Sister Barbara Jablonski, a sprite, clever, suffer-no-fools teacher who caused me to love Latin almost as much as she did. (To this day I can decline "agricola" in my sleep.)

I don't have a litany of nun-bashing stories to relate from my childhood. In fact, I have great respect for the nuns who not only educated me but helped form my moral background. One of the greatest gifts anyone gave me came from a nun, Sister Jeannine, who, in my junior year, accepted me into her coveted English honors class and was the first person to tell me I was a writer. Some years after I graduated, Jeannine left the sisterhood to marry a former priest -- and the story of her departure was the first article I published.

The church and I pretty much parted ways in college, though not by way of any dramatic schism. I was simply asserting my independence. I do have a distinct memory of going to Mass one Saturday night (only because I had promised my mother I would) with a Jewish guy after we got high in his fraternity room. Though stoned, I had remembered my promise to my mother, and my date agreed to come with me. He'd never been in a church before and was so fascinated by the rituals that he even took communion. (At the time I didn't know which was the graver sin: that I'd taken the host stoned or that he'd taken it as a Jew.)

I met my husband in my senior year of college and remember feeling relieved that he, too, was raised a Catholic. We assumed that one day we would be married in the church. While we lived in the city, we attended a progressive Catholic church and helped out in the homeless women's shelter in its basement. I was struck then by the fact that while most of the work seemed to be the domain of the sisters of the parish, they still could not serve on the altar.

Several years ago, my husband and I bought a house in a small Westchester, N.Y., village. Soon after moving in, I called my local Catholic church to register in the parish. I gave the church secretary my name and my husband's name (we have different surnames). She was stymied. I assumed she was having difficulty with the spelling of my last name, so I gave it to her. But she still didn't get it. In frustration I said, "Surely we're not the first couple to join your church to have different last names."

"As a matter of fact," she responded tartly, "you are."

As a matter of fact, I thought, I don't think this is the church for me. But we did attend Mass for a short time, finding little inspiration in the priest's fund-raising sermons and lackluster community spirit. When, a few weeks later, two sets of donation envelopes arrived from the church, one preprinted Mr. and Mrs. with my husband's last name, the other in my name alone -- as if I were the mistress to the couple -- I began church shopping.

I visited a Polish Roman Catholic church where I was the youngest by nearly 40 years. I went to a Unitarian Society fellowship service where so many faiths were recognized it seemed a hodgepodge of political correctness. I stopped in at a Presbyterian worship where the ex-hippie priest quoted more T.S. Eliot than Scripture. Then I came to a tiny white Episcopalian church with a bright red door that looked like it belonged more in New England than in Westchester County.

The rector was a woman whose two young sons were among those seated around the altar during the children's homily. (I figured one of them was hers when he blurted out, "Do you have to talk about Jesus again?") The service was very close to the Catholic Mass, with the most apparent difference being that the congregation responded "Ah-men" rather than "Ay-men."

The priest, a former financial analyst, told a story in her sermon about visiting her sister at Christmas some years back, when her sister was a young mother and the priest was not yet a priest but a successful Wall Street executive. Guests were expected imminently at the sister's house for Christmas dinner, and to the future priest's ever-organized mind, her sister was far from prepared: The house was a mess, the turkey needed stuffing, the kids were still in their pajamas. She came upon her sister in the living room with her little girl nestled in her lap, both of them staring up at the Christmas tree. The sister glanced up sheepishly. "She loves to look at the tree," she said. "She wants me to look at it with her."

More than any other sermon I've ever heard, that one has stuck with me. The fact that it came from a priest who was a woman and a wife and a mother helped too. I've found a sense of community in a church that has become much more than a place to worship on Sundays. It not only recognizes me as distinct from my husband but even has a prayer in its Book of Common Prayer for the adoption of a child that's been said three times for each of our children. No bells are rung during the consecration and all are welcome to receive Holy Eucharist, Episcopalians or not.

I still occasionally go to Mass with my mother. There are those rituals I miss: the lighting of votive candles, for example, and seeing those statues of the Blessed Virgin that I grew up with. I don't, however, miss the hierarchy that prohibits women from being ordained. And I still look up when the altar boy -- or girl, now -- rings the bells. But the difference now is that I'm not waiting for anything to happen.

So I am taking classes to learn how to be an Episcopalian, but I'm not rejecting my Roman Catholic roots. I think of it more as keeping my faith.