I woke up without the alarm, which I was quite thankful for. I figured that waking up early on a Sunday morning wouldn’t win me any brownie points with the people in my room, so I was thankful to awake without incident. While I was asleep I had dreamt that I was talking to Holly on the phone while I was in the bed in the hostel, meaning I was probably talking in my sleep, saying all sorts of things about how much I loved and missed her. I could care less what the people in the room thought of me if I had been talking and if they had heard me. I was only going to be there a few more nights. Then I would be off.

. I slipped on my sandals and quietly made my way to the shower, thinking how much it felt like being a freshman back at ol’ Ithaca again. I gathered my clothes so I could get into them in the bathroom, so as to minimize the time spent in the room while everyone was sleeping. I got into the shower, looking forward to what the Prince’s St. East web site had promised: "You’ll find no shortages of hot water here."

I turned the shower head to the side to let the water heat up and then turned the shower on. The water came out and was very cold at first. I stood there freezing in the building’s cold morning air, waiting for the water to heat up. Nothing. I fiddled with the knob a little, thinking maybe I hadn’t turned it far enough, or hadn’t turned it the right way. I tried everything. Still nothing.

The water was bouncing off of the base of the shower stall and was gently spraying onto my legs. It was so cold that from my ankles to about midway up my calf I was getting even more intense goose bumps than I had on the rest of my body. I stuck my left hand under the water. It was freezing. I left it there for a while; it was the only way to deal with a cold shower. Leave part of your body under the cold water until your body is convinced that it’s lukewarm. Then, ease your way inch by inch into the cold water, all the while telling your body not to worry, the water will eventually feel warmer and your balls won’t fall off from the cold. They may hide for a while, but they’ll come back when the ice age passes.

I showered as fast as humanly possible and got my clothes on for church. I threw on my heavy coat thinking of rule number one, and I threw on my backpack as usual, bringing the essential tools with me.

Setting out as early as I did (9:15am) was fairly pointless. In Scotland, as well as England, towns are close to dead on a Sunday. It’s a church day for some, a day of rest for others, but in most cases, for any reason, you’ll be hard pressed to find anything open before noon. I wandered the streets looking for breakfast, or maybe a Catholic church to go to instead of the Anglican one.

Not that I’m Catholic, it was just that I was very used to going to Catholic church. My mother’s parents were Catholic, and I had spent most of my time living with my mother in my youth, which by default can give me the label of being Catholic. On the other hand, my father was Jewish, more ethnically than religiously, so my spirituality was kind of in conflict. My friends called me a "cashew". Catholic/Jewish. Of course, the one thing that I could never make anyone understand was that in a strictly religious sense, I couldn’t be Jewish. My mother wasn’t Jewish, therefore technically I would have to convert. The whole thing was lost on most people.

There’s a lot of guilt involved in these two religions. Catholic guilt is something stemming from the beliefs of Catholics: Christ came to earth to die for our sins. We’re all sinners, there’s no way of getting around it. We’re probably going to Hell. Jesus is up there, trying to save all of our souls, and we’re not doing anything about it. You’re sinning while you sit there. Confess, confess, confess!

Hebrew guilt is much different. Hebrew guilt is very familial, the strength in it usually lying in the mother of the family. A Jewish mother can make you feel like an awful person in with just a look. I had seen it happen to my dad at the hands of his mother. It was almost comical, until it got pulled on you. My father was working on it, just to give me a hard time.

I liked the vision of the Hebrew God because it seemed a lot more straightforward than the one that Christianity tries to portray. First off, Christianity was very confusing to me at a young age. First there was God, and he gave us his only son to take away our sin. So Jesus was the savior, but he was also God. But wait, didn’t you just say that God was God, and Jesus was his son? Yes, but Jesus is also God.

I must have had conversations similar to that one so many times that I eventually became frustrated with my own inability to understand what was so obvious to so many other people. I just didn’t get the concept at a young age. I’m not sure I really get the concept now, but I’ve at least formed my own thoughts on it. The way it appears to me, God, although a singular being, can exist in multiple forms at one time, meaning that while he is one being, he is multiple in his singularity.

If that didn’t make any sense, don’t be worried, I’m not sure that it made a lot of sense to myself, and I’m the one who wrote it. Just think of it like this: God is God, he can do what he wants.

Anyhow, I originally had started going to Catholic church because my grandparents had always gone, and when I started exploring my spiritual side, it seemed like the easiest place to start. I don’t buy into some aspects of it though. I believe in abortion, birth control, and think that homosexuality is acceptable. But I think that the more you ask people involved with Catholicism, you’ll find greater acceptance among the people than you might expect.

But I had no idea where there was a Catholic church in Edinburgh, or even if one would be easy to get to. Scotland, like the rest of Britain, is primarily Protestant. Most of the people who originally went over to Northern Ireland were Scottish Protestants, which is why Protestantism is still so strong there. Thinking about how the Northern Irish regard Catholicism, I wasn’t too sure how well the Scots would regard it.

So I opted for the Anglican churched and confirmed that I was about an hour early. Keep on walking, keep seeking out food.

I walked around and caught some sights that I thought I should check out. The Scottish National Portrait Gallery was running a special on Scots in Film, with advertisements focusing on Robert Carlyle. It looked exciting. Down the same street there was a comedy bar that had live acts every night. That too looked interesting. I wondered how different Scottish humor would be and I hoped that I’d get to check it out.

I pressed on. I was absolutely starving and I didn’t want to spend much money, which was good because I didn’t want an overly large breakfast. The plan for the day was church, and then to hike up to Arthur’s Seat. A large, greasy Scottish breakfast would not be conducive to a long hike in the wilderness far away from any bathrooms.

I found a small café that was adjoined to an apartment complex and I walked in with some trepidation. I wasn’t sure if this place was supposed to be a service only to people who were renting flats or if it was open to all. There wasn’t a door leading directly from the street into the café and I had to walk through the lobby to take a seat. I couldn’t help but feeling they were going to kick me out.

But as I was standing around looking nervous, some people came in off the street. I breathed a sigh of relief and looked over the menu. I wanted cheap and quick. I decided on a bacon roll and orange juice. I took my seat and watched the street as cars started slowly accumulating on the road and the city as a whole began to wake up.

I took the advantage of the time to take a break from note taking and write a letter to Holly. I love writing letters to her. Writing letters to the person you love is a very romantic act. I never really wrote letters before this. She used to always send me letters during my first semester at Ithaca, I loved getting them from her. It made me feel so, well, loved. They were always sprayed with her perfume, so it was always a treat. Just smelling the letters brought me that much closer to her.

I continued writing until my food came. I don’t know why, but I was a little disappointed at what I got. The food was good, but I was a bit unprepared for what was set in front of me. I don’t know why, the name explained what I was getting; a bacon roll. But for some reason, I expected a little more than a buttered roll with some back bacon shoved into it.

I had been expecting some type of Cornish pastry, or at least something similar, like what a sausage roll is in England. At the very least, I figured that other things like eggs or cheese came standard with the roll, but then I realized, no, if that were the case it would be a bacon and egg roll or a bacon and cheese roll. I noted to myself that I should take things more literally in the future and proceeded to eat.

With breakfast out of the way, it was time to proceed to church; the Parish Church of St. Andrew’s and St. George’s, on the very special last day of the current Reverend. He was an amazing orator, capable of addressing whole crowds and making you feel as if he was speaking directly to you. Of course, a lot of that could have been the church’s PA system. He certainly wasn’t making loads of eye contact with everybody in the house, considering that we were seated around him in a semi-circle.

The seating was the most peculiar thing of the whole ordeal. It felt very much like what I imagined old English school houses to be. Boxes of seats that had small swinging doors you needed to open to gain access to your row’s bench. The backs of the row in front of you had a slope and a lip on them, so you could set up hymn books and The Bible in front of you. It was all very cozy, although not well heated at all.

What struck me so much about the Anglican church was the sense of love and community that was carried throughout the sermon. God wasn’t about feeling bad about your actions, or your being on the earth, God was about love. He was about saving his community, and his community was the whole earth. Down here on the earth though, we were responsible for our own little communities, and that was the focus of the sermon.

"What have you brought?" The Reverend asked, "What is St. Andrew’s and St. George’s doing in this community? Please, Lord, give us a church…" It was all about wanting the best for the people, for the greater good. The message was delivered without a sense of guilt or accusation. It was beautiful.

But the most beautiful part of the ceremony had to be the baptism of the little baby girl, Maisie Ann Evans. The sacrament of baptism, the washing away of sin. The idea of original sin is not lost in the Anglican church. It’s spoken of explicitly in The Bible and baptism is still an important ritual to them. The essential difference between these Protestant values and the Catholic ones is that when you are baptized in Anglicanism, your sins are forgiven and you don’t have to worry about it much afterwards. You can pray for your soul and ask forgiveness for your misdeeds, but confession is not even a part of the faith. You don’t have to confess your sins, you find forgiveness in your own way.

I left the church refreshed and renewed, as if I was the one being baptized and not the little baby girl. I had only been to Catholic and Methodist services before, and I don’t think I had ever been so moved as I had been at the Anglican service. It could have just been the baptism, and the way that the Reverend asked the children to get close so that they could watch the miracle of the forgiveness, but there was something warm and loving about faith in God that I hadn’t always gotten from my other religious experiences.

The Methodist church in my father’s hometown felt very cultish, and the priest at my grandparents’ Catholic church was a very good man, but an uninspiring speaker. In London I had been attending Catholic services with a priest who was the epitome of Irish Catholicism. Imagine an old Irish Catholic priest, and you have our man from London. Old and thin, with short gray hair and thick black glasses. His age shows in his face, and he’s all business at the altar, but there are times when he’ll make a joke and you can see his fun loving nature show through the exterior of his profession. But somehow, the church doesn’t necessarily feel like God’s love is upon you.

For the first time in a long time, I was moved. The Reverend was amazing, and I told him so after the sermon. He looked as if he didn’t quite know what to make of me. He politely shook my hand, thanked me for my kind words, and studied me for a minute. What was he looking for? I don’t know. I didn’t ask. We just stood there in silent appreciation of each other for another moment. Him thankful for my kind words, me thankful for his brilliant sermon. We nodded and then I parted.

I took a picture of the church for posterity and started walking back to the hostel. I was going to attack Arthur’s Seat today. I had best get ready for it.