We are not divided by our religions. We are divided by our ways of being religious.

I don't usually get requests for columns, but I was having breakfast with Diane Casey, former longtime director of the Cape Cod Council of Churches. I'd like to do a column about her, but she won't let me. She's too modest. Actually, a biography might be more appropriate.

Here's just a touch. When Diane was working in Connecticut, she arranged for different houses of worship to adopt a social worker. Imagine it's 11 at night, and a social worker has had to pull two crying children out of a home. Neighbors have called. The father beat everybody up, and the mother passed out on drugs. Connected to a parish, the social worker could put out a call for pajamas, clothing for school, maybe some toys … and get them donated within hours.

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Anyway, during our conversation, I told Diane a story, and she insisted I share it with you. In the process, you may understand something about me.

I had stepped away from church when I was a senior in high school. Not to burden you with theological details, but by then I’d discovered irreconcilable differences between myself and Saint Paul. It was a lot like breaking up with someone, not because you had found anyone better but because you had looked into the future, and they weren’t there.  And I had wanted to be a minister!

Later, when I was joining the U.S. Navy, among the innumerable forms to fill out, I was asked what my religion was. I have to tell you, at that point in my life, I didn't want to talk about it. So I made something up: Sacramentalist. I figured that way no salesman would call.

On my first Sunday in boot camp, we were ordered out of our racks at some ungodly hour and told we would attend Catholic, Protestant or Jewish services. Period. In the shortest service I've ever attended, the chaplain ended his remarks by telling us that although our soul might belong to God, our ass belonged to the United States Navy and don't you forget it. Dismissed.

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Now it’s the 1970s, and my best friend was going through a painful divorce. Finally, in desperation, he randomly picked a nearby church and went. There was the usual processional: the cross, the choir, the minister made their way up the aisle. As soon as it was quiet, the minister slipped off his vestment robe, laid it over the communion rail, and told his shocked congregation he was leaving the ministry to open a casino in Reno. Nevada. At which point he walked back down the aisle and left the church. The doors went boom and everybody was just looking at each other. He told me all this on Monday, complaining that he just couldn't catch a break.

It was awful but on a different level, it was kind of funny. I was still shaking my head when one of the secretaries asked me what was going on — and I told her about my friend. At which point, she asked what church I went to. Still defensive about this stuff, I remembered my days in the Navy and told her I was a Sacramentalist.

“Oh,” she said, “I've never heard of that.”

“Well,” I told her, “You remember your catechism.  A sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. Well, we Sacramentalists believe there can't be just five or seven sacraments; everything we do should be an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”

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She asked where my church was and, improvising as I went, I explained that if everything we did was sacramental, the world would become our church.  Finally, she asked how many of us there were. All I could tell her, and it remains true today, is that we tend to recognize one another when we meet.

I was still a very young man then, with a lot to learn. I resumed the project that I had started as a boy — to read the scriptures of every religion and try to learn as much as I could from them all. But I never stopped being a Sacramentalist. I've never given up trying, imperfectly I admit, to teach children in schools for over 40 years … to live my life in such a way that everything I do should be an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. The nice thing about it is that whatever our faiths, we can still try to practice them as sacramentalists.

In the process, I have learned that we are not divided by our religions as we might have thought, but by our ways of being religious. Look for differences, and we will see differences. Look for grace and we will find it everywhere — especially in the extraordinary woman with whom I was having breakfast.

Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: We are divided by our religious behavior, not by our religion