More church musings -- this time with puppets!

I went back to the little Episcopal church today. Again, no anonymity (by now, I was not looking for it)... midway through the service - after the singing of happy birthday to a 91-year-old woman in the back and before communion - the priest (same one from last wednesday) said, "No pressure, but if anyone here is new, and wants to say a few words about themselves, ahem, JULIE, they would be more than welcome." Then, jokingly, he offered a door prize to anyone who brings a man to church at the 10:15 service, because it is made up of mostly middle-aged and elderly women. Afterwards, we adjourned to coffee and birthday cake in the parish hall, which apparently has been rented out to an organization called COPA - the Conservatory of Puppetry Arts... so the place is filled with marionettes and strange monster-type puppets. The funny thing is that I didn't really even notice that it seemed odd decoration for a parish hall until I saw the movie posters for Team America.

I have this strange thing going on... in some ways it's a love/hate relationship with church, but even in the ways I feel alienated from it now, I still crave it, it still calms me down. Even when I sit in church and recite liturgies that I question, and wonder how much of my faith is cultural and how much is "real," for lack of a better word (though it begs the question, can any faith, even "real" faith, be extracted from its culture?), I would rather go than stay home. Maybe it's because even though I'm realizing that on some level, we all ultimately worship God "as we understand him," church, for me, is still the place where I know how to do that. And so I go, almost as an offering -- an admission that I want to know God, and even though I'm confused about it all right now I'm going to trust that it's not my job to figure it out so in the meantime I'll keep showing up.