My father is an ordained priest in the Anglican church, but I'm not a preacher's kid in the traditional sense. Primarily a theologian and teacher, Dad has pinch-hit for the diocese on occasion, but has never led his own congregation; as a result, I grew up outside the parish-house context that makes most P.K.'s either chips off the old pulpit or confirmed hellions. Still, though I've neither adopted Dad's faith nor rebelled against it; his spirituality has been central to my own relationship with God, and with him.

My religious education and church attendance both tapered off around the age of 10, when my parents tired of playing the pretend-sick game every Sunday and decided to let me find my own way to God. Since then, though never quite ready to join those who sum up their beliefs with the phrase, "When you die, that's it," I've kept organized religion at arm's length; my spirituality is as vague and contingent as is usually the case when it is tailored to individual needs and preferences rather than accepted from a higher authority. In effect, I've kept my soul in a money market account: low risk, low return, low maintenance.

If my agnosticism has troubled my father, he's never shown it. A brilliant and enthusiastic thinker, he's always been eager to share with me his latest insight into the meaning of a word that appears all of five times in the Hebrew Bible, or the parallels among various creation stories of the ancient world, but he's never once proselytized me. Back when I still made the "coming and going" circuit (Christmas and Easter), it was my mother who did the heavy lifting to get me out the door to St. Paul's. Dad willingly officiated my wedding in a garden rather than a chapel, using a service with a pared-down number of Jesuses and Holy Ghosts, and he didn't give me a hard time about not baptizing his grandson.

I know Dad too well to mistake his deference for indifference. Still, as much as I've appreciated his respect for my autonomy, there have been times when I've felt a half-suppressed yearning for him to take command of my soul, to seize my hand and drag me along on his walks with God. But in my family, the communication of faith from father to son is seldom a straightforward matter.

Dad's religious education was nearly the opposite of my own. He was born in northern Saskatchewan in a community of Mennonites, a pacifist sect driven by persecution over the generations from Holland to Prussia to the Ukraine to Western Canada. Although my forebears shared a language and culture with their neighbors, they had already parted ways in matters of faith; by the time of my great-grandfather's generation, Mennonism had given way to Christian Science on one side and Swedenborgianism on the other. My grandfather, John Daniel, embraced Marxism, and raised his children to believe in no god but the working man, and no devil but the capitalist system that oppressed him.

Although both John Daniel and his wife came from relatively comfortable origins, hard luck on the Janzen homestead at the onset of the Great Depression reduced the large family -- there would be six children who survived infancy, three that didn't -- to a hardscrabble existence. Turning to government relief, John Daniel spent the winter of 1932 working on a road crew, where cold nights in a tent brought a recurrence of childhood rheumatic fever complicated by dropsy and an enlarged heart. Forced to abandon the homestead, the family -- including the infant John Gerald, my father -- moved back to town for their father to die.

As it happened, John Daniel was too strong to be felled by any common illness; this was a man who'd won his wife's hand by taking on three older suitors at once and leaving them crying in the dirt. Still, his health was ruined. A skilled tinsmith, he was never again able to practice his trade. For the next dozen years, he eked out a meager living with everything from a food stand to a family factory for converting old tires into doormats, and made the children what toys he could from the scrap materials at hand. Each Christmas, the family would gather around a tree lit by candles in hand-made tin holders, though they understood it to be strictly a cultural event void of religious truth.

His body broken, John Daniel's spirit remained strong, and he lived his revolutionary ideals by serving as an advocate for the disenfranchised and downtrodden of Meadow Lake, a role that won him no favor with the local authorities. This was no laughing matter; his own brother-in-law's activism had ended with a body found in a snowy field and an investigation never allowed to reach a conclusion. John Daniel himself was brought to trial in the summer of 1936 on a trumped-up accusation of attempted murder. Sentenced to 30 days on a reduced charge, he afterwards managed to extract an admission from the judge that he'd been the victim of a flawed system, and enjoyed a rare moment of satisfaction.

Knowing that his remaining days were few, frustrated at being unable to work at his sons' side as he'd worked alongside his own father, John Daniel could be hard on the boys, especially the youngest, John Gerald, who would receive the least of his time, and would be only 13 when he died. On that day in 1946, Jerry came home for lunch, learned that his father was dead, and returned to school for afternoon lessons. No one spoke much about it afterwards, and the only comfort he received was the hand of an uncle on his shoulder at graveside. Grieving was a luxury beyond the means of the struggling family.

Not surprisingly, Jerry's soul took a dark turn in the years that followed. Raised not to believe in any Father but his own, and now robbed even of that one, he was unable to find any meaning at all in life. Angry and confused even for a teenager, increasingly desperate, he finally turned to the Bible at a moment that he has likened to the last night of a condemned man. Reading scripture didn't do much for him at first, but it was no worse than anything else, and so he kept on turning the pages.

As can sometimes be the case, the agent of my father's salvation was a woman. Hoping to win favor with a local beauty, he accompanied her family to church one Sunday. Inside the chapel, he was overwhelmed with a sense of cleanliness and light, like flannel sheets hung overnight to dry in the crisp northern air, and felt that he would do anything in the world for his own heart to be similarly cleansed. He knew immediately that God wanted more from him than an hour or two each week, that he was being called to dedicate every moment of his life to His service.

In the years that followed, my father attended seminary and was ordained -- luckily for my mother, my sister, and me, the soon-forgotten flame had been Anglican, not Catholic. He learned ancient languages to study scripture in the original, and traveled to Jerusalem to work with the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls. In time, he became an internationally known scholar of the Old Testament, and a leading authority on the questions raised by the Book of Job: what is the nature of God's relationship to His children, and why does He let bad things happen to us?

Earlier this year, while preparing to write his latest commentary on Job, Dad found an old letter in a box of sermons from the earliest days of his studies in the mid-1950s. He quickly realized that he must have set the letter aside unread when it first came into his possession; it wasn't the kind of thing you could read and then forget about. The letter was dated August 30, 1936. The first few lines were scratched with a pin, the best John Daniel could find at first in the prison hospital where he was serving his sentence. He wrote to his wife,

The unmistakable expression of faith struck my father like a bolt of lightning, but this was only the beginning. Having spent his life reading and rereading the Bible, Dad immediately recognized not only his father's explicit reference to Psalm 27 ("The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?"), but also numerous other allusions to the Books of Genesis, Isaiah, Acts and, near the end, the Book of Job. It became clear that my grandfather had not only read the Bible; he had studied it, reflected upon it, found strength in it to endure the many hardships of his lot.

In telling this story, Dad likes to quote an early poem of Robert Frost entitled "The Tuft of Flowers." The poem tells of a farmhand sent into a field to turn grass that had been mowed by another earlier in the day. Feeling the solitude of his task, he thinks of his fellow worker:

Then a butterfly draws his attention to a small flower that the mower had taken care to avoid, and suddenly the farmhand is alone no longer.

After a lifetime bearing the desolation of the fatherless child, Dad found that he and his father had been working in the same field all along, asking the same questions of God and finding similar solace in His answers. The discovery was a profound event in Dad's spiritual life, comparable perhaps only to his initial calling, as well as a balm for half a century of sorrow at his untimely loss.

Although my father was never able to know his father as an adult, I have been more fortunate. Over the years, a son's unconditional love has been complemented by deep respect for Dad's compassionate morality, and admiration for his many accomplishments in his chosen field. It seems strange, then, that the Christian faith so central to his life and work should remain a mystery to me, as remote and inaccessible as depression-era Meadow Lake. Still, like love, faith can't be coerced or willed into being.

As I make my way through the trials of daily life, mourn the past and worry about the future, I sometimes wonder what it would be like to feel Jesus at my side, to hear a divine voice from somewhere outside my own head. I wonder what I'll be able to tell my son when he asks me about God, and when he asks why I don't believe the same things as Grandpa.

But there are a few things I do know about God, clues I've picked up along the way. I've heard echoes of His voice in sermons my father has printed out for me. I've seen Him work through my father's hands, teaching and counseling three decades of seminary students, bringing comfort to members of the community struck by tragedy, tending the flame of faith in doubting hearts. I've seen His face in my father's, when he tells the story of finding the letter in the shoebox.

I don't know how I could ever put these things into words; the language for them may not exist, ancient or modern. But like flowers in a solitary field, they bring unexpected moments of grace, and the companionship of one who passed this way earlier in the day.