Conversion Story, pt. III

(pt. I is here.  pt. II is here.)
I left college in May of 1998.  By the next month, I had a teaching position in the same school district I went to as a child.  The man I’d loved since I was 14 proposed to me in October of that same year, and we moved in together in February of 1999, with the wedding date set for August of that same year.

To say that it was a busy time in my life would be, in retrospect, an understatement. 

Moving from the extended adolescence that college allows to something resembling responsible adulthood meant that I could, for a while anyway, shelve the whole search for a resting place in God.  I  did so with relief.  I still maintained a set of holdovers from my pagan years- a belief in reincarnation, and a vague pantheism being most notable.  Unable to figure out how God wanted us to relate to one another, I gave up trying.

But then time for serious wedding plans came.  My first choice was an extremely small wedding of no more than 50 or so people, held entirely in my parents’ backyard- it was a beautiful setting, and full of comforting memories; I couldn’t imagine having it anywhere else.  My parents, sensibly concerned about a number of logistical and potential problems a home wedding brings with it, encouraged Ken and me to come up with another option.

We couldn’t think of one.  Neither of us wanted to elope, and the thought of the actual ceremony taking place in a dreary, municipal setting was depressing.  Lack of options meant that when the Presbyterian church of our childhood was suggested, we couldn’t think of anything compelling to counter it with.  What it lacked in religious significance for me it made up in sentimental ones.  After all, Ken and I had both gone there growing up.  And while we went to the same school, we were in different grades, so it was the church’s youth group that was the stage for our fledgling romance.  Marrying in that church seemed a sweet nod to the physical location that brought us together.

The pastor who had worked there when we attended had since gone to another church, but Ken and I thought we’d see if he’d be willing to come back to officiate the wedding.  We met with him in his office at his current church, and he agreed to do so.  He handed us a packet of common wedding vows, and said that we could customize the ceremony however we felt comfortable. 

I took him at his word, and spent the next several nights sitting at the coffee table with scissors and glue, cutting one phrase from one version of the wedding ceremony, and another phrase from a different one.  In every version, however, I made sure to remove the name of Jesus from the proceedings.  I was fine marrying in a church.  I was fine having our childhood pastor officiate.  I was fine mentioning God in the ceremony, but I would not allow Christ to be mentioned.  It was too religious, too Christian.  A non-specific “God” could be invoked, and that was as far as I was willing to go.

Both the pastor and Ken agreed to my editing job, and so we were married in a Presbyterian church in a ceremony that banned any reference to Jesus.

Despite the changes in my life, I found my thoughts returning with increasing frequency toward God.  Having found nothing particularly useful in New Age teachings, absolute desperation turned my attention to organized religion.  After all, I reasoned, if a religious institution was going to have staying power and a sizable audience, two things it needed to fall under the “organized” category in my mind, it probably had something logical and useful to say.

With summer vacation staring me in the face, I figured I’d start learning what I could.  Since at the time I believed in reincarnation, I thought I’d start with Buddhism and Hinduism.

A brief study of Buddhism quickly revealed to me that it was more of a philosophical system, and in its purest form, not concerned with the existence of a deity at all.  Since it was my clear experience that there was a God, and the whole point of this excruciating search was to grow closer to Him/Her/It, I left Buddhism to its own devices and turned to Hinduism instead. 

The problem I found with Hinduism stemmed from its origins.  The majority of world religions have a particular individual as the founder.  Buddhism had Siddhartha Gautama, Islam had Mohammed, Christianity had Jesus, and Judaism had Abraham, Issac and Jacob.  For these groups, there is a way to find what the original intent of the religion was.  You can read what the founders themselves had to say, and glean information about the theology from that.

Not so with Hinduism, which grew from the religious practices of immigrating tribes.  Hinduism wasn’t “founded” so much as it “evolved”, and so tracking down the original vision of its theology proved impossible, because there wasn’t one.  What there was was a muddled sense of accepted confusion about the nature of God that I couldn’t wrap my mind around.  I didn’t need my understanding of God to be more obscure.  Additionally, Hinduism presented the same problem to me as did paganism- namely so many of the deities were created creatures, and therefore unsuitable to me as an object of worship. 

Islam presented a problem almost immediately.  Even before 9/11, there was a tone to discussions about Islam that made it difficult for me to know what was theology, and what was politics.  Additionally, I kept running into the insistence that unless one was reading the Qur’an in its native Arabic, the translation was invalid.  Something about all this struck me as almost Gnostic in its secretiveness, and I put aside Islam as a serious consideration.

Judaism was next.  But besides the obvious fact that the form of Judaism practiced in the Bible didn’t exist anymore, it felt too close to Christianity.  It was like declaring your independence from your parents, but going to live rent free with your grandfather.  I spent time reading the Old Testament, and feeling more and more resentful about the whole thing.

Around this time, three significant things happened.  The first was one day, in a fit of exasperation over having to listen to the spiritual whining of his wife for the millionth time, Ken said, “Why don’t you just pick something to believe and believe in it?”  Bear in mind, Ken never said anything like that to me in regards to my religious angst.  So when he finally could take no more, his words sunk in even deeper.  What was wrong with me?  Why couldn’t I just pick something that fit with my world view and settle in there?  Why did I have to make everything so damn complicated?  Surely there were enough people in my acquaintance who insisted that all one needed to do in life was be a good person and that would be enough.  Why couldn’t I just do that?

That was the kick in the pants I needed to convince me that something beyond myself was spurring this search.  Left to my own devices, I would have tossed the whole God question to the curb, and followed a path that offered maximum good feelings with minimum work on my part.  But I’d tried that, and it didn’t work.  It didn’t make the gnawing sense of something missing go away.  So as much as I wanted to chuck the whole thing, Ken’s words made me realize that there was no rest for the wicked, and I couldn’t stop this search until I found truth.  It was this realization, that I couldn’t give up searching even though I wanted to, that shaped some of my more embarrassing religious experiments of that time period.  Things like “baptizing” our infant daughter ourselves at a local park one weekend.  My heart was in the right place, but I can say that it was a great relief, years later, to learn that since I hadn’t used the Trinitarian formula (of course I hadn’t.   I think the actual wording called her “a child of the Universe”), she wasn’t validly baptized, but would be, the actions of her hippy dippy mother notwithstanding.

The next thing was we moved into our first house, which was half a block away from a Catholic church.  There was a statue of Our Lady outside, next to a playground, and I found myself staring at the statue when I’d take Lotus to the park to play.  Whenever I went for a run or a bike ride, I always made sure my path crossed that statue, and I’d pause for a moment, and stare at that image, the thoughts of my heart and mind a mystery even to myself.

The final thing that happened during that period of my life was Ken got his first transfer.  We would move away from suburban Detroit, a place I’d lived all my life, to Mississippi of all places.  Mississippi! The absurdity of the whole thing was almost too much to comprehend.  What on earth would a good Midwestern girl do in the Deep South?

(end pt. III. part IV is here.)