I
was nine years old the first time I found myself “spiritually confused,” I
remember the incident very clearly. I was in my fourth grade Sunday school
class, and my extremely charismatic Sunday school teacher, who had recently
anointed me with oil and “the power of Queen Esther,” sat my class down and
told them to ask her anything. It was an open forum about the Bible and God.
Young minds were being encouraged to explore. But I don’t think she was quite
ready for my question.
“So…”
I started, “God knows everything, right?”
“Of
course,” my teacher said.
“And
God made everyone?”
“Yes,”
she said.
“So
when God makes people, He knows everything they’re going to do in their life?”
“Yes.”
“Then
why does God create people if He knows they’re going to hell?”
She
paused. “That’s a very good question,” she said, “but we do have free will…”
And thus began the paradoxes and logical fallacies. This
did NOT make sense! How can you say that going to hell is the individual’s
choice (based on their decision to reject Christ) if God basically made the
choice for them when He created them? My addled nine-year-old brain couldn’t
handle this bullshit. After a time of arguing, I remember my teacher, flustered
and impatient, moving onto the next question.
I was not a very light-hearted kid.
I was very serious, very quiet, very thoughtful, and, at nine years old,
perhaps already growing a little skeptical and rebellious. I questioned a lot
of things, from the necessity of homework assignments, the rules of my
classroom at school, and the unspoken norms of society. I was not a “Why is the
sky blue?” kind of kid. I was a “Why is the world so evil and cruel?” kind of
kid.
Fast forward four years, and at thirteen, I think I was
driving my mother crazy. I was drinking alcohol at parties, getting in trouble
at school, and flaunting my barely-developing body every chance I got. I was
depressed, anxious, almost constantly on the edge of emotional ruin. And, for
the first time in my life, I openly scorned organized religion. The rules were
confining, the traditions were pointless, and the theology made absolutely no
sense. My parents and Christian-school teachers brushed this off as immaturity
and angst. They weren’t necessarily wrong, but the questioning and doubts
continued long after I stopped wearing thick eyeliner and wishing I could
change my name to “Daisy.”
All throughout high school, I spiritually “flip flopped”
between two extremes. I have a feeling there are at least a few Christian
school kids who can relate to this. Spiritual Emphasis Week would happen, and I
would be compelled by the messages or touched by the worship. I would read a
convicting Christian book directed at wayward teens, and do an immediate 180 in
behavior and thought. I would go on a mission’s trip, or go to a Christian
conference, and come back “changed.” But the “change” never seemed to last.
After a few weeks or months, the doubts would creep in, my normal behavior
would resume, and I would look back on my “spiritual high” with scorn and
skepticism. “Brainwashing” was a word I used a lot back then. I also liked the
words “agnostic,” “searching,” and “myth.”
But of course, things change. This proved to be just a
phase after, when I was seventeen, one of my dad’s girlfriends gave me the book
Eat Pray Love. To say that it changed the landscape of my religious
experience forever wouldn’t be a strong enough statement. That book changed my
spiritual DNA. It opened my mind to an entirely new reality – I could believe
in an all-knowing, all-loving God, and yet not buy into Christian dogma or
theology. I had found what I saw as a middle ground, and I jumped on the chance
to live in that fray. I reveled in it, rolled around in the dirt of it, and
fell in love with it. Suddenly lacking that angst and hatred I had once
directed toward my Christian upbringing, I suddenly liked words like
“open-minded” and “universalism.” I liked signing my letters with the phrase
“Love & light.” I meditated. I smiled at strangers. I felt like I was
radiating wisdom. I felt enlightened, god damn it.
But the pendulum still swung.
There were still chapels to attend
every Monday. There were still Bible classes to go to every day. My peers were
still mostly devout evangelical Protestants, and I had no one to share this new
spiritual elation with. So it died like that parabled plant that didn’t take
deep enough root. I swung back and forth wildly, changing my religious and
political convictions as often as I changed the color of my hair (which, if you
don’t know me, was often enough to scare people). I was spiritually volatile. I
was in a crisis. I was always so sure that I possessed complete certainty, but
in reality, I was extremely confused.
Eventually, blessedly, the pendulum seemed to stop
swinging. I sat in one spot for a couple of years, with only occasional, short
hiccups of change. I pressed into my own path. I grew in my knowledge of auras,
portals, past life regression, indigo children, pendulums, crystals, shamans,
reiki, chakras, ascension, enlightenment, Higher Self, spirit guides, Christ
consciousness, and soul agreements. Some of my best friends were like minded,
growing in their knowledge of the same New Age-y stuff as me. It was, quite
possibly, the happiest time in my life. It’s hard not to be happy when you
truly believe, with total assurance, that Love is god (this phrase was tattooed
on my arm, to my mother’s displeasure) and that humans are inherently good. It
especially made me happy to believe that all religions were equally right and
equally wrong about God. God was too big and too incredible for humans to truly
understand, I thought. Religions were just grasping for knowledge of the same
beautiful, universal deity.
To say I was a hippie at the time
would be fairly accurate.
I won’t bore anyone with too many of the details of my
Christian conversion in 2012. I was pregnant with my daughter, in a toxic
relationship, and terrified of the uncertainty in my future. I was extremely
vulnerable. So I shouldn’t have been so surprised when I had a religious
experience at church. I begged God for forgiveness, cried bitterly over lost
time, took communion, and left the church “changed” again.
This time, it stuck.
For two and a half years, I went to church nearly every
Sunday. I dedicated my daughter to Jesus. I vowed to raise her in a home based
on Biblical truth. My “Love is god” tattoo was covered up by an ornate cross.
My free-spirited self was shoved in a corner, replaced swiftly by a new soul I
did not recognize.
Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I found a
completely different kind of happiness. It felt purposeful and mature. Somehow,
for me, being a follower of Jesus Christ also meant being and adherent to the
American Dream. Where I used to envision raising Paige at Burning Man, there
were new visions of traditional marriage and white picket fences. I had done a
180 all over again. But my 180s started to have consequences. My relationship
changed. Friendships were strained or lost completely. Priorities shifted. My
mother got excited over the return of her prodigal child. I realized pretty
quickly that the changes I had made could not be undone. This wasn’t high
school anymore, and I was expected to have my religious views figured out.
“Searching” was no longer considered kosher – I was a mother, damn it, and I
squashed every religious doubt that ever came up in my heart. I went from
having a wide-open mind to having a very, very closed one in a very short
period of time. Deep down, it didn’t sit right with me, but everything was
going so well. I didn’t want to ruin it with any kind of cynicism or admission
of “not knowing.”
But then, 2015 happened. My
then-fiancé became my now-ex-fiancé. Everything fell into a kind of chaos that
I had not been familiar with for years. My future that had been seemingly set
in stone, seemingly certain, was now a series of blurry unknowns. I was mad at God
for “taking away” the love of my life. So I stopped praying. Then I stopped caring.
Then I stopped believing.
Some days, it feels like I’m spiritually stuck in my high
school years. The last year has been a series of insane changes in every aspect
of my life, and I have migrated between belief systems at least a couple of
times. I’ve been ecstatic over the course of the last year about new mantras
and sage cleansing ceremonies, but I’ve also been ecstatic about Pentecostal
prophecy and my mega-church. It’s been a very confusing twelve months, to say
the least. But I can no longer swing back and forth so comfortably. I can see
the ridiculousness of my position. You cannot believe in the healing power of a
moonstone rod one day and the healing power of speaking in tongues the next.
Or can you? In all honesty, I haven’t got this figured
out at all. I’m trying to settle into a middle ground, with opinions and ideas
that are more nuanced, but I have always been an all-or-nothing kind of person.
I have always been very extreme.
It’s hard, however, to just “pick” one belief system or
the other, when both belief systems (conservative Christianity and New Age-y
universalism) have so powerfully affected the direction of my life and shaped
my personality. Christianity gave me my foundation. It somehow got me through
high school intact and alive. It gave me hope in some of my darkest times. But
my hippie-ass, cherry-picking system of belief grew me into an adult. It got me
through my eating disorder. It taught me how to love my body and myself. Both
belief systems have “saved” me from all kinds of shit, up to and even death.
So I guess I’m having a moment of doubt. A long,
drawn-out, irritating moment of doubt. My poor friends who have dragged me
through this past era of my life must have been rolling their eyes the whole
time. Certainty may be the mature thing to possess at this point in my life,
but I have no certainty to speak of in this area whatsoever.
I don’t know what would need to occur for me to be
faithful to one spiritual path, once and for all. “Proof” does not normally
impress my fickle heart. I have read The Case For Christ. I took an
apologetics class as a junior in high school. I am well-versed in all of the
reasons everyone should believe in the Bible as God’s inerrant word.
I’m just not personally convinced.
I have so many questions that I wish there were easy
answers to, on either side of the aisle. And I have so many reasons to continue
going to my church. I have plenty of reasons to raise my daughter in the
Christian faith. But I also have so many personal reasons to reject
Christianity as a whole. I know that what I need is more exploration, more
time. And I need to give myself permission to be fickle again, to be wrong, to
get messy in the mud of “What do you believe?”
But not knowing can be very uncomfortable. Watching a
sunrise and not knowing the character of the creator can be unsettling for
someone raised firmly in a certain religion. But at least I can see that the
sunrise is beautiful. And I’m waking up to watch one more.
Whoever made me still wants me here. I still have a
reason to be on this plane of existence. And if nothing else is comforting
today, that fact alone will do.
