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PRmerger
Guest
Wow! Thanks for sharing your journey, Nabooru! Beautifully done!I have not converted…yet. I’m still thinking that I might very well do so, feeling the strongest pull that at times is almost painful, but there are still some issues I need to work out.
Anyway, I live in St Louis, which is a beautiful city (provided you don’t go north of Delmar Blvd), and very, very Catholic. I was raised, however, a die-hard LCMS Lutheran. My grandmother hated Catholics with a passion. My aunt merely considered converting to the Catholic faith because she was marrying one, and my grandmother did not speak to her for two years. She eventually bullied both my aunt and her husband into being Protestants. My mother wasn’t quite so forceful but certainly was not a fan. My father played at religion when I was a child, but had to hide his contempt at faith, which was very difficult for him. Now he’s not so shy these days… He’s living proof that life without God is misery.
Anyway, I went to a Lutheran school and honestly didn’t even know other religions existed. We lived in a Lutheran bubble. One project I had to do for school was to visit the Old Cathedral on the riverfront as a historic St Louis building. I was intrigued by the inside, with its altars and a deep feeling of sanctity.
There was always something drifting in my head making me admire Catholicism. It made no sense since I was raised to hate it. The Pope came to visit our city in 1999 and seeing people line up to offer devotion to him was really over my head. Then in an audience he mentioned the recent St Louis baseball season and the crowd LOST IT. That is a fond memory. The Pope seemed approachable then.
Although for a while I was a devout Lutheran, I couldn’t deny that next to a Catholic church, it was empty. I remember in confirmation class our pastor asking us how we knew we were saved. We stared at each other. He told us it was because we were so awfully repentant for every sin we ever committed. I couldn’t even keep track of all the sins I committed! And he knew it, so he said that we were sorry for all our sins because of our faith. Gulp. I didn’t know how that worked out. It all seemed very vague and hard to define.
I decided at about 18 that I was just too good and smart for Christianity. I grew to hate it intensely, and campaigned and railed against it, but somehow I never felt sincere when hating on Catholicism. I would go through periods of admitting and denying my love for it.
During an admitting period I talked my mother into taking me to the New Cathedral, the seat of the Archbishop. I am telling you now, if you have never seen the cathedral in St Louis, you have not lived. When I entered it I felt like the builders had done their best to approximate Heaven. It was silent. There were chapels on all sides, for different purposes of prayer. For some reason that made infinite sense to me. But I fell away. I gave in to the Devil.
I got involved in New Age, Buddhism and Hinduism. Like I said, I was too smart for Christianity, and I think that insufferable pride is what kept me from being a Christian. I was enlightened, I was literally God, master of my own destiny and as a future Ascended Master/bodhisattva/Sri Guruni, I was also influential in the running of the universe. Christians were to be pitied and reviled, but everyone else was okay. They were all on wonderful spiritual paths. They weren’t as good as me, of course - I was wise beyond my years due to all of my previous lives, which I was getting close to wrapping up. But as long as they were faithful and did what was right, they were good to go. It was all relative.
So try seeing 9/11 and telling yourself that it was okay because those terrorists were just doing what they truly believed was right in God’s eyes. The massacres of Christians in the middle east because of their faith, I tried to tell myself, was just cultural differences. But if, as I believed, there was no such thing as “wrong” or “right”, just forward or backward (and I couldn’t know what was so for other people), then why did it feel so wrong?
One night I had a nightmare. I’d been confused and fumbling towards my goal of enlightenment for a while. Basically, my dream was God saying to me, “You want to be Me? You think you’re Me? You want to run the universe? Go ahead, give it a shot.” The best way I can describe it is to say that it was like that scene in the last Indiana Jones movie, in which the Soviet psychic was destroyed by being overwhelmed with things beyond her comprehension when she begged the aliens to grant her the knowledge of everything. It was incredibly humbling. I had never been “one with God” because I was His creation. This nightmare had such an impact on me that I had a panic attack that lasted for two days. My world and the way I had constructed it was destroyed.
I’m waaaaaaaay rambling here. But to put it simply I discovered I could not through my own merits save myself or make myself godlike. I needed a savior. I started attending an Anglican church shortly after. Whether or not my pilgrimage will take me to Rome remains to be seen.
I would like to add as a footnote that we do have a need to bring people to Christ, because like them, I was in that darkness and in a single night descended into the horror and despair that life apart from the true God is.
One more question: what does your screenname mean?
So I better do something about it.