Why am I a…
…well, what am I? I’m not positive. I identify as a Christian; I chose obedience to Christ and his Church. I was baptised, I made the vows before my community, and I will hold to them as I have for four years. But I am like an immigrant to America, who even as he swears allegiance to his new home, is not wholly ‘of’ it; I am naturalized, but not natural. I belong to the Church, but my head has memories and my soul was formed in other lands.
I was brought up a Pentecostal, and then I broke from it, from Christianity, and from religion altogether for a few years of humanism with some spiritual aspects. I didn’t discover an interest in spirituality until I had left religion, much like Jesus never had any interest for me until I discarded it. I was freethinker because I needed escape from a repressive sect in the Pentecostal brand, and refusing to accept anything on authority was the best away to create space around it and myself. Freethought and later the worship of reason had the air of virtue, and since I was still an idealist I could not help but be a humanist. Naturally human ethics ought to be constructed to better serve human ends. This lasted about four years, until I became a more serious student of philosophy, and particularly Stoicism. Stoicism placed a great deal of emphasis on reason, and seemed to me a rationalistic kind of spirituality. I did not expect, when studying Stoicism, to encounter the Divine – but I did. Stoicism allowed me to appreciate a sense of divinity that was more than the ‘imaginary friend’ I derided as a rationalist; it also awoke in me an appreciation for virtue.
From there the story becomes more complicated. A friend of mine was then involved in RCIA classes, and asked me to attend a liturgical service to compare notes as it were. We met as agnostics, you see. After witnessing Christian liturgy, I was entranced by its mystery and beauty, and also welcomed by an absolutely loving parish. It offered me the enchantment I was starved for: throughout my twenties I had become increasingly more disillusioned. Progress was not what it was cracked up to be, and I had begun to realize that man is not perfectable. I saw the precious heritage of generations being cast aside: mother’s heads full of receipts being discarded for ready-made meals from the supermarket, fathers’ crafts being rendered museum curiosities by modern machinery. We become creatures of consumption, idly gazing at movies and yearning for happiness in possessions, instead of creatures of creation. How many people these days can still play instruments and sing, let alone recall ancestral melodies to put new words to? In politics, once profound connections to the local – to the home, the county, the village – have been sublimated. Now, at least in the United States, the national government, the State, is everything; to it we pay taxes, of it we are ‘citizens’. But we have no real place; our actions have no real effect on its course. So I sought…meaning, connection, authenticity – community. I wanted, too, to follow the will of God, which I had faith in despite not ‘believing’ in. God was a force I could feel moving on my soul, even if I did not give rational assent to His existence, if that makes sense.
The Episcopal church was Christian, and thus the ‘faith of my fathers’, a connection to ancestral folkways, and it very nearly fulfilled my religious ideal, of a village church that sits at the heart of the community and is the stage of its every tender moment, tying together births, weddings, deaths in meaning. The Episcopal church was also liberal enough for me to blend in, even though back then I was more fit for a UU church than a Christian one. I continued attending, respectfully abstaining from communion even as they encouraged me to take it. After wrestling with the decision for several months, I made my decision: I would be Christian. I did not quite believe Christian doctrines, but I would live by them; I would keep faith with them. And so I was baptised, and swore myself to Christ, hoping to enact the Jewish response to Moses’ law…“we will do and we will understand.”
Years have passed now, and with every passing year I become more fully naturalized Christian. Its doctrines are no longer so foreign to me, though I still can’t swear to them with the earnestness of someone native born. I speak Christian, but with a skeptic accent. My love for the Christian tradition grows and grows, and I am continually attracted by more orthodox or catholic thought, but ever distracted by the old doubts. Besides, I love my parish church – I am a part of it. I am an usher at times, a choirman more often, an officer of the Vestry. Besides, this parish took me into Christianity. I could have never gone to a Catholic or East Orthodox Service as a skeptic back then and stood it I feel I owe my adoptive family fealty.
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