Apparently no one else is willing to bite the bullet, so I'll go.
My parents are what you'd call "cultural Christians", sort of a phenomenon of living here in the South. We went to church for a while starting when I was about seven or eight (1990-ish), and ending in 1995. It was non-denominational "contemporary" church that met in a private school's auditorium. I remember being very bored by it. My parents never discussed religion outside of church, and I have to say, they didn't really live it, either--they say terrible swear words as everyday language, and there are many other justifications for my saying this that I shouldn't really go into in public.
I had no idea who this Jesus was, or why the hell I should care. Before we started going to this church, "Jesus" was just some name I heard sometimes at school or on TV. "Jesus" was what my parents yelled if they hit their fingers on a door or something like that.
The Gospel According to Courtney:
In Sunday school I learned that Jesus was this really nice guy who lived a long time ago. He had a lot of good things to say, but for some reason some people didn't like him, so they nailed him to a cross and let him die on a Friday. They stuck him in a tomb somewhere and he lay dead until Sunday morning, when, for some reason, he actually came back to life, got up, and walked out. Then some women came and saw the tomb with the stone sealing it rolled to the side. An angel came up and said something like, "Hey, this guy rose from the dead, so he ain't here, sorry." And God saw that it was cool. The end.
Yes, I'm serious, that's about all I knew of the Gospel until I was, well, shall we say, old enough that I should have known better. But no one was fussed with making sure I was aware of the finer points of such things as these, and I was therefore not fussed wth learning them.
To go into more detail about this church, I have to say, at least they understood the importance of giving communion every week. Sure, it was a wafer and a little shotglass of grape juice, and I neither understood the significance of it nor why I wasn't allowed to partake. When I was ten or eleven, we were finally allowed to take communion in my Sunday school class. (Until I became Orthodox, that was the first and last time I'd taken communion. Ever. Anywhere.) I still didn't know what the significance was or why our teacher apologized in advance for having us take communion if it turned out we weren't ready. This confused me for
years, I'm telling you. If you are wondering, no, I was not baptized, at that point or any other. I also don't ever remember saying anything called a "sinners prayer" but I might have, I don't know.
I received a Bible when I was ten, a gift from the church for memorizing all the books of the New Testament. I treasured (and still have, somewhere) that Bible. Even though I still didn't have any idea what it all meant. It was like there was some block on my mind, that made words from Scripture run through my head, in one ear and out the other, with no comprehension or understanding.
Not long after that, though, my family decided to stop going to church. The "official reason" was because my parents perceived some slight against them as being personal. Something bad happened in my hometown at that time, and my family was one of the ones affected severely. It was extremely painful for us, and I think it was compounded by the lack of spiritual support caused by no longer going to any kind of church.
Those were painful years, believe me. I praise the Lord for His mercy upon me during this time, because church or no church, the little I had learned from going had had an effect on me, and I continued to pray in secret. I wasn't entirely sure who I was talking to or why I had to talk to Him this way. Or why I even thought He existed, since I'd never seen Him or heard Him talk back.
There were times I drifted towards very, uh, human-manufactured personal philosophies--like most teenage girls I researched a little on paganism, wicca, etc. For a little bit I flirted with secular humanism. But I guess God had some kind of hold on me because everything just kept coming back to this Jesus guy and the Christian God. So I resolved to one day become a Christian. That day wasn't going to come soon, since my parents weren't exactly crazy about the idea of going back to church. But I would one day investigate all the Christian denominations and figure out which one I liked the most, and become whatever it was.
The center of this was my desire to be baptized. It would be a looooong time before I ever found out on an intellectual level what it really means to be baptized. But somewhere in my heart I knew there was a difference between me, and baptized Christians, and I
needed to be one.
It was then that my sister announced her intention to become a Mormon, which she followed through with on her eighteenth birthday. She deconverted not long after going off to college. I have gone into more detail about this elsewhere, but suffice it to say, I managed to withstand, with my baby Christian faith, the proselytizing that I was subjected to by my sister's Mormon missionary friends. Thank the Lord.
In the middle of all of this, I became pro-life. I'm not sure how--my parents are fervently pro-abortion and raised me to be the same. (As they say, that's just the first of many ways I've disappointed them over the years.) Anyone who has been out from under a rock for longer than five seconds knows that the pro-life movement is predominantly Christian. When I went off to college, I became involved with my campus's pro-life group. At the first meeting, when we were asked to cite a reason why we were pro-life, I was the only one--and I mean the ONLY one--who didn't specify religion. One of the guys there decided I must be a heathen, and began to evangelize to me. I rolled my eyes at him but decided to go to this "Campus Crusade" meeting he invited me to, just to get him to shut up. (Besides, he was kind of cute.)
Well, was THAT ever an experience. They sang "praise and worship" songs I had no idea of the lyrics of, but everyone else seemed so impassioned by it, raising their hands, etc., that I figured I had to be in the right place. After all, they could tell me more about this Jesus guy that I didn't know. Who was he? Why is he so important? Why do we follow him? Why does God have a son? The tragedy of September 11th had just happened a few weeks before, and for obvious reasons I wasn't the only one seeking answers to these questions.
But as my months with Campus Crusade wore on, I felt a spiritual stagnation come upon me--these people had no answers, they just had more of the "Jesus is a nice guy" stories. No word on the importance of the Crucifixion or the Resurrection. All they told me was that Jesus dying on the cross somehow "paid the debt" for my sins. Their characterization of God was some kind of creditor in the sky, waiting to zap his underlings for being naughty, and the only thing that stopped him doing it was some guy who was nailed to a cross 2000 years ago.
At that point, it's a wonder I didn't give up on organized religion altogether.
I think the last straw for me was when I was emphatically encouraged to go on a mission trip to convert other people. Wait a minute--I barely know anything about what
I'm supposed to believe, how the hell am I supposed to convert other people to this? It's bad enough that I'm stuck in it--I'm supposed to curse
other people to this ecclesiastical limbo, this strange middle ground? No... no, I wasn't going to do it. I was going to find a church, right then and there. And whatever it was, was going to tell me all these things I'd missed over the years, the things no one at Campus Crusade found important enough to tell me. (Or rather, found me important enough to make sure I knew, but I digress...)
About this time, I had been reading Frederica Mathewes-Green's pro-life works for a long time and had started to touch on her religious works. The idea of "Orthodoxy" confused me. What an odd thing--a Christian denomination I'd barely ever heard of.
My sophomore year had just begun and my university was having a student organization fair, where students could come check out the different organizations on campus. The table I was running was in the bright summer sun, and directly behind me, in the shade, was the table for Orthodox Christian Fellowship. I was in the sun, they were in the shade--it doesn't take a genius to say, maybe I should take a break and check out their table for awhile, hmm? And yet aside from that, I felt a strange urge to go to
their table, specifically. Theirs was the closest but not the only one in the shade. There were plenty of other groups I could have checked out. And of course, Campus Crusade was in there somewhere.
Anyway, there was a nice, friendly-looking guy working their table, so I decided I'd strike up a conversation with him and see if he had read anything of Frederica Mathewes-Green's pro-life writings. Somehow, the conversation ended up being about Orthodoxy and since I was looking for a church anyway, I figured I might as well look at these Orthodox churches too. I had been about to visit the Episcopal cathedral close to campus, but I decided I'd hold off on that for awhile until I saw what these Orthodox people were all about. Also, if nothing else, visiting an Orthodox church would be an interesting story to tell my kids one day. ("When Mommy was in college, she visited this
craaaaazy church....") I got the nice guy's name and number and decided I would go to an OCF meeting to see what they were all about.
My table had been staffed by myself and a devout Catholic woman. On the walk back from the organization fair, she and I discussed religion, and she offered to get me in touch with a Catholic priest. I got her priest's name and number too. But when I finally got up the nerve to call up the priest that Friday, at the appointed time she'd given me... there was no answer. '
How strange is that,' I thought.
'Well, I still have this Orthodox thing to go to on Monday. I guess I'll do that.'
To be continued...
