My parents were not churchgoers; my mother had been put off the church by her overly zealous mother, a Jehovah’s Witness, and my father was an atheist with multiple science degrees. At seven, I moved to France and attended Catholic school there. I wanted to be Catholic, I recall, because everyone else was. At twelve, I moved to North Carolina.
I was twelve and prematurely going through teen angst. I realized that my parents had moved me into the middle of nowhere for no reason but money, and suddenly turned anti-materialistic (to be fair to them, the alternative was drowning in debt; putting four girl through college is not cheap. I understand their decision). I was a wannabe bohemian. I believed in True Love. I believed in standing up to The Man. The Man, in my case, was Jesse Helms, my senator, famous for declaring that AIDS research should not be funded because they deserve to die anyway--and The Man was this species of Christian fundamentalism that I had never encountered before. The one that says God hates pretty much everybody. Yes, homosexuality was a sticking point for me. At thirteen I was shunned for being a lesbian. I had short hair and liked math better than boys. I questioned it myself, of course, because I really had no interest whatsoever in boys--and none whatsoever in girls, either. But I listened to Melissa Etheridge and the Indigo Girls because they knew what alienation tasted like. However, let me say that I was not a rebel. I was intelligent; I relied on my brain. There were no drugs, no sex, no wild partying in my high school days. And after a while I became aware that I was indistinguishable from a brain in a jar.
As you would expect for a geek such as myself, I found refuge in internet message boards. And there was a boy. We talked anime, mostly, but of course other things came up; and he was a Christian. Not one like I’d ever med before. For one thing, he was actually nice to people. He did not consider himself holier-than-though. He liked anime and computer games, and he was the smartest person I’d ever known with whom I disagreed on absolutely everything. He exposed my first great logical fallacy: the idea that anyone smart would hold exactly the same opinions I did. He laid bare my cynicism. After I had gone away to college, and I had learned more personal details about his life, I started to develop a small crush on him. Idiot, I told myself. We would fight about absolutely everything. Besides, he was desperately, soul-crushingly in love with someone else. No poaching.
I went to Japan; we lost contact. And that was when I discovered that I was not, in fact, a brain in a jar. I had a body; I had desires. I skipped class to read comic books. I developed a profoundly stupid crush on a Japanese boy. I had always been smarter than the people around me; I had always let myself been convinced that, simply by being smarter, simply by applying my brain to the problem at hand, I could find what was right and do it. That started to fall apart long before then, of course, but it all unravelled completely there. I should have been enjoying myself, taking advantage of my opportunities, and I wasn’t. For the first time I was aware of being truly weak. No, for the second time; the first time was because of the boy. He was soul-crushingly in love, and I could do absolutely nothing to help him.
My next year in university, I discovered postmodernism. And I know that a lot of criticisms have been leveled at postmodernism from a Christian perspective, but it pushed me in a certain direction, if only because of the way I reacted against it. I have half a scientist’s mind. No, I thought, it is obviously not true that everything we think we know is mediated through the dominant culture. No, I thought, there really is such a thing as the absolutely true. And yet it wasn’t all a backlash. Postmodernity fundamentally asserts something I had found out the year before: that we can never really know anything for sure. We are not as smart as we think we are. And if we aren’t as smart as we think we are--only God knows what absolute truths do exist. I briefly looked into Unitarian Universalism, but the church wasn’t within walking distance. At some point I said a prayer, to whoever was out there, quoting the Refreshments: "I don’t need a miracle, but I could use a push in the right direction." Here was my central problem: I couldn’t know what was true, I couldn’t do what was right, no matter how hard I thought or how hard I tried. I didn’t know it then, but I was about to find out that Christianity holds the solution when it says that no matter how much we manage to mess things up, we can be loved and forgiven.
Less than a month later, almost by accident, I got back in touch with the boy, who was no longer in love with anyone else. And it was love. Mutual, stupid, hearts-and-flowers-and-wow-I’m-an-idiot long-distance love. We talked about religion occasionally. I started lurking around the Christian Theology section in the bookstore, and C.S. Lewis told me about a kind of Christianity I hadn’t really heard about before. I’d read a chapter, argue with him in my head, concede the point, and return. Some points I didn’t concede; he obviously hadn’t known very many women. But he won more points than he lost--and he won the most important point: that it is through Jesus’ death and resurrection that our broken relationship with God can be restored. If I had been converting for the boy, I would not have bothered; he probably doesn’t think an evolutionist liberal Christian is much of an improvement over an agnostic. But I researched and researched and researched, and when the little voice inside my head said, "You know it’s true. Why don’t you just admit it?" I said, "Okay." I confessed my sins and asked Jesus for forgiveness. And I went into a church on a Sunday morning and God was there.
If I had to pin down a "born-again" moment, though--I would go back to when I was twelve, and standing at the top of the driveway in the summer sunshine, and being a rebellious angsty teenager, and got an emotional slap upside the head that went something like "Will you stop being so self-centered and look at how beautiful and wonderful the world is, and embrace love for the creatures around you?" I have no doubt that that was the Holy Spirit. I just thought that he was telling me to be a Buddhist--because it seemed rather obvious, at the time, that Christians weren’t very good about embracing love for the creatures around them.And now the task before me, by no means an easy one--to do something about that perception. Because I can’t argue that it’s not a little bit justified.
I was twelve and prematurely going through teen angst. I realized that my parents had moved me into the middle of nowhere for no reason but money, and suddenly turned anti-materialistic (to be fair to them, the alternative was drowning in debt; putting four girl through college is not cheap. I understand their decision). I was a wannabe bohemian. I believed in True Love. I believed in standing up to The Man. The Man, in my case, was Jesse Helms, my senator, famous for declaring that AIDS research should not be funded because they deserve to die anyway--and The Man was this species of Christian fundamentalism that I had never encountered before. The one that says God hates pretty much everybody. Yes, homosexuality was a sticking point for me. At thirteen I was shunned for being a lesbian. I had short hair and liked math better than boys. I questioned it myself, of course, because I really had no interest whatsoever in boys--and none whatsoever in girls, either. But I listened to Melissa Etheridge and the Indigo Girls because they knew what alienation tasted like. However, let me say that I was not a rebel. I was intelligent; I relied on my brain. There were no drugs, no sex, no wild partying in my high school days. And after a while I became aware that I was indistinguishable from a brain in a jar.
As you would expect for a geek such as myself, I found refuge in internet message boards. And there was a boy. We talked anime, mostly, but of course other things came up; and he was a Christian. Not one like I’d ever med before. For one thing, he was actually nice to people. He did not consider himself holier-than-though. He liked anime and computer games, and he was the smartest person I’d ever known with whom I disagreed on absolutely everything. He exposed my first great logical fallacy: the idea that anyone smart would hold exactly the same opinions I did. He laid bare my cynicism. After I had gone away to college, and I had learned more personal details about his life, I started to develop a small crush on him. Idiot, I told myself. We would fight about absolutely everything. Besides, he was desperately, soul-crushingly in love with someone else. No poaching.
I went to Japan; we lost contact. And that was when I discovered that I was not, in fact, a brain in a jar. I had a body; I had desires. I skipped class to read comic books. I developed a profoundly stupid crush on a Japanese boy. I had always been smarter than the people around me; I had always let myself been convinced that, simply by being smarter, simply by applying my brain to the problem at hand, I could find what was right and do it. That started to fall apart long before then, of course, but it all unravelled completely there. I should have been enjoying myself, taking advantage of my opportunities, and I wasn’t. For the first time I was aware of being truly weak. No, for the second time; the first time was because of the boy. He was soul-crushingly in love, and I could do absolutely nothing to help him.
My next year in university, I discovered postmodernism. And I know that a lot of criticisms have been leveled at postmodernism from a Christian perspective, but it pushed me in a certain direction, if only because of the way I reacted against it. I have half a scientist’s mind. No, I thought, it is obviously not true that everything we think we know is mediated through the dominant culture. No, I thought, there really is such a thing as the absolutely true. And yet it wasn’t all a backlash. Postmodernity fundamentally asserts something I had found out the year before: that we can never really know anything for sure. We are not as smart as we think we are. And if we aren’t as smart as we think we are--only God knows what absolute truths do exist. I briefly looked into Unitarian Universalism, but the church wasn’t within walking distance. At some point I said a prayer, to whoever was out there, quoting the Refreshments: "I don’t need a miracle, but I could use a push in the right direction." Here was my central problem: I couldn’t know what was true, I couldn’t do what was right, no matter how hard I thought or how hard I tried. I didn’t know it then, but I was about to find out that Christianity holds the solution when it says that no matter how much we manage to mess things up, we can be loved and forgiven.
Less than a month later, almost by accident, I got back in touch with the boy, who was no longer in love with anyone else. And it was love. Mutual, stupid, hearts-and-flowers-and-wow-I’m-an-idiot long-distance love. We talked about religion occasionally. I started lurking around the Christian Theology section in the bookstore, and C.S. Lewis told me about a kind of Christianity I hadn’t really heard about before. I’d read a chapter, argue with him in my head, concede the point, and return. Some points I didn’t concede; he obviously hadn’t known very many women. But he won more points than he lost--and he won the most important point: that it is through Jesus’ death and resurrection that our broken relationship with God can be restored. If I had been converting for the boy, I would not have bothered; he probably doesn’t think an evolutionist liberal Christian is much of an improvement over an agnostic. But I researched and researched and researched, and when the little voice inside my head said, "You know it’s true. Why don’t you just admit it?" I said, "Okay." I confessed my sins and asked Jesus for forgiveness. And I went into a church on a Sunday morning and God was there.
If I had to pin down a "born-again" moment, though--I would go back to when I was twelve, and standing at the top of the driveway in the summer sunshine, and being a rebellious angsty teenager, and got an emotional slap upside the head that went something like "Will you stop being so self-centered and look at how beautiful and wonderful the world is, and embrace love for the creatures around you?" I have no doubt that that was the Holy Spirit. I just thought that he was telling me to be a Buddhist--because it seemed rather obvious, at the time, that Christians weren’t very good about embracing love for the creatures around them.And now the task before me, by no means an easy one--to do something about that perception. Because I can’t argue that it’s not a little bit justified.
