My Faith Journey

Karen had asked me about my faith journey and suggested that I post about it. Its a long story with many twists and turns but here goes....

When I was young, my family belonged to a Disciples of Christ church ( you know, First Christian etc.). I'm so thankful my parents made church part of our lives. I have many good childhood memories of that church. It was there that I was baptized when I was 11 or 12. I also remember my mom talking to us about God and reading us books about Jesus. And we always had bedtime prayers. Unfortunately, when some family problems arose during my early adolescence, we stopped going to church. But I never stopped wanting to have a spiritual life and decided that when I got my driver's license and/or went away to college I would find a church of my own. About this same time, I read a book that had a huge impact on me. The book was Karen by Marie Killilea. The true story of a family whose daughter had cerebral palsy, this book showed a family with a vibrant Catholic faith. The descriptions of the liturgical life of this family greatly appealed to me. I knew immediately that I wanted to find a liturgical church in which to worship. Eventually I ended up in an Episcopal church a block from my college campus. I loved being Episcopalian. I loved the liturgy. I loved the church seasons. I loved the kneeling and the reverence. I loved the music. Then I met my future husband (now ex-husband). He was raised Southern Baptist and while he led me to believe that he was open to the Episcopal church, I found out after the wedding that in reality he was stubbornly opposed to any church but Southern Baptist. For about the first year of our marriage we had a lot of conflict about this. Then I got pregnant with our first child. In the interest of family unity I agreed to become Baptist. I was Baptist for 20 years until my first marriage ended. I won't go into the reasons for the divorce here, but suffice to say I was almost as hurt by the reactions of our church to the divorce as I was by my ex-husband. I RAN, not walked, back to the Episcopal church. I found a loving, Spirit-filled parish and was very happy there. To be continued.....

Bottom Line

One of the things that changed after my "wake-up call" last summer was how I saw God's nature. For years I had gone back and forth on the whole homosexuality issue. I have friends who are gay and are also wonderful, loving people. Would God turn His back on them because they were gay? That made no sense to me. I believed (and still do) in a loving God who wants all of His children with Him. But what I saw in my denomination and in our culture at large was this entrenched idea that if we have certain tendencies, God must want us to be that way and so not only would it be impossible to change but God wouldn't even ASK us to change. So the issue of homosexuality is the part of the iceberg that is above water. The larger problem is sin and repentance. That's the part that lurks under the dark, cold ocean of our world. How many people have wrecked lives because our culture and, God help us, our CHURCHES refuse to acknowledge it?
So last summer, by a work of God's grace, I arrived at my bottom line: The only kind of God that I wanted to worship was a God who has both the desire and the power to change me. Me. Not my husband, not my children, not my gay friends, me. I had to leave all those other people in God's loving and capable hands and trust Him enough to take care of them. My job was to put myself in a community that reflected this desire of God to change me and supported me in those efforts.
Because if God can't change me, why bother? A church that believes that is nothing more than a bunch of guys in dresses, playing with candles and pretty words. Its worse than wrong because it keeps people apart from the Truth and the Healer that can transform.

One of the things I am beginning to suspect about Orthodoxy is that they are people who believe in transformation. Not in a legalistic, punitive way but with a humility and awareness that even the best of us are as nothing compared to our Lord. I am going to my first Orthodox service this evening and I am SO hoping to find this is true.

Wake up call

Last summer God shook me awake. That's the best way I can describe it. Following my divorce in 1998 I went into a spiritual tailspin. I continued attending church but began a period of questioning everything I knew or thought I knew about God. I got to a point where I wasn't sure what was true anymore so I just stopped asking. I still wanted to know God but was just plain "stuck". Thankfully, last summer God "un-stuck" me.
If you've been following the Current Unpleasantness in the Episcopal Church you will know that it has been embroiled in controversy for the last few years over the ordination of an openly gay bishop. Last summer things came to a head when the General Convention elected a presiding bishop, a woman, who espouses no discernable Christian doctrine. It was in the days following convention that I finally had to choose. What will I believe in....a God who loves every person no matter what but requires no departure from sin OR a God who has the desire AND the power to change me. I chose the latter. That has opened a floodgate. To my knowledge at the time, the Episcopal parish that I was attending had no plans to confront this situation (they have since left ECUSA) so I was going to have to find another place to be. I knew I needed a liturgical church. That left me with 3 choices, Anglicanism (apart from the US version), Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy. Anglicanism would be the easiest of the three but I have serious doubts about the long-term viability of a denomination that has the ability to vote in heresy. So I took a long look at the Roman church. I'm still looking at it. But I have to twist my theology into some uncomfortable positions to go there and I'm not sure "contortionist" is a spiritual gift. That leaves Orthodoxy. My first thought was "that is just too ethnic and strange". But lately the more I read about it, the more I am impressed. Orthodoxy has a humility and an respect for mystery that I find very compelling. We'll see.