My Story of Spiritual Growth: From Myth and Dogma to Connected Clarity
Content Updated on September 04, 2008
Christian Roots
I was born into a Christian American family. I was baptized as a Lutheran and attended church and Sunday school every week during the early years of my life. The church had stained glass windows, a big cross at the front of the room, and a man in white robe. There was even a white-robed man with long brown hair who stood up at the front and gently spoke his sermons. I vividly recall thinking that he must have been Jesus himself. I learned about Bible stories, rules God demanded we follow, and the horrors of Hell. At home, I frequently flipped through the pages of our hard cover copy of a children's Bible and watched Charlton Heston movies about Moses. I said my prayers every night as I lay in bed, and when the wishes in my prayers didn't come true, I was often told by teachers in the church that it was because I needed more faith or because God thought that my wishes were bad ideas (i.e. God has different plans for you).
Eventually, my family had to move away from our family church, and for a few years we had no membership in any church at all. We did continue to talk about God, read the Bible, and watch Charlton Heston movies, and once in awhile we attended one of the neighbor's churches. I still prayed every night.
We moved again, and again began looking for a church we could call our own. I went to a Lutheran vacation Bible school, Methodist Christmas services, and non-denominational Easter services. Eventually we settled on a non-denominational church called Living Stream (which, by the way, is a very common name for a variety of churches). We attended services. I went to youth group. I continued to hear all the same Bible stories and rules, got the same answers to questions (e.g. faith and God's plans), and was repeatedly told to stay away from Satan's temptations. My grandmother reinforced those teachings with warnings that I needed to avoid learning about other religions, which wasn't a problem because I didn't know anyone who openly had any religion other than Christian.
I later started attending a Baptist church with some friends. It too was like the Lutheran and non-denominational churches, but they were louder and more passionate, and all the noise made me feel a bit uncomfortable.
At my high school, somebody started a Christian youth group that met during the lunch break and my driver's ed teacher, whom I thought was totally cool, was one of the leaders. So I attended it every week and, coupled by teenage peer pressure, I became quite devoted to living a good Christian life, which mostly meant that I had to pray a lot, needed to protest things like abortion, and couldn't kill myself (which saved my life on several occasions since I was such a depressed kid).
Roots of Transformation
As I came closer to the end of my teenage years, many of my friends became cynical atheists and others became hypocrites, self righteous church advocates by day and rebellious rule breakers by night. I simply held my faith in Jesus, God, and the Bible, which I read at least weekly, and tried to balance what I had learned from churches and the Good Book with what I really believed about the world. Trying to reconcile the contradictions wasn't easy, but I could always invent a logical yet imaginative way to bridge the gaps and rationalize my behaviors. I drank a little, but not often. I stayed out until morning and just hung out all night. I lied often to my family but was quite loyal and honest with my friends. I had sex to gain intimacy and love, but secretly felt guilty about it. I had great hopes for the future, and I just kept praying for those hopes to become reality. And then I got pregnant.
Teenage pregnancy is scary enough, but then I started losing the relationships I had become so attached to. My boyfriend was far from supportive because his hopes for the future didn't include a kid. His reactions to the situation left me feeling worthless. Many of our friends took his side and confronted me about how I had ruined his life and even accused me of lying about the whole thing. My family was supportive at times, but they were also condemning. I felt like I couldn't trust anyone. Even my doctor was uncaring; I was just another patient to check off the list. And my hopes of going to college, starting a high powered career, and marrying Prince Charming were crushed. At least I had my baby. I was going to be the best mom possible for my baby. My baby was my strength. And I had a union job with benefits, so at least I could take care of my child. And then I started bleeding, and the doctor told me that I needed bed rest, which meant no working. By not working, I would lose my benefits and likely even my job. I was going to become a single teenage mom on welfare. A coup el days later, I woke up at 4am in agonizing pain. I was having a miscarriage. Twelve hours later, I wasn't pregnant anymore. My baby was dead. My friends were gone. My family was disappointed and disgusted. My boyfriend was gone. And my baby was dead. All that was left was me.
I spent the next two weeks in bed crying or going for long walks alone and crying the whole time. Gradually, some friends did appear and offered their support, but I didn't trust anyone anymore. I built a wall of bitterness and hopelessness around me and pushed most of those friends away. I hated life and contemplated killing myself (since it wasn't the first time that I had contemplated suicide, I already had a plan figured out).
During one of my walks, I sat in the middle of the desert and asked God to show me the true path to Him. I figured that if I could find the true path to God, then I would be blessed with a good life, and I would finally be happy.
The Search for the Path to God
I went back to work and started earning a living again. I signed up for college right away. I began reading the Bible from cover to cover. And I began attending church and Bible study groups again. But this time, something was different. I had a new found strength to seek truth, to ask questions, and to not back down.
I began to study Christian history, then Jewish history, and then Pagan history all from an academic perspective. I started studying about ancient Roman society and ancient Mesopotamia. I studied the beliefs of every church in my area by suggesting to each church or members of the church that I wanted to join them. I started with my old church then branched out to Evangelical, Methodist, Mormon, Jehovah's Witness, Catholic, Presbyterian, and Adventists. I read the Bible cover to cover several times, snuck into university classes about Biblical history, and studied the Nag Hammadi. It didn't matter though, I couldn't find a place where I felt the right path calling to me.
Their teachings all seemed terribly judgmental and emotionally immature. A vengeful god didn't seem very understanding. A god who rewards and punishes based on archaic laws didn't seem very wise. A god who would banish his own children to a place of suffering for eternity didn't seem like a loving parent. A god who was supposed to foresee everything foresaw temptation and let it happen to his children, knowing that they would fail and end up in an eternity of banishment or torture, and I'm supposed to worship that? As a parent, God seemed irresponsible and abusive. As an omniscient, all-wise being, God seemed strangely naive. As the greatest being ever, he seemed insecurely needy of praise, worship, and sacrifice to appease his ego. The Judeo-Christian God I had grown up knowing was a logical impossibility, and at my very core, I knew I couldn't believe in him anymore.
So I started to branch out even further into studying non-Christian religions. I began with variations of Neo-Paganism, and eventually settled on Christo Wicca, a combination of Christianity and Wicca. Later, I migrated into non-trad Neo-Paganism and then to new age spiritualism and then to mysticism. Through all of it, I learned to draw up astrology charts, read tarot card and runes, interpret numerology calculations, cast spells, conduct seances, tap into intuitions influenced by spirit guides, and attune chakras with reiki. And the more that I learned, the more that I realized that you don't need spells or fortune tellers or psychic healers to help you get what you want.
I went on to learn about various types of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Hinduism. I loved many of their teachings, but the mythology left me disenchanted.
God Isn't "God"
During my religious studies, I was going to college and majoring in Liberal Studies and Natural Science. I began to learn about Newtonian physics, Einsteinian physics, chemistry, astronomy, cosmology, general biology, botany, zoology, human biology and development, biochemistry, geology, meteorology, psychology, the arts, education/teaching theory and methods, technology, math, philosophy, and social sciences. My studies led me to see the world in a new way.
The god I was looking for wasn't at all the God I had grown up knowing after all. I was looking for an old Father in the sky or a Mother Earth. I wasn't even looking for a Buddha or a guru. I was simply looking for a reason why things happened and a reason to feel loved and important. So I stopped looking for a deity.
And that's when what I was looking for appeared.
God was in everything. God was physics and biology, geology and time. God was life and consciousness. God was evolution. God was even in me as well as in everyone else. God wasn't a deity who, like a human, judged or loved or hated, or, like a genie, granted wishes if you wished hard enough. God was simply existence and the laws that govern existence.
And that's when my true spirituality emerged.
Agnostic Spirituality
When I prayed to a God outside of myself, my wishes were never fulfilled. But when I presented my wishes to myself and gave myself the responsibility of fulfilling those wishes, I found opportunities to choose to make every desire a reality or to make my entire life a nightmare. I could study my own mind and life and make it better, or I could give up. Either way, I could move forward with hope and confidence that how I responded to events, thus outcomes, my future, was my choice. I could cherish all that which was temporary, such as every second. I could feel connected to the universe, to the cosmos, because I was a part of it. I had meaning to my life, and I wanted to see what would happen next.
I officially declared myself an agnostic. Perhaps there is a deity somewhere watching us, but I have no logical evidence for that, and my life is going along perfectly well without acknowledging such a being or trying to appease it. Plus, I have lots of extra time to focus on appreciating the present, moving forward with goals, and enjoying the little things in life now that I don't have to spend all that time trying to figure out what a supreme deity wants from me. After all, there really isn't a way to know that anyhow, so I'm not going to waste my time trying to accomplish a futile act. Besides that, even if there is a supreme creator, a parent of everything, who consciously cares for all of us, I hope that such a being would be proud of how I have decided to fully embrace every moment of this amazing gift of life it has given me and how I have taken responsibility for my part in the community of the universe rather than judge me for not following some old silly rules. And if there isn't such a deity, that at least I have spent my life well.
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