Oh buddy! This'll be a damn book, let me tell you. So sorry?
I'm quite religious myself. I grew up Christian under my mom. She was always religious herself but didn't really have any "come to faith moment" until she left for the Air Force when she was young. Been a good Christian woman ever since. With that, however, she never got REAL deep into her faith, just knew the general principles of the Bible of love thy neighbor, ten commandments kinda stuff, and taught that to her kids, myself included in that. I was baptized into Christianity when I was I think like 6, maybe.
As each of us kids grew up under the roof of our religious mom, we all had different experiences. I have two brother and two sisters, so a decent sized family. However we also didn't really have a dad along the way. There were men along the way in our early lives but never really a dad, if that makes sense. About the time I turned 9 my mother got with a new guy and married him. He turned out to be a dirt bag sack of crap that was a child abuser. From that point on, from age 8 to say 16, myself and my siblings lived our lives in various forms of abuse, homelessness, poverty, and all that other kinda good junk that comes with bad home lives. We always faithfully went to Church on Sundays but other than small youth group meetings, I never personally got into Church that much. Since we were dirt poor and my step-father, like most abusers, tried to hid the abuse, even from my mom, we didn't have any affinity to any specific Protestant Christian denominations like Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, or so on, where there might be some kind of accountability for home life. We went to the easiest to get into, sit-in-the-back, "seeker friendly," congregations we could find. That never lent much towards authentic Christianity in my mind, even as a kid, so I never got involved.
Eventually, when I was about 14 I went on what was called the, "Winter Retreat." A 3 day retreat for the high school youth group to go from Illinois to Wisconsin. We did things like tubing and snowball fights, but then at the end of the day, always had like 2 hour long worship sessions with music, a speaker, prayer time, you know, the typical Jesus camp kinda stuff. That's actually when I had a real moment of spirituality for the first time. In the midst of what's coined as, "Jesus high," of a retreat like that, I truly believe I had a moment of the soul when God, "spoke," or simply made me aware of spirituality in general. For the first real time I understood what was meant by God, or at least the idea of him. I didn't just think of big bearded man in the sky or the Sunday school felt-piece characters that were used to teaching kids after watching Veggie Tales.
I considered God.
That's a really heavy statement. I didn't really call myself a Christian then, despite living like it and being baptized, I just knew that I was open to religion from that point on as a valid way to see life and not just something old people did because they were told to by their parents, and them by their parents, and so on.
Through a series of moves I ended up in Colorado and, when I was 17, took a world religions course where I studied things like Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Taoism, Shintoism, Shamanism and/or animism, and the like. Through studying in that class I realized how much people wanted to know God, throughout all of everything since there was ever any people in the way we think of them with evidence of intelligence, they craved knowing God. Be it for power, relationship, money, tradition, whatever, we as humans want more than human existence. Those who don't ponder God ponder the next best thing, their own mind, and create things like fiction and fantasy books, games, and what not. I've written my fair share of crappy high school fan-fic of alt. history Lord of the Rings. We want more than what we see because we can consider more than what we see, so we produce it if we can't excavate it through the use of the tools of direct logic, which by nature of faith and God(s), can't happen.
At that point, say 17, 18 years old, I decided that I needed to figure out this God/religion thing. Yes, my mom always raised me to be a good Christian kid, but Christianity wasn't the oldest religion by far, so what about the people who were before Christians, how would they function in their own world? I took the year and read through holy/sacred texts of the major world religions of the Bible, Qur'an/Hadith, The Vedas, and various Buddhist texts.
Side- note:
This was a fundamentally flawed idea because the #1 rule of reading any ancient text is keep it in the context of the original writers. While I could only sort of do that with the Biblical text and some Quranic text, I knew little of the original context of Hinduism and Buddhism beyond broad history of origin. So admittedly this wasn't the best way to go about it.
At the end of my year of study I came to the personal conclusion that if one took out the God factor, if there was no god/gods at all and one was simply to live the moral life of the various respective religions purely for moral sake, the Christian life was indeed the most proper that I could find out of the major 5. The Christian ideal offered the greatest aspects of humanity that I could find across the board. Buddhism was my #2, but if found it too isolated from relating to other people and too inward. Obviously inward transformation is a major factor of Christianity too, but in theory, it's for the sake of one's salvation AND the salvation of those around them. I'm sure that idea is present in Buddhism as well, but it seemed more of a pronounced thing in the Christian ideal, which I found a more, "proper," way to live. So as my starting point I found that if I wanted to live the most moral life I could I would end up a Christian regardless of God.
The next year, after graduating high school, I ended up going to a Bible college in Knoxville, TN and studied Bible & Theology as well as Intercultural Studies- Emphasizing Missions work within Muslim People Groups. After a good while of University I had a kind of crisis of faith where I wasn't sure I believed what I was being told by my professors any more and the experiences I was having in my faith didn't match what I was reading in the text of the Bible. The healing of soul, the changing of character that came with faith and obedience in Christ, the heart for the salvation of others, the revilement of personal sin and ego, it just wasn't in my life. And that was an issue if I was going to be a Christian person. So senior year I dropped and moved back home to Colorado with my mother. I left and walked away from my faith for a good solid year. I thought of all of the abuse I had been through and how messed I was with unresolved hurt. I saw my little brother, just 16 himself at the time, who got the worst parts of the abuse out of all of us kids, slip into drug addiction and almost die of a meth overdose. My older brother spent himself into thousands of dollars of debt because his poison of dealing with things was money, shopping, spending. And all of us siblings had our own vice that came from the years of unanswered abuse. How could God love me? Not that he didn't SAY that he loved me, but I was at the point of considering taking my own life. God/Jesus is described as a loving father, among other things. If that were true, what kind of Father allows his own kid to get so hurt and remain so, to the point where at 20 year old with tons of potential, he considers taking his own life? What love is that?
That's when I had my next big moment of faith. I don't think I could have ever seriously taken my life, but I was writing out a suicide note to simply see what that process would feel like. Maybe if I actually took even that little step, I'd scare myself into better think. Like, "Oh man this is a real thing and I could hurt myself. I should get some help." In that I didn't necessarily pray but I was simply asking God, in my darkest hour, so to speak, why? Why this life, why this pain, why anything, why wouldn't he answer me, why wouldn't he heal me? His word says that the yoke of Christ is easy and burden light, but Christianity never brought me anything but abuse and lies. While writing out my note I heard the closest thing to the audible voice of God I have ever since heard. It wasn't the voice of God, I don't believe. It was my mind. I truly believe that it was myself, but often times that's exactly how God communicates so I have no quarrels attributing a helping word in my mind to the will/voice of God.
"For them." I heard.
I looked over and saw that one of my books from University had fallen over a little before and it fell to a page that was giving some stat on how many people in the world were, "unreached," or had no access to the biblical scriptures or even knew the name of Jesus. It wasn't said to me explicitly but the implication was that whatever it was I was going through, somehow that suffering would later turn to good for the sake of other's healing. Giving my life in suffering, even for the moment, for the sake of even the potential to offer healing and salvation to others. That was the life of Christ. That was the authentic Christian life. Not that I HAD to suffer otherwise I wouldn't be a Christian, but that in being a Christian, even if we don't get to see the fruit of it, we suffer for the sake of others.
This small word destroyed me. It made me think that indeed God had not been silent because he was unloving, he was allowing me mental anguish and torment of soul to prepare me. Like a good father who teaches his son through hard work and pain, so to was this god of the bible stretching out the soul of a boy that he might have the heart of a proverbial man and do as men have always been called to do in the Christian faith; war for the Kingdom of god through the slaying of self ego, called sin, and through the constant seeking of the betterment of others.
Well from that point I had a renewed sense of purpose, a first resolve as a final resolve to my mind. I moved back to Tennessee and simply began life away from my mother out in Colorado. It was here when I finally had some freedom that I started exploring Christianity not as my mother had taught, but as I saw proper. The world of denominations was open to me and I had options. I tried church after church to find where I fit in best and kept coming to the conclusion that I DIDN'T fit so I'd move on to a new one. Eventually I became Anglican, or a part of the Church of England. I appreciated the high church style of Anglicanism with the use of vestments for the priest, icons of saints and scenes of the Bible, bells in the church, and so on. After about another year of that I started to fall away from my beloved Anglicanism. I ran into the same issue I had while in University: the experience I was personally having didn't match up to what I was seeing in the Bible. I was living a more focused, more moral, more humble, more pious, more everything good, kind of life than ever before, had firm resolve to the love of God, faithfully attended a Church that I myself decided on, but I was hollow. As the scriptures would say, I had built my foundation on sand instead of rock. Something was missing. There was a lack of authenticity that I found to be present.
Just recently in fact I became a convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. I wanted a faith that had a firm foundation to it, one that I knew that if I ever have kids of my own, the same Church (in the larger collective sense) that I went to would still be around and wouldn't have changed its values when they came of age and decided on their faith. Protestantism had too many options for it to be the only Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic church that is spoken of in our creeds, that even some of them confess. There is a constant air of change to the protestant denomination, numerous as they are, which caused for a sense of a spiritual arms races. Everyone wanted to present themselves and why they were good and at the forefront of modern Christian thought, application, and presence. Of course many of them work together in truly good things like missions work and homeless help and so on. But every church I was a part of had in it an identity that allowed for fundamental shift to a new trajectory of "mission," if the moment arose and they became culturally irrelevant. "If we need to change because we don't see growth, we can change."
This was not the way of the church that I read about in the scriptures which the Christ said was built on the rock and the gates of hell itself would not stand against her; who the family of God in the mystery suffered death and torture to preserve.
So I looked at the two strongest bodies I could, being the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox. Even within these two there are major splits, most notably from each other, of course.
I have too many problems with the office of the papacy, not necessarily the person of the pope; though the new pope certainly has his communal flaws within Catholicism. I also do not believe at all in the idea of purgatory, the practice of selling indulgences, various rules that are applied to the priesthood, and various other issues like this that made it a fundamental impossibility for me to ever be in communion with Rome. So I was left with Eastern Orthodoxy. I started exploring, went to a divine liturgy service on a random Sunday, and have been Orthodox ever since.
I am Orthodox to this day because I have found the authenticity I was looking for of faith here. ALL bodies of believers will have their flaws, and Orthodoxy has her own issues, so that's not to say things are perfect. But here, unlike any place, church, group, or religion I've ever explored, my heart, my soul, indeed even my mind have been healed and are healing. You could say some of that is just time away from all of my past issues, but I know it to be more than that. The authenticity is proving in that I love people, at all, but also actively. And not just a generic, "people," but more than that. I have a genuine love for my, "enemies," or those who wrong me. I want good and actively pray for the betterment of those who have done me wrong. Not out of conceit to make myself feel better, praying like, "O Father in Heaven thank you that I'm not like that dirt bag! Help that dirt bag, because you KNOW he needs it!" It is a prayer of relation, because I know I've been the person to hurt someone, I know I've been and continue to be the sinner, I know the struggle and how much I have had to be healed simply to walk well with other. So I can pray for their betterment in love, actual love, like never before I even considered.
To that point, I do not steer away from my emotions, I am sensitive again to compassion. My heart of stone, as it were, caused by years and years of abuse, doubt, and unhealed blame, has turned to a heart of flesh which simply wants love.
A bit of an aside which comes around: The Orthodox view of hell is not the pit-of-fire view. And I personally, obviously, believe this lack of pit-of-fire to be the better understanding. The view is that post life here on Earth, hell is the consciousness of a person. This perfect being, the one of total love, God, the one whom the phrase, "entire," is simply factual and not just theoretically applicable, this one who is truest love and total being, is before us. He is in reality because he is reality, before our eyes. And there we realize . . .everything. Every improper sin, word of slander, hateful thought, degradation of other people, withheld good, it's all made known before the greatest reality there ever cold be. That is hell. Think about anytime you've ever seriously hurt someone you care about and how awful you felt. How even something so simple as really disappointing your mom hurts to your core. Now multiply that times literal infinity and wrap that feeling up in proper totality, then apply that to yourself . . . .forever without end. A wholeness of the torture of consciousness for eternity in light of the severity which you have done ill against, namely the severity of infinity. Every sin is a sin against eternity itself, making it eternally significant.
This view of hell is one I can actually believe. The pits of fire for the sinners, where God creates this torture pot worse than anything we could feel or almost even consider, for anyone who has violated even one of his fetishes . . . that's not a God of total love to me. There are of course opposing views and theologians who can backdoor their way into showing that somehow that view of the literal hell-fire is actually loving, but I stopped believing them. How much worse and better, both, is this torture of not just flesh, but mind and soul, for someone to experience; not because they are found to be guilty of doing bad, but more because they are found presently before love itself to such a whole manor?
I say it thus in a sort of story:
This love, the love of the Christ shown to men, the love of God even in merciful judgment, the love that I do now experience through my own heart and mind and emotions, this is why I'm religious. Because yet in life the authentic God of love presented by the one true, holy, catholic, and apostolic church has not failed to show himself to me. I had been knocking my whole life on the door of God, and he invited me in from a young age. I was the young neighbor kid who came over to the old guy's house and always asked questions. But I wandered from his house and kept crying over my own pain when the winds and rain and hunger set in, of spirit. And he would simply receive me again, gently knowing that the fullness of time would prove my salvation. And I would knock on the door of the Father, he would graciously answer, I would enter, I question and rant and rave, then start to let myself wander, and eventually leave. And then repeated that for years. Somewhere along the way that cycle happened anew and instead of simply walking through an open door, only later to leave, I asked if maybe I could stay for a while. I asked for some coffee, maybe some soup. The days had been hard and hurtful to me, yeah? Could I maybe stay a bit here in the house, maybe just for a little while to simply warm up even?
And that time, I just never left. I became a whole person again, receiving wholeness of person-hood as given from the wholeness of love, through grace, in faith, by Christ alone.
Amen.
( gotta throw a little sermon-speak in there ;) )
Hope it wasn't TOO long and actually answered your question.
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