Coming Clean

Rediscovering Religion

In highschool, I had 4 significant milestones that lead me back to Christianity and trying to figure it all out.

The first was an “Understanding Religion” seminar that a bunch of students got together and did over a 6 week academic program I attended one summer. I was introduced to Universalists, Ba’Hai, Hinduism, Buddhism, Wicca/Paganism, Calvinism, Catholicism, and a few others. I found myself intrigued by all of them and thinking about each of them. I readily identified with the Calvinists and less so with the Catholics. Yet I had never encountered Catholicism before, so I paid careful attention between the Calvinists and the Catholics. When I surveyed the general response to the two, people felt the Catholics were asking you to make a lot less assumptions and take more on faith – especially on topics such as justification and the eucharist – and the Calvinists the other way around. I found that weird – weird in that I was trying to figure out, what’s the difference between assumption and faith? But, that’s what I got out of a few people I talked with afterward who didn’t care either way.

The next thing that happened was a class on World Literature I took my senior year of highschool. The first semester studied ancient texts which were all – surprise, surprise – religious. So, I read a lot of the Bhagavadgita, the Zoroastrianism texts, and Eastern Myth and Philosophy. That was really good for me because it got me thinking critically about pantheism, polytheism, dualism, and sorting why those do and don’t make sense. In a lot of ways, it prepared me for Mere Christianity when I read it in college. In so many ways, reading C.S. Lewis is like watching dormant and yet ventured paths of my thought blossom before me.

Third, I started attending a church again with a friend. This was both good and bad for me because while I was rediscovering the need for a communion with believers, I found myself really not fitting in with baptist theology. For example, one night after Bible Study we began a group prayer, during which someone asked if anyone was “scared of the fires of hell” to stand up. Well, I am scared of hell. I’ve got no bones about saying so. So, I stood up. You know what happened then? I gots me a good ol’ baptist saving. Okay, I really shouldn’t be so condescending – they thought they were honestly serving me. But c’mon folks… even Christians should remain fearful of the fires of hell – just as they should remain fearful of God – even if our hope says we have no need for it. But anyways…

Fourth, I began a quest to understand the early Church Fathers. I wanted to know what they thought about Christianity, what it meant, how they practiced it, and everything else. I figured if there were any Christians who knew what Christianity was about, it would be them. Calvin, the Catholics, the Baptists — they got nothing on the early fathers. They are all just poor images of the real, first thing.

There were a few other milestones that happened during this time that need to be talked about, but it is more appropriate to come back to them later than try to deal with them now. For in the moment during this time, these things were inquisitive but largely inconsequential.