Residual Christianity and Your Self

Who are you?  On the surface, that's an easy question to answer, but the truth is far more complex once you start to examine yourself.  In fact, the more you examine yourself, the more likely you are to figure out that you do not have a true, singular "self" in the traditional sense of the word.

(If this is somewhat of a new concept to you, Sabio Lantz made an excellent post regarding our many selves which will be a good primer.  Also, note that I'm not a psychologist.  So believe me at your own peril, and chastise me at your will.  Thanks!)

It's not that you have multiple selves either; at least not discrete selves which can be easily segregated from one another.  They often bump, overlap, and conjoin each other.

You may object, because if these selves can't be segregated, then can't we say that there is a singular self?  Such an objection has some validity, but only if we broaden the definition of self to be on the fringes of an incoherent, dissonant mess of an identity.  Ironically, thinking in terms of having many selves is an intuitively useful tool of understanding your own full identity.  At least, part of me thinks that.  ;-)

Just ask yourself (metaphorically speaking) if you've ever had a difficult time trying to make a major decision in your life.  The pros and cons you came up with may very well have represented competing desires sourced from different selves (or if I could coin a term; self-concepts).  A classic example from our times is trying to decide between career versus family interests.

Even in superficial matters, multiple self-concepts is so intuitive that Kellog's ran a commercial in 1988 for Frosted Mini-Wheats where various adults spoke about the wholesome goodness of the mini-wheats, which then cut to children in the same adult clothing expressing that "the kid in me" liked the delicious frosting.

With this complex interrelation of self-concepts, when there is a major change in one of those self-concepts, it can have ripple effects across your other self-concepts, and your other self-concepts can strive to frustrate those changes.

How about an example for clarification?  Divorce.  If you are divorced, or know someone who became divorced while you knew them, you may know exactly what this means.  Being a husband or a wife is far from being a single-dimensional role.  It permeates so many different factors in your life; everything from where you'll choose to live, to where you'll travel, to what risks you are willing to take, to what food you'll eat, etc.

Then comes the threat of divorce.  Your adventurer self-concept may revel in the opportunity which will be afforded after you get free from the "ball and chain" of your spouse.  Yet your nest-building, home-making self-concept may panic at the thought of losing both the support and stability provided by your spouse and the future you had planned together, so you consider trying to mend the divide between you, despite whatever serious issues may be driving you apart.  And so on.  And so on.

More importantly to our topic here, however, is that these types of deep self-concept changes can have residual effects, both pleasant and unpleasant.  Continuing with the example, a year after the divorce is final, perhaps you may find yourself standing on a mountaintop, and the thought hits you, "if I was still married, I wouldn't be here today, having climbed to this glorious peak."  Later, you may find yourself dining at a restaurant, drinking a glass of wine alone, where, seated at a table across from you, is a darling elderly couple, still delighting in each other's company after all these years, and you think "That could have been us.  That should have been us."  Your one "self," appreciating what is, yet grieving for what was; tying both perspectives back to the former state of marriage.  Despite the change which has occurred, there is a residual self-concept of a married person within you, and many of your other self-concepts are influenced by and compared against that residual concept.

As we've seen, being married encompasses much more than simply saying "I do," and, ahem, consummation.  It intermingles with your beliefs, your plans, and your several aspects of your identity.  Similarly, but on a much larger scale, being a Christian involves much more than simply believing that Jesus died for your sins.  It is a world view which exerts influence over many of your competing and coexisting self-concepts.

Some examples of crossover influences are:  Your career-minded self-concept may come to understand the transient nature of all human achievement, and in turn you may discard or re-prioritize that self-concept, or even change its focus to seeking achievement for God.  Your parenting self-concept may also change priorities and delights, from trying to raise a robustly healthy child, to focusing on introducing your child to the love of Christ and delight in sharing the glory of God.  (This is not to imply that it must be either-or relationship, just to establish priorities, understanding that those priorities affect the choices we make.) And so on.  And so on.  In this way, we can see that when you are a Christian, your Christian self-concept touches on many other self-concepts. 

Deconversion from Christianity is not an instantaneous matter.  It may be an instant of emotional epiphany or the fruition of careful study which changes your belief of whether or not Jesus died for your sins, but discarding that surface belief and the associated label is far easier than actually discarding your Christianity.  Similar to the situation of divorce noted above, a residual Christian self-concept lingers behind.  Some parts of that self-concept can change almost automatically, like no longer thinking that Jesus may be showing up at any moment, and no longer treating a minister with more respect than you would anyone else.  However, much of it will remain unchanged, such as the way that you may still identify that there is a transient nature to all human achievement, and the way that the beautiful essence of a favorite Christmas carol may still pull at your heart-strings.  Your residual Christian self-concept will still long for the wondrous fantasies the myth provides, such as the hope of reuniting with your lost loved ones in the hereafter.

For some who lose their faith, aspects of that residual Christian self-concept can be enticing enough to lure them back to the faith after the initial chaos of the loss of faith settles down, in much the same way that sometimes divorced couples decide to get back together.

For others who lose their Christian faith, they will never go back, but their residual Christian self-concept endures regardless.  So the question becomes how do you deal with that?  The right answer for you probably depends a lot on your individual experience and temperament.  Here are some of those answers:

1. One way that some people deal with it is through a "rebound faith," just like a rebound relationship after a breakup or divorce.  They'll renounce Christianity only to trade it for a different faith, like Islam or Buddhism.  To some extent, this can drown out the cries from the residual Christian self-concept, but, like a rebound relationship, it only goes so far.  Plus, you may be creating another persistent self-concept to lug around with you the rest of your days!
    
2. Others make take up another faith in earnest.  Valuing the spiritual experiences felt in Christianity, they may focus their spiritual journey on another faith in a different sense than being a mere rebound.  I would guess that some subset of these people take the path of Universalism.  This approach can help modify the Christian self-concept into something more loving, open, and generalized, such that I suspect those who take this path have no issue with their residual Christian.  (Ironically, there are a few relatively modern Christian denominations which have taken on a Univeralist slant, claiming that Jesus is not the only way to Salvation.)  Another subset may delve more into the notion of Gnosticism.
    
3. Still others trade causes, swapping evangelizing for politics, or for equality rights, or for their careers, etc.  Similar to the faith trades mentioned above, this can be a simple attempt at substitution and suppression, or this can be an earnest pursuit which is afforded now with the time freed from worship and/or the release of Christian social mores.  In either case, this does little to address the residual Christian self-concept other than to distract you from it for some time.
    
4. Others may do nothing at all regarding their residual Christian self-concept.  This can be is a very difficult path to take.  With the Christian self-concept permeating so many other self-concepts, the echos of that former life will persist seemingly ad infinitum.  Only time and the diversion of thought from this self-concept serve to gradually lessen its affects.
    
5. Finally, and what I believe may be the best approach, others choose to tackle their Christian self-concept through a process of demystification.  It involves introspection, flipping from a concentration on what you believed to a study on why you believed it.  I'm not talking about the banal mechanics of how you came to be a Christian, such as your parents bringing you up to be a Christian.  I'm referring to examining why you wanted to believe in Christianity; the social aspects, the hope for justice, your emotional connection to Jesus' story, etc.  The process also involves extrospection, observing and learning from others how they are affected by similar themes, and why they believe in their religions.
   
   The fruit of such contemplation is a deeper understanding of yourself and your fellow humans.  You can appreciate the beauty of faith and simultaneously see its darker paths.  You can ascertain the attraction of the myths, and appropriately put them in their place as such.  With such understanding, the residual Christian self-concept can be elegantly relegated to being a phase in your life's journey, like that of your childhood or your first love.
   
   The Christian self-concept will remain, bubbling up occasional remembrances, but you can behold them in a similar fashion to the gripping storyline of a good book or movie, yet with a richness of personal experience of having played a role in that story.
   

Realize that these paths may be combined, each handling some aspects of the residual Christian self-concept.  Most importantly, realize that these paths really represent processes, not instant answers.  It takes time to sort through your own complexities.  So get comfortable, and enjoy the trip of self(-concept) discovery.

The Final Chapter

This is the final chapter of my deconversion story.  For the other pieces of the story, click the "Crumbling Faith" tag.

Throughout the ten year relationship with my wife, we were friends.  We had started as friends at work, at a restaurant while I was finishing high school.  We had progressed to being friends with an attraction to one another.  We got married.  While my attraction for her only weakened slightly, it appeared as though her attraction for me decayed faster than Beryllium-8.  But we managed.  We were friends, after all.  I never strayed.

At the risk of sounding cliché, I think we had married too young, because I certainly didn't know what I needed in a life partner at that time.  So as we continued on together, it seemed that we grew farther apart.  We remained friends, but by the end we were like friends at work again.  Yet there was a final straw.  I am being purposely vague here, as I'm sure that telling my side of the story would have me appear to be a perfect husband when I am equally sure that that is not the case, but, suffice it to say, some things transpired which should never transpire in a marriage.  So I pushed the separation.

With the separation, and while the divorce proceedings resolved, I decided to abstain from romantic relationships for a year.  I wanted to give myself some time to establish who I really was, and wanted to make sure my judgement was not clouded; make sure I avoided a "rebound" relationship.  It turns out that I am still figuring out who I am, but, hey, life is like that.  :-)

Anyway, living alone and abstaining from romantic relationships left me with a lot of time on my hands.  Early on, as I was sifting through the boxes of my stuff, I came across the notebook where I had jotted down thoughts about the Bible when I had started reading it so many years ago.  I had never finished.  I had never even made it past Leviticus.  So there I was with time on my hands and an unfinished task.  It was a match made in heaven.  ;-)

I remember how I felt at that time.  I was skeptical.  I hadn't really gone to church much at all in the past ten years.  I hadn't felt any divine presence.  I hadn't seen any miracles.

But I was hopeful.  I believed, weakly.  So many people around me, including my family, believed with conviction.  Even more importantly though, with eternal consequences on the line, and the potential reward being so great, I wanted to have a strong faith.

With my feeble, tenuous faith (decimated by the lack of divine interaction as a teen, and withered through the subsequent years of malnourishment), I picked up the Bible again.  Skeptically hopeful.  Starting with Genesis, chapter one.

By the time I reached the story of the Tower of Babel, my skeptical side was amazed, while my faithful side became ever more desperate.  I had started to forget all of the important details of what I had just read, so I started from the beginning again; this time writing summaries for each chapter.

(I tried to only summarize what exactly was written, while keeping my skeptical comments separate.  Those summaries I would eventually share so that anyone could read the story of the Bible quickly.)

For my skeptical side, it seemed like the evidence against faith added up steadily and consistently as I continued to read the Bible.  As I enter into studying the New Testament now, that trend has not changed.

For my faithful side, the losses came in discreet blows.  Passages like the near-sacrifice of Isaac, the passages which seemed to boldly contradict everything I had ever been told about God, evoked a deep, visceral reaction as if my very soul had been stabbed.  Observing how God enacted a world-wide famine to result in the enslavement of the Israelites just so that He could free them 400 years later...  Seeing God almost take the life of a baby due to the matter of circumcision...  Reading how God toyed with the Egyptians, manipulating the free will of the Pharaoh, just so that He could provide a grand spectacle...  Etc...  Etc...

My soul died.  Hemorrhaging from so many shattered beliefs, it could not survive.  My desire for it to live, alone, was not enough to preserve it.

I thought back to my teen years, when I had picked up the Bible and had read some of those very same passages.  They had seemed odd to me back then, but not wrong.  Not abhorrently, morally wrong.  Why?  I'm not sure.  It could be that back then I thought that God was my friend.  Every good friend has faults you are able to overlook in the name of love.

Communionus Interruptus

The next installment of my deconversion... 

The fever of my renewed piety had died down after months of waiting for a sign from God on what He would have me do.  I felt rejected, for a little while.  My prayer stopped.  My Bible study stopped.  I just couldn't understand what was going on; why God wouldn't want to guide me or even talk to me.  It was a blow to my self-esteem, which wasn't really that high in high school anyway.

Eventually, over a period of weeks, I realigned my perspective into thinking that maybe, even though I had been ready for God, maybe God wasn't ready for me yet.  Perhaps God had plans for me, but they were just further down the road.

However, this was also when cognitive dissonance entered the picture, because that divine silence planted the seed of doubt within me.  Realizing how easy it was to deceive yourself with the discernment of spiritual matters, I began to wonder if anyone really heard from God, or if God even existed.  These were just brief, passing thoughts at the time.  The truth was that I still very much wanted to believe, so I clung to my faith even while doubt germinated.

On the order of a few months later, I started to date the woman who would become my first wife.  She and her family were Catholic.  I remember one of the first times that I entered her room, in her parent's house, how there was a crucifix nailed above her bed, and a couple of teen devotional books, including If the Devil Made You Do It, You Blew It.  The budding skeptic in me said, "oh boy, I wonder what I'm getting into here."  Meanwhile my pious, optimistic remnant said "hmmm, I wonder if Catholics have a better way of approaching and worshiping God, a way which does more than my failed attempts?"

It turned out that she was not exactly a devout Catholic, in many senses.  Yet, on some rare occasions, typically one of the big holidays like Easter, we would go to Mass with the rest of the family.

The Mass experience was quite bizarre to me.  The holy water at the entrance, there to dip your fingers and make a sign of the cross and give a slight kneel/bow upon entering.  The burning incense.  The large number of responsive prayers, where the entire congregation talks back to the priest with a preordained script.  The kneeling.  The standing.  The kneeling.  The sitting.  The kneeling.

Aside from all of the pomp and circumcision ;-), the main part of the Mass resembled the Methodist sermons I had been raised on.  After enough visits there, I became comfortable.  It turns out that that was a big mistake...

The last visit which we made to the Catholic church that I can remember, I can remember one part of it quite well; the Communion.  Up until then, I had stayed in the pew during Communions at the Catholic church.  Partly this was due to my skepticism, but another part was just being unfamiliar with how the Catholics ran things.  However, with enough experience now under my belt, I thought I could participate.  I didn't know exactly what to do in front of the priest, but I thought I could cheat off of the guy in front of me, so to speak, and see what he did and said.  Perhaps, with a little grace from the priest, it would all work out right.

More importantly, I would have a sanctified piece of the body of Christ within me.  I thought that maybe that would help get things moving in the right direction spiritually.

Unfortunately, the layout of the reception line did not permit me to mimic the guy in front of me, because I didn't have a clear view, and I was not close enough to hear.  All I was able to discern is that he knelt and opened his mouth.  But so what?  How hard could accepting a Communion wafer be?

I walked up the to priest and knelt before him.  I opened my mouth.  The priest set the wafer in my mouth.  I got up, and I started walking back to my pew, while chewing and swallowing the rather-bland bread-product.

Apparently, I didn't say the right secret words, or give the appropriate gestures, because about half way back up to my row of pews I felt a tap on my shoulder.  I spun around and, surprise!  It was the priest!  He stopped the entire Communion procession to chase me down and confront me.

"What did you do with the Host?" he demanded.

"Um, I ate it." I replied meekly, still in shock.

He turned around, obviously disgruntled, and continued the Communion service.

Meanwhile, my cheeks as red as a Cardinal's gown, I headed back to my seat.

My mind was racing.  What did I do?  What didn't I do?  Could he sense that I was different?  Could he sense that I had some doubt in me?  Was it simply a matter of broken protocol which caused this priest to chase me down?  Was the priest just a perfectionist?  Did I forget to say thank you?  WHAT JUST HAPPENED?  Even my Catholic in-laws were in shock and disbelief at what had occurred.


I didn't feel any different after eating the body of Christ, at least not from that wafer.  The events surrounding its consumption, on the other hand, did make me feel a bit different.  It nagged at me.  Not from a spiritual sense, but just trying to make sense of that behavior, which was just about a polar opposite as I would have expected from a church leader.  It wasn't until years later in my second round of Bible studies that I came across the answer.  In my layman explanation:  The Catholic church holds very high regard for the Communion wafer being truly, not metaphorically, the body of Jesus Christ, and they only share the good stuff with fellow Catholics, Catholics who know what to do and what to say.  And they have Biblical reasons for taking that stance.


As time passed, hope dwindled, but still existed.  Skepticism also became stagnant.  I was just waiting around for something to happen, something to show me the way.

Looking for Jesus

Once upon a time, I was working at an industrial plant in Texas during a maintenance outage.  Around a hundred contractors worked on completely disassembling large pieces of machinery.  Parts were cleaned or replaced as necessary to ensure reliability.  One particular worker there had an incredible religious experience during the outage.

A man was working on sand-blasting hard-water scale off of some nuts when he saw a vision.  On one particular nut, the image of Jesus Christ was made manifest almost immediately after applying the jet of sand.  Elated and awestruck, he stopped his work and immediately started sharing the miraculous apparition with everyone.

That's the actual nut in the photo!  Do you see Jesus?  Yeah, neither do I.  I can kind of make out a face, maybe even a little like Tom Selleck, but if that is the best the Creator of the universe and master of all matter can do to show His face, I'm not impressed.

If God did go around putting the image of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, on nuts, or toast, or fountain water-stains, it would be weird, and more than a little creepy.  You'd have to examine your bumper after every drive for bug guts in the shape of a crucifix for a sign from God.

Millions of Christians claim to hear from God, but not in picture form.  Thankfully, it appears that relatively few Christians claim to hear God speaking literally.  Instead, in our time, the normal way to "hear" from God seems to be to discern it from emotions they feel or events which occur.  Discernment can be a real problem.

God, in most common reference, provides these messages invisibly.  If there was some invisible phenomenon which moved air from one place to another, and rustled grass and leaves, but was not wind, how could you discern it from wind itself?  Is it just when the air moves in a favorable direction?

If you believe that God controls everything, then anything could be interpreted as a message from God.  Even the weather, which affects everyone regardless of faith, you can see as a personal sign from God.  My older sister appears to have this perspective, as she has said (paraphrased) things such as "God did not want me to take my children to the park today because it rained." 

As a teenager, I had the idea which seems most popular, that God lets most events play out however they will (because He knows the will ultimately end the way He wants), but occasionally does step in to tweak the events or send messages.  I had believed that Jesus/God would step in and provide healings.  I had believed that God would answer prayers.  I had believed that God would place things on our hearts and in our minds.  I didn't know exactly how it happened, but I wanted to know.

You see, as a teenager, I was a budding skeptic.  I was not at all skeptical about Christianity at that time, as a whole.  (The time I am focusing on here, specifically, is during my pious revival mentioned in my last post.)  Yet while the months went by, waiting to hear from God, I thought seriously to myself:  "When I hear from God, how will I know it is really a message from Him?"  This got the gears of my skeptical brain working.

Even at that age, I had come to realize that self-deception was pretty easy.  I had the sense that if I forced myself to look for Jesus in everything, I was sure to find what I thought was Him, but not necessarily the real thing, such as the bolt up above or this recent tale about a guy who thought God had saved him during a trench collapse.

Besides self-deception, I also thought Satan may be out there, lurking around, ready to misdirect me too.  This would have been a perfect opportunity for him, too, given that I was so inexperienced in the faith.  He could have lead me down a path I thought was right because it felt right, but turned out to be all wrong.  I had to be on guard.

That sobering thought reminded me, too, that a message from God may not be telling me to do something that I wanted to do.  In fact, it could be quite the opposite, because it was to be His will, not my own.

With all of these possible snags waiting to catch me, waiting to lead me astray, I got nervous for a while.  I was afraid I might miss the message God gave to me because I was being too guarded, too cautious to make sure it was a real message.  However, this nervousness soon passed.  I knew that God knew my thoughts and my heart, and I knew that God was God.  God could figure out a way to make the message incontrovertibly clear.  At least, that's what I thought.

So I waited.  Listening.  Watching.  Patiently.

Several months went by.  No contact.  No message.  So, slowly, my teenage mind got distracted by other things as my passion for God burnt down to a few glowing embers.  Even with those few, meager embers, I kept the heat of hope alight thinking that God would call me when He needed me.

About a Girl

When I was in high school, I got into a relationship with an older woman.  How much older?  I don't know, for sure.  I was (partially) a gentleman, so I didn't ask.  She was probably in her upper 20's or lower 30's, while I was just 16.  My teenage ego was at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

You've got to understand that I was far from being a Casanova in high school, or really anytime for that matter.  She was one of only two girlfriends I had in high school; the first one.  But using the term "girlfriend" to describe what happened probably isn't accurate.

The relationship started as co-workers in a restaurant, and took the next step with me providing private math tutoring at her apartment.  She was going to the local community college.  Why the late college start?  Well, I was a little slow to put it together, but I think it was kind of a big break-up, re-invent herself, rebound thing.  I was probably a rebound thing too, but I digress.

I know this is somewhat of a teaser, but I'm not going to divulge the details of the fling.  I'll just sum it up with the fact that I was (thankfully) too shy, inexperienced, and flat-out immature to take full advantage of what would have probably been a big mistake.  The relationship fizzled out before any real damage was done.

Anyway, part of that relationship involved me trying to spend any time I could with her.  She was a Christian, and a regular at her church.  So that meant that I escorted her to church several Sundays.

Her church was different.  It was non-denominational, and it was my first exposure to a non-Methodist church.  To me, for the brief time I attended, it sounded just like a Methodist church, but it looked completely different.  Specifically, there was no Christian iconography.  No crucifix or cross hung prominently behind the preacher.  No stained-glass window adorned the building.  If it wasn't for the pew-style seating, it could have easily been mistaken for just some generic meeting center.

Around the time before this woman, I had put my faith on a shelf.  I didn't go to church.  I still believed in God, but there was nothing about me or my actions which would have given that impression.

Then, there I was again, going to church.  Some might say it was God leading me back into His fold.  I would say it was just me, tempted by having a beautiful, mature woman on my arm, but that was not all.

In the back of my mind, going to church was one of those things I should be doing anyway, but wasn't.  Also in the back of my mind was the haunting question:  Why have I never felt God's presence or heard from Him?  So this church-going revived my thirst to know God.  It took on a significance well beyond this girl.

I started reading the Bible by myself for the first time in my entire life.  Starting with Genesis.  And I started taking hand-written notes; notes which would later serve as the impetus for my Bible summary on my other blog when I came across them about twelve years later.  While I read on in Genesis, there were some things which disturbed me a little bit, but not to the point of shaking my faith at all.  The weight of my faith was based largely on what I had learned of God in church and youth group, which was almost exclusively New Testament based.  The image provided to me was so good that the minor snags I found in my reading were as easy to dismiss as are the idiosyncrasies of dear friends.

I also started praying, which was the first time doing so in a mature fashion.  As a kid, I would pray to God to help me find my lost wallet, but during this personal revival, I was far less trivial.  The maturity of my heart for God far exceeded my knowledge of Scripture, and exceeded the maturity in any other aspect of my life at that point.  I was praying for the healing and good will for other people.  I was praying for God to use me in any way which He saw fit.

But I still wasn't hearing from Him or noticing any discernible signs of divine favor or involvement in my life.  There was no Holy guidance to direct me in God's will.

I began to reflect upon myself to discover what I may be doing which was hindering my relationship with God.  I began to be as upright as I could, changing habits which might be objectionable.  I thought back about my many sins committed that far, and I prayed prayers of repentance.  I remember around that time, Lent was getting ready to begin, and so I chose to give up listening to heavy metal music for Lent, thinking that perhaps that was somehow preventing an interface with God.  (Not being Catholic or knowing much of anything about Catholicism at that time, I just knew Lent was a time to give up something you enjoyed in order to get closer to God.)  I started listening to any sermons I could find on the radio to supplement my church learning.

Still nothing.  Still nothing.

I held out hope.  Someday, God would guide me, when the time is right.  Someday I'd know.  But without any divine guidance, my pious passion eroded away over time.  Hope was still there, but the passion was gone.  I was waiting.  Indefinitely.

Many years later, when I would pick up the Bible again to study it, I mused to myself, wondering if, with just a little divine encouragement, if Abel would not have been killed, like my faith.

Indoctrination in Vanilla

It was like being born a citizen.  I was an American before I had an appreciation for what the United States of America was as a country.  I was a Christian long before I understood what Christianity was about.

My own story of the beginning of my faith was so bland that I have great difficulty remembering details.

My parents shuffled me off to Sunday School while they attended the real sermon.  There, I learned how Jesus loves all the little children, yes, all the children of the world.  Cartoon pictures of Noah and David decorated the cinder block walls.  Cartoon versions of Biblical stories told to us, like how David, just a mere young boy, bravely stood up against the evil, giant Goliath, and killed him with God's help.  (They left off the part about the subsequent decapitation, as they did with any of the less-kid-friendly details from other stories.)

It was, for all intents and purposes, a real school without exams.  The stories which we were told were presented as fact, just like an History class.  That's not to say I would expect anything different, but just to point out that there was no deep thought involved.  There was no reason.  There was only the way it was.  And I just soaked it up without question.  Indoctrinated.  Christian.

I can't remember the precise age, maybe 10(?), but at some point I was deemed old enough to go through the Methodist Church Confirmation program.  It was to be a confirmation that I was actually in the faith, that I was indeed a Christian.  The program took the cartoon concepts presented in early Sunday School and, well, made them less cartoon like.  But just a little.  Still in two-dimensions, the concepts of Salvation and (the only alternative) damnation were sketched out on a foundation of sin.  God's love would save us.  Jesus would save us.  Make that:  Jesus had already saved us.

To this day I can't tell you what version of damnation they had preached to me at that time.  I thought I was already a Christian, and all the people I knew were too, so I didn't worry about it.  Also, I was pretty self-centered, even more than I am now.  ;-)

This program, too, was just another form of school.  The trouble is that I was a pretty smart kid with a wealth of laziness.  When you are "blessed" with that gift, a structured teaching pace can be unbearably slow.  So just like in real school, I would pay attention just long enough to get the gist of what the teacher was saying, and then completely zone out in daydreams.  The Confirmation program did have tests of sorts, and I paid attention just enough to pass them.  That's probably why I barely remember anything from the program.

Anyway, graduation day came, and I was confirmed in front of the entire congregation.  The whole class was paraded up front, where we each read a verse out of the Bible.  Voilà.  We were proclaimed Christians.  Our parents were happy.  I didn't feel any different.  I mean, I thought I already was a Christian.  To me, it wasn't a faith; it was a status, or identity.  It wasn't something you earned, it was something you were.  The pomp seemed a bit unnecessary.

However, now that I was a true Christian in the eyes of the church, from then on I attended the regular sermons with my parents.  Physically I attended, that is.  Mentally I was off in a different world.

Our church didn't have an energetic preacher.  Fire and brimstone was rarely in the forecast.  Nobody jumped up and yelled "PRAISE THE LORD!"  Nobody spoke in tongues.  Nobody got healed.  Nobody prophesied.  Nobody stood up and waved their arms back and forth with hands uplifted as if receiving invisible ray beams of love-energy from the God in the sky above.

There was no show.  There was only worship and psalms.  Reverent, quiet worship.  And daydreaming.  And the occasional nap.

It would take a special girl for me to start pondering my Christianity more deeply, but that's a story for another time...

Christmas Love

Sorry about breaking out the guy in the red suit so early this year.  Seems to get earlier and earlier.  Half a century from now, people will be giving up Christmas cookies for Lent.  But I digress...

I have a confession to make:  I never loved Santa.  Don't get me wrong here.  I loved to get presents.  I certainly appreciated the big guy stopping by with a stash of toys, but I didn't love him.

That's not to say that I had something against him either.  I wasn't creeped out by the thought of him omnisciently watching over me.  After all, that's what God was doing too.  Nor was I scared that he could enter into everyone's houses in the middle of the night without waking anyone up.  Nope.  My parents didn't have a problem with it, so why should I?

I simply just didn't love Santa.  I didn't love Santa, because I didn't have a relationship with Santa.  He sneaked in, dropped off the gifts, and covertly left.  Our family didn't even leave milk and cookies out for him.  I never wrote him letters telling him what I wanted, and I never wrote him letters to thank him for the gifts.  He never wrote me letters either.  I didn't know how to use a phone to call anyone, but he never called me.

Santa was a stranger; a very generous stranger, mind you, but a stranger none-the-less.

This created a rather strange dynamic.  Someone I didn't know stopped by reliably once a year to shower me with gifts in secrecy, without any kind of relationship or return of gratitude.  And he did this with all the kids I knew!  With that kind of consistency, the endorsement of my parents, and the abundance of evidence, I had to accept that it was normal behavior for his special case.

Oh, it was a very beneficial system, but it was hollow.  There was no relationship and no love, so there was no real meaning, aside from knowing that I would get new toys every year.

I don't really remember when I stopped believing in Santa.  There was not an eureka moment.  I think it was a combination of overhearing conversations, leaked information on TV, and recognizing the handwriting on the gift tags.

It wasn't earth-shattering either.  I didn't get angry at my parents for lying to me.  In fact, to some extent it made me appreciate my parents even more because I then knew that they were the source of the gifts.

I didn't feel the need to tell my sisters, or anybody, about my discovery.  With every parent perpetuating this illusion, and every kid believing in Santa for a time, it seemed to my like a harmless right of passage.  There was no point in me spoiling the mystery for others.

You know where this is going, right?  ;-)


In my teens, as I began to develop a maturity of mind enough to explore my faith in God, love became a hanging point.  Like we find in Matthew 22:37 below, we are called to earnestly and actively love God:

Jesus replied: "‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’"  NIV

I didn't make the comparison at the time, but I was having the same issues loving God as I had with loving Santa.  I went to church, and always treated the church with a reverent respect.  I went to the youth group. I prayed from time to time.  It seemed to me as though I was putting forth an effort to be with God and talk with Him, but I never heard back in any discernible manner.

I never felt a relationship, and without a relationship, there can be no true love.  At least by my definition of love.

God, and Jesus for that matter, were like Santa, at least to me.  God was a stranger, a generous one, given the promise of an eternal blissful afterlife, but a stranger none-the-less.  Only this Stranger was demanding love.  The only evidence seemed to be that everybody around me believed in God.  There was no annual, reliable, tangible gift session to at least stoke the fire of faith.  You just had to wait it out.  You had to die to get the promised reward.  And before that, you had to love.


When I first had these kind of thoughts, about the lack of a real relationship, that wasn't enough for me to doubt my faith in God.  My parents didn't have a problem with faith, so why should I?  I just thought someday, someday I will hear from God.  I just need to be patient.  I just need to be patient.  It may take longer than a year.

Forever and a Day

I had a college professor who used to say:

"Words have meanings.  They should be used with care."

When you read something in the Bible, the Word of God, the book of Truth, you would think that they are reliable words.  True, interpretation from language to language does tend to cause some corruption to the meaning at times, but certain concepts transfer pretty readily.

Take the concept of forever, for example.  If God says that something will last forever, we should be pretty safe to assume that is synonymous with eternal, not "for a really long time" or "until the earth is replaced on Judgement Day" or "until the sun goes supernova and swallows the earth."  So when you see text like Genesis 13:15, where God gives a specific chunk of land on this specific planet to a specific group of people forever, you've got to stop and wonder how on earth that could be true.

This is especially puzzling when put in light of some of Christian eschatology which proposes that at some point in time this physical existence will cease to be.  Then, it seems, people are anxious to redefine forever.  Forever will come to an end some day, and then a new forever will begin.  It is all pretty amusing to me; the things we will believe.

If you've got some time, follow this link, which is a search on Bible Gateway for "forever."  Pretty interesting stuff...

Prayer Echos

Prayer was always a bit of a mystery to me, but especially so when I was growing up.  So when I was young, I never understood exactly how it was supposed to work.  It seems that nobody tells children the technical details about prayer is supposed to work, and that's probably a good thing for indoctrination.

Of course, when you're young, your prayers are pretty simple:  thank you God, protect my family, oh, and please get me a shiny new bicycle, the big wheel just isn't cutting it any more.  God, please help me find my wallet which I have lost for the twentieth time.  Etc.  So I would say these things and somehow know that God heard them.

Yet I wasn't insulated from the world of prayer around me, in that I heard what older people were saying.  God spoke to them.  God spoke to them!  They prayed, and they heard from God.

Why wasn't I hearing from God?  Why wasn't God speaking to me?  All those times I had prayed before, all I had ever heard was my own voice echoing in my head.

At that time, I was too young to really think about why that may be.  I was somewhat content knowing that God heard my words even if I didn't hear back from him, and somewhat distracted by the joys of being a little boy, but the question didn't go away.

In my teen years the question jumped right back in my face with a vengeance as I began to take a more adult and robust entry into the faith.  I kept trying to have a dialog with God, but it never really worked.  I would ask questions to God, and sometimes I would get responses, but those responses were little more than my own anxious mind filling in the blanks to answer my own question.

I was tempted to believe that it was God answering, but I just couldn't accept that as being the case, given that the answer always came in the same tone of inner dialog as when I would ask myself if I wanted one or two scoops of ice cream.  I expected more from God.  Something I could recognize as only His response.  Something which might just leave me trembling.  Yet all I heard were empty echos, and the sound of my own inner voice.

How about you?  What was your prayer life like when you were young, and later as an adult believer?