October 6-13, 2015

I want to share a few things about how I came to be a believer. I certainly don't do this from a desire to proselytize or a need to display my moral superiority. At the same time, in keeping with the faux modesty that infects this entry's title, I really do believe that the intellectual part of religious faith is, at best, a necessary evil. In fact, this confession comes from the heart as much as the head. All that being said, let me first apologize for any offense these words may cause; if there is one thing that remains an intensely personal experience, it is the business of finding a God. I understand that your path may not be mine. With that in mind, here are some milestones along my road.

I. In which I explain that I was never born again.

Sitting on a folding chair in the basement of the Evangelical United Brethren church where my mother sent me every school-year Sunday morning, I could not answer the altar call to let Jesus into my heart, there or ever, as it turned out.

It just seemed so intrusive, and my heart seemed not at all worthy.
After all, as the son of an atheist father and agnostic mother, how could I?

II. Thoughts on divine providence.

At the same time, I knew what Steve Sealey did to Mrs Hickey, our hapless Sunday School teacher, was wrong. As a particularly venal specimen of teenage humanity, he seemed dedicated to making her cry. Which he did, repeatedly, practically rubbing his hands together and cackling with glee while he did so.

While I did not have the bracelet to put it into words at the time, I knew that this did not fit the bill of What Would Jesus Do.

And so I floated along for all of my twenties and much of my thirties — faithless, loveless, joyless. I don't know why I dodged all those bullets — car wrecks, drug addiction, HIV. Remind me to look up divine providence.

III. In which I explain how I turned toward God.

Two things changed me, both of which happened in the early 1990's when I was not yet forty years old:

First, I read a book, of all things: A History of God by Karen Armstrong, a British nun turned scholar, and I took a course at The University of Michigan: The English Bible, which was taught by the extraordinary Ralph Williams, a scholar who applied his penetrating intellect to the collection of books that stand at the center of Western culture.

Second, I began attending Mass with Julie shortly after we became a couple. I don't remember making a conscious decision to go with her, and I know she never applied one ounce of pressure for me to come along. It was more like we were constant companions at this point, so why shouldn't I go to Mass with her?

Of these changes, I say the following:

The first conferred upon belief in God an intellectual respectability that I saw as an absolute necessity. I was going to be a lot of things in my life, but a stupid believer was not one of them.

The second had, for lack of a better way of putting it, a tactile efficacy. In the formulation of that great scholar of funk, George Clinton, having freed my mind it was time for my ass to follow.

The result of the changes was my conversion, or turning toward God.

4. IV.Poetry, not prose.
   

I know it's crazy talk, really I do.

I think I startled the woman who was leading my Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults class as I prepared to enter the Catholic Church when I said words to this effect one night. And I mean, I'll repeat what I told her at the time: the idea that Jesus Christ, a product of immaculate conception, lived a sinless life, then died on a cross, taking on the burden of all of humanity's sins and thus making it possible for all who believe in him to have eternal life, before being resurrected from the dead and rising to sit by God's right hand in heaven is absurd, simply not believable. And yet I don't just believe in that idea, I believe in its reality.

Because it's old crazy talk. And one of the things I learned in step one above is that people have been thinking about this shit for a long time. And in all their thinking they have yet to come up with any definitive answers. Just as in science, the contemporary world's anodyne to religion, there must be doubt, so it must be in any thinking person's faith.

And if it helps at all in terms of the battle between the two, I will fall back on the old saw which says science describes the world in prose while religion does so in poetry.

V. In which I explain how I felt God's infinite and unconditional love.

So go ahead, knock yourself out. It is not possible for anyone to think me more foolish than I do for daring to believe. I'm pretty much aware of how absolutely bizarre the argument above sounds. But must everything in this world yield to logic? As Poe puts it in "Sonnet —To Science," "Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart, / Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?"

If that makes me a Romantic so be it. I do know one thing, which I believe to be neither foolish nor bizarre: I have felt God's infinite and unconditional love. As surely as I sit here typing these words on my iPad (yes, with at least that level of certainty), I believe there is a God who created the universe and in a means beyond my feeble mind to comprehend, loves everything in it, including little old me.