What kind of person writes songs and poems like these?
It's a long story, and I love to tell stories. But as Lemony Snickett was fond of saying, I have to write this, but you don't have to read it. If I am boring you with this, go back to the poems and songs. Or better yet, get back to your life. What are you doing wasting time on the internet?
I was raised as a Unitarian-Universalist. My father doesn't believe in God, and my mother is a classic agnostic who doesn't believe anyone can know anything about God. When I was growing up, any time that I asked questions about God or religion or church, I would get a long lecture. My mother would answer my questions from the perspective of as many different world religions as she could, and she would always end with, "I think that your father thinks this about it... I think this...And when you grow up, you will make your own decisions about what to believe about these things." I thought about God and religion quite a bit when I was little, which probably means two or three times a month, but it seemed like a lot. I asked my friends what they believed, and I really enjoyed reading a book we had about the world's great religions. It had lots of pretty pictures.
At some point, as a teenager, it occurred to me that the word "God" was a label people put on questions when the questions got too big to answer any other way. Who made the universe? What happens to us after death? These are questions that you cannot get scientific answers for, because they are structured in such a way as to preclude scientific investigation. You could say that this is where people drag religion into the issue, or you could say what I did, that they put the "God stamp" on those areas. As I thought about it, it seemed to me that most of the things that people put the God stamp on were not issues that I cared about very much. Some people care about how the universe was made. I am completely content to enjoy it without wondering about where it came from. People turn to religion to deal with feelings of guilt, but at that stage of my life, guilt was not an issue. I knew I wasn't perfect, but I wasn't doing too badly either. I didn't know what would happen after death, but it wasn't a burning issue for me. So I asked myself whether I had a "God issue," a question that I cared about that didn't feel like it could be answered adequately without bringing God into the equation. And after thinking about this for a while, it seemed to me that my "God issue" was, "What is the purpose of my life supposed to be?"
I want to make it clear that I was not particularly filled with faith at this point. I wasn't sure there was a God, and I certainly wasn't sure what God was like, or which of the myriad things people had thought about God through the ages might be true. But it seemed to me that if I tried to answer the question, "What is the ultimate purpose of my life?" then I wasn't content with any of the answers that could be given without dragging God into the answer. I think the conclusion I came to was essentially, "I don't know if there is a God, or what God is like, but if there is one, that's what my life is supposed to be about."
I left it there. One more bout of not very profound philosophical musings by a young teenager. I don't know how much time went by, but in retrospect, I think it was not much later that I happened to be in conversation with a boy who was one of the smartest kids in my class, and one that I looked up to. He was compulsively honest, and he was also brave and kind. He watched out for other students. He wouldn't tolerate bullying. Suddenly as we were talking (I don't know how it came up), I realized that he believed that the Bible was literally true. Noah's ark, seven days of creation, the whole ball of wax. I was flabbergasted. I was shocked. "You're an intelligent person. No one believes this stuff anymore." (This was at the very beginning of the 1970's. I don't think I could have thought this today.) And that started months of long phone conversations. He demolished most of my arguments against Christianity, but I still didn't believe, and eventually I got tired of talking about it. I remember telling him that I was tired of this subject. I had thought about it all I intended to, and I was ready to move on. Maybe I would think about it again when I was about 40. That seemed safely far off.
Now it seems to me that God had other ideas. Within a few weeks, I was at a meeting of the Unitarian-Universalist youth group. Some of the other members had planned to bring a speaker, and the speaker had not been able to come, so they were running the program themselves. I was grateful for that, because I was president of the group, and was happy that we were not suddenly left with no plans. That was my first response. My next response was amazement. What were these three talking about? They were telling about something that had happened to them a few days before...They were talking about being "born again" as new Christian believers, and they were talking about exactly the same thing that my friend from school had been telling me. Inside, I groaned. "Oh, no! I'm going to have to start thinking about this again."
These three could not have been more different. One had spent his high school years running away from home and strung out on drugs. Now after becoming a Christian (not just that first meeting, but as I saw him over the next few months), his life was completely changed. He straightened out, he wasn't using drugs, and he was putting his life back together. The second boy went from being an average kid to someone who was really impressive, studying hard, running for school president. The third girl was in her first year of college. She already was pulled together, an excellent student. She didn't need God for that. But she glowed with the excitement of knowing God. In fact, her life fell apart a bit after becoming a new Christian, because her parents were pretty upset with her. Her new faith didn't fit their ideas about what she believed, so they kicked her out of the house. That scared me. If I became a Christian, what would happen to me?
As I've already shared, my parents had always told me that decisions about religion would be my own to make when I was old enough. But while I knew that this was true, I also knew that being a Bible-believing Christian was not on their short list of things that intelligent people did. However, they had raised me to follow truth. I finally came to the conclusion that even if they never accepted what I believed, I would not be going against the way that had raised me if I became a Christian because I believed that it was truth. It was still scary to think of the possibility of doing something that my parents would not be happy about.
We always spent the summers at Chautauqua. At Chautauqua, I knew I would be safe. There were lots of Christians there, but so far as I knew, none of these scary people who talked about being born again and changing your whole life. Little did I know, this was the summer that the Institution would let a minister from Campus Crusade for Christ take over the College Club. My mother suggested that I might be interested in some of their meetings at the beginning of the summer. Aaaugh! More of these crazy Christians who actually believed, who had actually experienced God changing their lives.
I was SOOO tired of thinking about this. I finally reached the point where I began to pray with all my heart, "God, if this stuff about Jesus is really true, please show me. And if not, would you make that clear so that I can go back to being a normal teenager and stop thinking about this?" And then, one night at a meeting, it was "God if this stuff about Jesus is really true, then I want in on it. All the way in. And if not..." And what changed was that I suddenly realized that I had reached a point where if I said that I did NOT believe that Jesus was God, and that he had died on the cross and risen from the dead, I would know in the depths of my heart that I was lying. Now, I know that this is a psychological phenomenon which is proof of nothing. But it was something I could not walk away from. I think I could have talked myself out of just about any vision or miracle I saw within about 24 hours. But I could not deny that I now did actually believe.
That's not a very traditional "sinner's prayer". It doesn't match much of what you are supposed to say when you become a Christian. And so, over the course of the next year, I spent a lot of time trying to make sure that I "did it right." Until I got tired of that. If I didn't become a Christian then, I surely did it later. I was 16 then. As I'm writing this, I'm 62. A lot has happened since then. Nothing, I think, more important to me. And that includes marriage, the birth of my children, the birth of my granddaughter.
My parents were wonderful about it, and I have only recently learned how much it cost them to stick by their word that it was my decision. It took me several weeks to let them know what had happened, and the fact that it took me so long to open up was hurtful to them. But they were also worried about me, because I was doing something that seemed foreign and narrow-minded and spooky. Occult, even. Maybe it seems less so now, more than 40 years later.
I've grown and changed since then. But you don't read a blog to get a memoir.
It's a long story, and I love to tell stories. But as Lemony Snickett was fond of saying, I have to write this, but you don't have to read it. If I am boring you with this, go back to the poems and songs. Or better yet, get back to your life. What are you doing wasting time on the internet?
I was raised as a Unitarian-Universalist. My father doesn't believe in God, and my mother is a classic agnostic who doesn't believe anyone can know anything about God. When I was growing up, any time that I asked questions about God or religion or church, I would get a long lecture. My mother would answer my questions from the perspective of as many different world religions as she could, and she would always end with, "I think that your father thinks this about it... I think this...And when you grow up, you will make your own decisions about what to believe about these things." I thought about God and religion quite a bit when I was little, which probably means two or three times a month, but it seemed like a lot. I asked my friends what they believed, and I really enjoyed reading a book we had about the world's great religions. It had lots of pretty pictures.
At some point, as a teenager, it occurred to me that the word "God" was a label people put on questions when the questions got too big to answer any other way. Who made the universe? What happens to us after death? These are questions that you cannot get scientific answers for, because they are structured in such a way as to preclude scientific investigation. You could say that this is where people drag religion into the issue, or you could say what I did, that they put the "God stamp" on those areas. As I thought about it, it seemed to me that most of the things that people put the God stamp on were not issues that I cared about very much. Some people care about how the universe was made. I am completely content to enjoy it without wondering about where it came from. People turn to religion to deal with feelings of guilt, but at that stage of my life, guilt was not an issue. I knew I wasn't perfect, but I wasn't doing too badly either. I didn't know what would happen after death, but it wasn't a burning issue for me. So I asked myself whether I had a "God issue," a question that I cared about that didn't feel like it could be answered adequately without bringing God into the equation. And after thinking about this for a while, it seemed to me that my "God issue" was, "What is the purpose of my life supposed to be?"
I want to make it clear that I was not particularly filled with faith at this point. I wasn't sure there was a God, and I certainly wasn't sure what God was like, or which of the myriad things people had thought about God through the ages might be true. But it seemed to me that if I tried to answer the question, "What is the ultimate purpose of my life?" then I wasn't content with any of the answers that could be given without dragging God into the answer. I think the conclusion I came to was essentially, "I don't know if there is a God, or what God is like, but if there is one, that's what my life is supposed to be about."
I left it there. One more bout of not very profound philosophical musings by a young teenager. I don't know how much time went by, but in retrospect, I think it was not much later that I happened to be in conversation with a boy who was one of the smartest kids in my class, and one that I looked up to. He was compulsively honest, and he was also brave and kind. He watched out for other students. He wouldn't tolerate bullying. Suddenly as we were talking (I don't know how it came up), I realized that he believed that the Bible was literally true. Noah's ark, seven days of creation, the whole ball of wax. I was flabbergasted. I was shocked. "You're an intelligent person. No one believes this stuff anymore." (This was at the very beginning of the 1970's. I don't think I could have thought this today.) And that started months of long phone conversations. He demolished most of my arguments against Christianity, but I still didn't believe, and eventually I got tired of talking about it. I remember telling him that I was tired of this subject. I had thought about it all I intended to, and I was ready to move on. Maybe I would think about it again when I was about 40. That seemed safely far off.
Now it seems to me that God had other ideas. Within a few weeks, I was at a meeting of the Unitarian-Universalist youth group. Some of the other members had planned to bring a speaker, and the speaker had not been able to come, so they were running the program themselves. I was grateful for that, because I was president of the group, and was happy that we were not suddenly left with no plans. That was my first response. My next response was amazement. What were these three talking about? They were telling about something that had happened to them a few days before...They were talking about being "born again" as new Christian believers, and they were talking about exactly the same thing that my friend from school had been telling me. Inside, I groaned. "Oh, no! I'm going to have to start thinking about this again."
These three could not have been more different. One had spent his high school years running away from home and strung out on drugs. Now after becoming a Christian (not just that first meeting, but as I saw him over the next few months), his life was completely changed. He straightened out, he wasn't using drugs, and he was putting his life back together. The second boy went from being an average kid to someone who was really impressive, studying hard, running for school president. The third girl was in her first year of college. She already was pulled together, an excellent student. She didn't need God for that. But she glowed with the excitement of knowing God. In fact, her life fell apart a bit after becoming a new Christian, because her parents were pretty upset with her. Her new faith didn't fit their ideas about what she believed, so they kicked her out of the house. That scared me. If I became a Christian, what would happen to me?
As I've already shared, my parents had always told me that decisions about religion would be my own to make when I was old enough. But while I knew that this was true, I also knew that being a Bible-believing Christian was not on their short list of things that intelligent people did. However, they had raised me to follow truth. I finally came to the conclusion that even if they never accepted what I believed, I would not be going against the way that had raised me if I became a Christian because I believed that it was truth. It was still scary to think of the possibility of doing something that my parents would not be happy about.
We always spent the summers at Chautauqua. At Chautauqua, I knew I would be safe. There were lots of Christians there, but so far as I knew, none of these scary people who talked about being born again and changing your whole life. Little did I know, this was the summer that the Institution would let a minister from Campus Crusade for Christ take over the College Club. My mother suggested that I might be interested in some of their meetings at the beginning of the summer. Aaaugh! More of these crazy Christians who actually believed, who had actually experienced God changing their lives.
I was SOOO tired of thinking about this. I finally reached the point where I began to pray with all my heart, "God, if this stuff about Jesus is really true, please show me. And if not, would you make that clear so that I can go back to being a normal teenager and stop thinking about this?" And then, one night at a meeting, it was "God if this stuff about Jesus is really true, then I want in on it. All the way in. And if not..." And what changed was that I suddenly realized that I had reached a point where if I said that I did NOT believe that Jesus was God, and that he had died on the cross and risen from the dead, I would know in the depths of my heart that I was lying. Now, I know that this is a psychological phenomenon which is proof of nothing. But it was something I could not walk away from. I think I could have talked myself out of just about any vision or miracle I saw within about 24 hours. But I could not deny that I now did actually believe.
That's not a very traditional "sinner's prayer". It doesn't match much of what you are supposed to say when you become a Christian. And so, over the course of the next year, I spent a lot of time trying to make sure that I "did it right." Until I got tired of that. If I didn't become a Christian then, I surely did it later. I was 16 then. As I'm writing this, I'm 62. A lot has happened since then. Nothing, I think, more important to me. And that includes marriage, the birth of my children, the birth of my granddaughter.
My parents were wonderful about it, and I have only recently learned how much it cost them to stick by their word that it was my decision. It took me several weeks to let them know what had happened, and the fact that it took me so long to open up was hurtful to them. But they were also worried about me, because I was doing something that seemed foreign and narrow-minded and spooky. Occult, even. Maybe it seems less so now, more than 40 years later.
I've grown and changed since then. But you don't read a blog to get a memoir.
My name is Rebecca Howell.
God bless you.
God bless you.
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