An Atheist’s Journey

The Jesus Christ of my generation, David Carradine, died today of an apparent suicide. Maybe David Carradine himself wasn’t Jesus Christ, but his most famous character, Kwai Chang Caine, was one of the closest characters we’ve had to a Jesus in two thousand years. Kwai Chang Caine, an outcast from his own country of China, a half-breed born of a white American father and a Chinese mother, traveled the desert of the western United States of the 1800s carrying a message of peace, tolerance, and love of life and of one’s neighbor. Hunted and persecuted for his peaceful ways and his one mistake of defending his master from a brutal attack by the Chinese emperor’s nephew, Kwai Chang Caine had a lot in common with the more commonly known Jesus, the Jesus of Nazareth.

“Kung Fu” ran from 1972-1975, before DVDs, before cable, when living in the country meant suffering through poor television reception. Yet I watched as many episodes as I could. As a high school student during those years, I came of age watching his adventures and carefully paying attention to his message and his commitment to “The Tao”, the path he chose and did not forsake.

Caine was a Shaolin priest, a monk of high training in the teachings of his masters and the fighting style of kung fu. Every episode of the television program had its obligatory two fighting scenes, but Kwai Chang never wanted to fight and only did so to protect the rights of others, or to defend himself from evil men bent on killing him. A Shaolin priest could walk through walls, it was said, yet Caine was “just a man” as he insisted with unequaled humility. He was not familiar with the Christian Bible, as we learned in “The Tong”, my favorite episode from Season 2, but he recited quotes from famous Chinese Buddhists and other philosophers of his era. For example, Caine said, “Yield and overcome,” to the Christian woman who had quoted the passage from the Bible about turning the other cheek.

I dreamed of joining a Shaolin monastery and learning kung fu, but it wasn’t until years later that I realized that I *had* been trained in the monastery every week for the three years that the series ran. From Kwai Chang Caine I learned patience, determination, tolerance, and a philosophical world view.

David Carradine became a cult hero to a whole generation of boys like me. Martial arts schools exploded onto the scene in the 1970s, and are still a rage today. I studied martial arts for one year as an adult. Two of my brothers went further, one even competing at the national level in the 1980s. “Kung Fu” had a huge impact on me personally and on an entire generation.

If the Jesus of Nazareth was anything like the character of Kwai Chang Caine, in temperament, spirituality, strength of character, and the struggles he lived through, then it is no wonder that Christianity caught on. I mean no disrespect to Jesus of Nazareth to compare Him with Kwai Chang Caine, and I hope no offense will be taken by the reader.

The passing of David Carradine will be felt, quietly, privately, by many who will miss their own personal Jesus.

In a comment on my last blog post on miracles, the commenter, Stephen Parrish, wrote the following:

What is the common ground between the occurrence and the impossibility of miracles?  If a religion were based on the flatness of the Earth, or the geocentric theory, would you seek common ground with its followers?

You’re trying to find a path to something you don’t believe exists.  I don’t get it.

The issue is important enough that I want to devote an entire blog post to it.

I want to emphasize that I appreciate Mr. Parrish’s comment.  Comments such as his are exactly the kind of comments I seek from readers.  If everyone agreed with me, then this blogging would get very boring very quickly.  And in the spirit of finding common ground, I want to avoid the temptation of engaging in counterattack.  So I will use a parable (something I’m borrowing from the bible, by the way).

Let’s assume that there are flat earth believers and that we disagree with them, in particular we believe in a spherical earth revolving around the sun.  (Call us the “copernicans”, after Copernicus the scientist who gave us the current heliocentric view of the solar system, which by the way isn’t exactly correct either, given our solar system’s trajectory about the galaxy; but anyway…)

I argue that we should want to find a common ground between the flat-earth believers and the copernicans.

What is the alternative to finding a common ground?  Well, we could kill them all, and that would solve the problem of our differences.  But maybe they outnumber us significantly and would fight back.  Okay, then maybe we can wait until they all die off, perhaps a generation or two.  But they teach their children that the earth is flat, and so, as a culture, they’re not likely to die off.  Okay, maybe we can educate them in our public schools, or unleash people like Carl Sagan on them.  But we find that that doesn’t work.  We’ve aimed our telescopes skyward and have “proven” that the earth isn’t flat, and we’ve written books detailing those proofs, and Carl Sagan said, “billions and billions,” so many times that he was hoarse, but still they believe that the earth is flat.  We can write a zillion books on the subject, teach the heliocentric theory in our schools, and the flat earth believers will simply home-school their children.  They congregate in their flat earth buildings with their steeples.  And then we learn that they are plotting to do away with the non-believers, the copernicans!

We have failed miserably.

Who wins in the end?  Some might say that the truth will win out, that whoever holds the correct view will emerge as the winner.  I wonder whether that is really true.  People believe what they want to believe, sometimes irrespective of the truth.  And in any case, it could take a thousand years.

I argue that we must find a common ground with the flat earth believers.  Maybe there’s something good about believing in a flat earth.  The earth is locally flat anyway, right?  Maybe there’s a value in seeing the earth as flat.  Maybe in finding a common ground, we can overlook the superficial differences between us and rejoice in something higher.  I’m not sure what that is right now, but maybe it’s LOVE.

How can we love each other if we are hating each other’s beliefs?  Maybe LOVE is a good enough reason to overlook the details of each other’s beliefs as we move toward that common ground.

Why attempt to find a common ground?  Ultimately, we must find a common ground because there is value in each side’s position, and because, as a civilization, we cannot survive if either side is erradicated.  Science serves a useful purpose, and so does religion.  So rather than continue sniping back and forth, let’s figure out how to come together.

Who am I, and what do I stand for?  I’m a scientist and a mathematician.  I teach math at a community college.  I have a PhD in a scientific discipline, with a strong background in math and physics.

I seek to understand the universe in scientific terms.  Because of my background, I do not believe that a personal, omniscient, omnipotent, God exists.

However, I want to be very clear that I’m NOT anti-religion.  I disagree with atheists who would eliminate religion.

Why do I support religion and religious thinking?

The short answer: Because I think there’s something necessary to human civilization that religion provides, that without it we risk our own destruction.  And until we understand what that something is, we must be very careful about eliminating religion.

Religion is in trouble in western culture.  Religious peoples in the west are in a battle for their cultural survival.  Left unchecked, the advancement of science will totally destroy religion.  I have seen it in myself, and I understand how the psychology of scientific thinking dismembers and crushes religious impulses.  I have somehow found the strength to withstand the final annihilation of the religious impulse within me, but the atheistic army marches forward with great success.

It’s a battle between theism and atheism, and I stand in the middle, now unwilling to take sides.

I have been on both sides of the fence.  For the first 10-12 years of my life, I believed wholeheartedly in God.  I wanted to be a Catholic priest.  I attended Catholic grade school.  Then I discovered science.  I looked up at the night sky and decided that there was no room for God in the universe, that God was not necessary for its functioning or for our understanding of the universe.

But in the intervening years, I have come around to the idea that liberal thinking, often synonymous with life without God, presents a huge risk to our culture.  As a civilization, we are at that point when our tools and weapons are far more powerful than our moral skills.  In our hands we hold the means of our destruction, and we don’t know what to do.

Some would argue that it is the great religions of the world themselves, embodied by such people as George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden, that present the risk, that liberals are peaceful people and wouldn’t hurt a flea.  There is some truth in this view, but it ignores the terrible moral relativism that liberals advocate.  There is a price to pay for liberalism, paid by the people who commit suicide, paid by the homeless, paid by the single mothers, paid in the form of the stark loneliness of the disconnected in our vast society.  I’m one of those disconnected, even surrounded as I am by friends.  I find myself contemplating suicide on a daily basis.  Why?  Because I don’t know why I’m here.

It is an oversimplification to say that Christians are conservative and atheists are liberal.  And anyway I don’t think that it boils down to liberal versus conservative.  I DON’T know what it boils down to.  But I do know that there is something of value in religion, in the bible, even in the tele-evangelists who unscrupulously profit from people’s need of religion.  I don’t know what it is, but I want to explore and find out.

I’m open to anything in this search.  Maybe I will come to believe in God, though I think that if that happens too easily, then I will have failed.  I believe that I serve a useful purpose by being in the middle, a sympathetic atheist in search of what “God” can offer Man, that to convert too quickly (should that be my eventual fate) would do a dis-service to the needs of Christians and atheists alike.

I challenge both to look at the other and ask, “Why?  Why are you the way you are?”  And to ask this without dismissing the answer.  Because the truth is in the answer, even if we don’t yet understand what that answer looks like.

I once took the following oath: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man nor ask another man to live for mine.” The oath was a line from the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn (rhymes with “mine”) Rand.  It’s the oath that one must swear by in the novel in order to gain entry to the secret valley (heaven?).  By swearing this oath one affirmed that he would live his life according to the principles of “rational self-interest,” i.e., for his own selfish purpose.  Seven of us high school students took the oath.  That oath came to define my relationships and my life for years to come.

Ayn Rand was an atheist.  Her novels could be regarded as atheist manifestos, revealing what a world without God, what individuals without God, could look like.  And I bought into the vision of such a world and such a person.  For Rand (permit me to paraphrase and summarize, as I have read all of her fiction and nonfiction books), God is a figment of Man’s imagination, the result of Man’s irrational superstition and fear, his lowest vision of himself (weak and dependent) in the face of an irrational and inexplicable universe.  For Rand, the theist (a believer in God) was at the same level as the scummiest politicians who line their own pockets with money stolen from citizens.

I was a Randian, a follower of Ayn Rand, until one day in college when I met Burt, a PhD student in computer science, who patiently explained to me the flaws in Randianism.  At the top of Burt’s list of flaws of Randianism was that Rand and her movement were dogmatic.

After much “soul”-searching, I realized that Burt was right!  The charge might have been hard to prove from Rand’s fiction writing alone (not so with her nonfiction).  But in her public life, Rand was known to be merciless with interviewers, publishers, critics, and anyone else who crossed her path.  Even among her followers she allowed no questioning, no doubt, no interpretation that was not sanctioned by the hierarchy of the Objectivist movement (the philosophical movement that she founded and led based on her brand of atheism and metaphysics).  She was an angry woman, unforgiving and intolerant.  While her novels are still popular and command a cult following, I’m sure she would hold most of her readers in low regard.

But dogmatism was for me also a primary criticism of Christianity.  There are probably as many Christian dogmas as there are Christians.  Christians hold dogmatic beliefs of many bizarre and unprovable notions, from the likes of purgatory, to God’s infinite power, to original sin, to my sinfulness for being an atheist (wouldn’t God be more forgiving?), to the primacy of Christianity over other religions, to all the rituals, and on and on.  If you find yourself on the wrong side of a discussion on any of these points with a dogmatic Christian, you risk ostracism or worse.

So I found myself between two worlds, the dogmatic theistic world of Christianity and the dogmatic atheistic world envisioned by Rand.  Thus began my search for meaning in life and for a possible role for spirit or the divine in my corporeal existence on this planet.

If I seem conflicted, or contradictory, or indecisive, or unwilling to commit, then maybe it’s just my unwillingness to become dogmatic.  When it comes to religion, I don’t want to “finally have all the answers”, because that would mean I had finally settled into that dogmatic mode that I hate so much.

Like most churches nowadays, Journey IFC encourages hugging between its members.  Rick the minister will say, “Find somebody you don’t know and make them feel welcome,” and then the congregation will scatter and the hugging will commence.  Hugging strangers, and even friends, has always made me uncomfortable.

As a kid in the Catholic Church, I remember the introduction of the tradition of turning to your neighbor and wishing them a “Peace be with you.”  It seemed odd at the time and made me uncomfortable.  How that Church tradition got started, I’ll never know, but it probably had something to do with the liberalization of the sixties, or maybe something to do with Vatican II.  Even acknowledging your neighbor and opening your mouth to speak in the sacred church seemed like a sacrilege.

And touching in church, whether it be a handshake or a hug, seemed unnatural.

My parents didn’t hug me as a child.  Anyway, not that I remember.  I was the oldest of four boys, and it was all my parents could do to keep us from killing each other.  Affection didn’t exist.  Even into college and beyond, the concept of hugging someone who wasn’t my sexual partner seemed weird.  Later, I learned (through the movies or television perhaps) that hugging was permitted, even expected.  I had thought that everyone felt about hugging the same way I did.  Now I think maybe hugging has been around forever, and it was just my particular family that didn’t do it.

So now I attend a church that hugs.  I can sort of fake it when I hug the women.  A woman is a potential sexual partner, after all.  Peggy comes up to me and says hello, and then she gives me a big hug.  She’s a big woman anyway, and then she wraps her arms around me and squeezes tight.  “How are you?  Have you had a good week?” she will say as she crushes the breath out of me.  “Fine!” I squeak faintly, gasping for air.

Most of the other women are more reserved, if they even hug me at all, understanding that a full body hug is probably not appropriate.  Or maybe they just read my body language and back off, wondering what my problem is and why I don’t get into the religiousness of the pressing of two bodies together.

Then there’s the “man hug”.  It has become kind of a joke.  The method for hugging a man is the following:  First you lean in, hesitating a little, perhaps verbally acknowledging the awkwardness of the situation.  Then you shake hands.  As you shake his hand, you move in closer and bump your right shoulder to his right shoulder.  Now, right shoulders touching, you put your left hand on his right shoulder.

That keeps the number of points of contact at a minimum for a hug, three points.  It’s not possible for other body parts to accidently bump together with the man hug.

But Rick the minister doesn’t employ the “man hug”.  He gives a real hug, a real face-the-person-and-wrap-arms-around-them hug.  The weird thing is that I like it.  Does that make me weird?  And I reciprocate in kind.

Learning to hug strangers and friends, whether women or men, has been part of my journey to learning to love those around me.  It doesn’t seem religious to me, but I would miss it if I left the church.

————

“This morning, our pastor said, ‘Religion is Man’s search for God.  Christianity is God’s search for Man.’  I like that.  I think it’s a big part of why I dislike the term ‘religious’ and feel I must distinguish between being ‘religious’ and being a ‘Christian.’”

————

The above was written to me in an email by Melissa, a friend of mine, on a recent Sunday,  I haven’t known how to respond.  It’s one of those sophist kind of statements that sounds interesting, and may actually mean something interesting, but instead has just confused me more.

Being the sophist that I am, perhaps I can respond in kind.

Is Christianity really God’s search for Man?  And what does that mean?  If God is all-powerful, why does God need to search for Man?  I would hope that God doesn’t need to search for Man.  Man searches for God, perhaps, but the other way around?

And what about the statement that religion is Man’s search for God?  That sounds more reasonable.  But if that’s true, if religion is Man’s search for God, what is so bad about that?  In my bible study sessions, practically every Sunday Rick suggests that we are searching for God.  If finding God is so easy, then why is a whole planet searching?  And if God exists, shouldn’t a person want to find Him?  Wouldn’t God want Man to find Him?

I’m not even going to get into the whole “Science Versus Religion” debate.  Not today anyway.  I have friends (more than one) who have told me that they have seen Jesus.  I don’t discount their stories on scientific grounds.  Indeed, if there is a God, then pretty much anything is possible, and visions of any or all of the Holy Trinity will occur.

However, is a vision of God or Jesus the same thing as finding God?  What does it mean to find God?  Obviously not the same thing as locating the deity in a bounded region of space.  Do you even have to believe in God to find him?  I have a younger brother who has argued for Pantheism, the belief that everything is God.  My brother would argue that I’m God, you’re God, and that rock over there is God.  That would make God relatively easy to find.

But a pantheistic God would diminish the nature of God as understood by Christians, as I’m sure my Christian friends will not hesitate to point out to me.  Pantheism is just a confusion about the nature of matter and energy, about the universe.  If there is a God, an understanding of Him must somehow contribute to one’s life more than just labeling rocks.

If you read between the lines, you will see that my search for God isn’t going well.  Maybe I can’t claim that I’m searching for God.  I don’t believe in God.  I guess I’m searching for what the idea of God represents to those who believe in Him.  Having that idea in my mind wouldn’t be bad for an atheist, would it?

Melissa, thank you for caring about me enough to write me emails about religion, Christianity, and God.  Thank you for being patient with me.  Thank you for adding some goodness to the world.  And keep praying for me.  I don’t know how that can help me, but it can’t hurt.

You know those fish shapes that people put on their cars?  They started out simple.  Just an outline of a fish.  Sometimes there’s the fish with the cross somewhere inside the shape.  Then the atheists got involved and came up with contrarian designs.  I think the first was the word “Darwin” in the shape of a fish.  And then “Truth”.

Then the believers fought back.  There was the big fish eating the little Darwin.  And the word “Truth” in the shape of a fish eating the Darwin fish.

But the atheists have been prolific in the religious fish wars.  Now there is Darwin fish eating the fish with the cross.  And on and on.

Before the fish wars, when a fish was still an unambiguous Christian symbol, I bought a used Mazda that had a fish on the back end.  Lynn, my girlfriend from 1992 to 1995, and I bought the Mazda for our move to Boston for graduate school.  We both were a little uncomfortable with the fish because neither of us was religious.  I was an atheist.  I never really knew Lynn’s beliefs, but assumed that she was not religious.  Wouldn’t she have told me of her Christian views sometime during our four years together?

Lynn and I talked about removing the fish from the back of the car on a couple of occasions, but we decided to leave it there.  I think we both thought that it couldn’t hurt to leave it right where it was, not because of any fear of being struck by a thunderbolt if we removed it, but because people might treat us better when they saw the fish.

And on several occasions, total strangers mentioned the fish–at gasoline stops, etc.–giving us an approving expression or comment.  “It’s nice that you’re Christian,” they might say.  We never contradicted them because that was the whole point of keeping the fish, to get the nice comments and create rapport with strangers!

Lynn eventually dumped me.  It’s complicated, and I won’t go into it here, except to say that she wanted children and I couldn’t give her children.  There’s probably a religious connection there which I’ll explore later.

Before she left, I sold her the Mazda with the fish.  I didn’t need a car in Boston.

Years later I had occasion to communicate with Lynn.  She had become a born-again Christian.  How could that have happened?  What crisis had struck her?  Was she always a Christian and I just didn’t know it?  Had my atheism had anything to do with her conversion?  I’d love to ask her these questions and more, but she won’t talk to me.  Our brief communication was in the form of a thank you card which she sent me.  In it she said that I was in her daily prayers.  Even though I don’t understand the efficacy of prayer, the fact that she prayed for me made me feel good.

I had allowed a Christian fish symbol to remain on my automobile.  A militant atheist would have removed it, but I was no longer militant.  I allowed the fish to attract Christians into my life.  Maybe the fish had had something to do with Lynn’s conversion.  I’ll never know.

“I’m drowning here, and you’re describing the water!”

Jack Nicholson says that to Greg Kinnear in the Academy Award winning movie As Good As It Gets.  That’s how I’ve been feeling about the bible study unit on worship which is in its third or fourth week.

I’m not criticizing Rick, the minister and our bible study teacher, because he can’t possibly know what I’m missing, what my spiritual needs are.  I have great respect for him as a minister and teacher, and he has taught me a lot already about the bible.  He has told me that this unit is for me, and though that’s probably a bit of an exaggeration, it’s probably mostly true.  He knows that I’m an atheist and I have asked him to help me understand worship.

So far we’ve learned a number of things about worship: the history of worship; the meaning of words used to identify worship in Hebrew and Greek; rituals of the “tribe” (a word that Rick uses to express, I think, not only that we are a collection of closely connected human beings, but also still somewhat primitive in our approach to God).

The most common set of rituals we’ve studied so far surround sports, particularly football and baseball.  I’m not much of a sports fan, but that’s not my criticism of the metaphor.  I find much of value in the sports metaphor, such as discipline, goal-setting, mind-over-matter, leadership, coaching, dedication, success, reward, and many other valuable concepts.

But the rituals we have examined are the most banal and ridiculous from the sports mystique, such as “The Wave”, tailgating, wearing the team colors, “Game Day”, praying for victory, and a slew of other useless (at least to me) traditions.

I’m looking for reasons that worship of God will benefit my life, whether I believe in God or not.  What is there in this for the atheist?  If the answer is “nothing”, then I need to just go home and never come back.  But I don’t believe that’s the answer.  Faith that all this serves a secular purpose is my first step.  Maybe I’m on the wrong path by looking for a secular benefit of worship, but I doubt it.

For example, some have said that meditation can bring spiritual peace.  I don’t know what it means to be spiritual, but I can understand the need for meditation.  It relaxes the body.  It clears the mind.  It increases consciousness.  It serves to focus attention.  And a dozen other good things.  I assume that Christian worship of God accomplishes these things too, but I’m looking for something more, or else I will just meditate by myself in the privacy of my own home.

Also, I would like to believe that my Christian friends are not just wasting their time and engaging in a ridiculous ritual!

And even if one believes in God, why the Hell would God demand worship??!!  God, if he/it/whatever exists, wouldn’t need the bowing of simple humanoids to maintain his existence.  I just quietly shake my head in disbelief when I hear people say that God needs our worship.  It’s absurd.

As I walked out of bible study today, I realized the extent of the disconnect between the atheistic view of worship and that of the believer’s.  They just don’t get it, I thought.  It’s like watching a bunch of lemmings jump off a cliff.  I don’t get it.

As I said to Rick on the way out today, I have faith that this is all leading somewhere.  Perhaps I have more faith in my church and the bible than some of the so-called Christians.  I believe that there must be a rational purpose to all this.  I’m just waiting to hear it.

Jesus existed.  Why do I feel the need to state that explicitly?  I’ve never really doubted the historicity of Jesus, that he was a man and lived 2000 years ago, even that he said the things attributed to him.  I just have a bit of a problem with the part about him rising from the dead.  In any case, I want to understand him, to know what he was about and how he might impact my life.

Sometimes I wish I believed in God.  Not during hard times.  During hard times I rely, for better or worse, on my intellect.  No, I find myself wishing that I believed when I’m treated like an outcast, like someone unworthy of existence, by people I love.  If I believed in God, people would treat me like a normal human being, not the anomaly that I am.

There was a woman, Linda.  We met in a dance club in January, 1992, after DeAnn and I had broken up.  Linda had a masters degree in psychology.  She was short and wore glasses.  She had long brown hair.  She smiled at me.  We danced.  Atheists have emotions and needs and desires, and so do Christians, and we became intimate.  Not that night, but the next, and the next.  On the third morning, she asked me about my religious beliefs, and I didn’t lie to her.

It would be easy to lie about my religious beliefs, to say that I worship Christ, that the Bible is a holy book, that I want to get married in a church, all for the purpose of getting and keeping a high-quality woman.  The problem with lying, however, is that it is wrong.  Who determines what’s right and wrong?  We all do, of course.  A lie undermines trust whether you’re a Christian or an atheist, or a Budhhist, or a Muslim.  Without trust, there can be no relationship.

So I told Linda that I am an atheist.

She took it hard.  She told me that she didn’t think that we could continue dating.  I argued with her.  I said, Why should a difference of religious beliefs spell the end of a romance?  But she would have none of it.  And we went our separate ways.  For a week, anyway.  When we ran into each other in the dance club the following weekend, the spark–no, the fire–was still there.  We went back to her apartment and woke up the next morning in the same place we had been a week earlier.  We spent the weekend together.  We shared meals.  I showed her my house.  We laughed.  But by Sunday evening, a gloom settled upon us again, because I knew what she was thinking.  Then we had the argument again, the one where I said two people don’t necessarily have to have the same religious beliefs to be in love.  But we arrived at the same impasse that we’d reached the week before.

Beliefs cannot be changed just by wishing them to be different.  Beliefs, especially religious beliefs, are not like the paint on a house, that can be scraped off so that another hue can be applied.  No, a religious belief is more like the foundation of the house, or maybe the load-bearing stud walls.  They can’t be easily moved without tearing down the entire structure.  Even if I wanted to believe in God, and accept the lord Jesus Christ as my savior, it is not that easy.

Linda stared straight ahead, past me, into a grieving void.  I knew that I had to leave, never to return, for her sake if not for mine.  I gave her one last kiss, and then I walked out.  As I climbed into my car, I could hear the sound of her crying.  I drove away.

How did I, an atheist, come to attend a liberal, non-denominational church founded by Rick Diamond (who has a “Doctor of Ministry degree in Postmodern Church Leadership”)?

I first met Rick Diamond at a book signing event for one of Anne Lamott’s Christian books at Barnes and Noble.

My ex-girlfriend (and now friend) DeAnn had invited me.  I was going through a fiction writing phase and would attend book signings to support other authors and to see how the experts did it.  I had read the autobiographical part of Anne Lamott’s book “Bird By Bird” on writing and loved it, and I was curious to see what she might have to say about religion and Christianity.  DeAnn’s interest in Christianity surprised me a little.  I had known her at that point for 18 years, and religion hadn’t been a driving force in her life.  I found myself thinking that I had pushed yet another woman over the edge to Jesus-freakism (more on all the woman I’ve “converted” to Christianity in a later post).

As the people gathered for Anne Lamott’s talk, DeAnn pointed out many of her fellow churchgoers.  Of the perhaps two hundred or more people who had shown up for the signing, maybe a dozen were from DeAnn’s church.  She took me over to meet Rick, the minister.  He’s tall, dark blonde hair, glasses, bearded, scruffy, shirt untucked, a bit of a pot-belly, jovial, very friendly.  We spoke briefly.  Okay, I liked him, I thought.  But I would never see him again.

Oddly, this was a group of liberals, not something you normally associate with Christians (more about that in a future post).  Turns out I was the only right-winger in attendance.  Anne Lamott made some disparaging remarks about George W. Bush and so on and so forth about the Iraq war, and asked if there was anyone in the audience who supported Bush.  I raised my hand, fearing that I would be the only one, but knowing that I could handle it, like old times up against the Jesus freaks I argued with years before.  She was nice and didn’t crack any jokes at my expense, and that alone raised my already high level of respect for her to new heights.  Later she was friendly as she signed my copy of “Plan B” and thanked me “for being a good sport”.  She won a fan that day.

But this blog isn’t about Anne Lamott.  It’s about how I came to attend this crazy church.

DeAnn and I had dated years before (lived together, had wild and crazy times together, broke up, somehow became friends, you know the drill).  Now our friendship consisted of dinners out once a month or so, nothing too intense.  As the years passed, DeAnn became more religious.  Somewhere in the intervening years, she had found Jesus.  We have never spoken of it.  She would have answered my questions if I had asked, but I never really thought to ask.  Also, I’m not sure she would have been able to explain her conversion to me even if we’d had the conversation.  Part of our success as friends, after being lovers, was that we respected each other’s decisions, didn’t bicker, didn’t try to analyze the other, just accepted each other as we were.  So I found myself friends, again, with a Christian woman, one who didn’t want me in a romantic way.

When she invited me to attend her church, I said yes.  I was not averse to churches.  I had met Rick and was curious what all the fuss was about with this liberal church.  And I was feeling like it was time to advance my search for spirituality, or whatever the hell it was that was taking over my consciousness.  So I attended DeAnn’s church that Sunday morning, January 21, 2007.