When I was a child, I went to church every week. I was baptized Presbyterian and confirmed United Methodist, at the time both middle-of-the-road, mainline Christian denominations. Other than attending church services, we didn’t talk about religion in our house. We didn’t pray at meals; I may not have said nighttime prayers.
I am also the youngest of four children. I often say my parents were tired by the time I came along. I was left alone to figure out many things out for myself. My teeth suffered from this laissez-faire attitude, but I can see how this may have helped my spirituality.
When I was about 12, I decided religion didn’t make sense to me and I declared I wasn’t going to church anymore. My parents let me stay home, maybe because they were tired of fighting with their kids. Had they made me go, I may have resented it far more than any good I may have gotten from it.
I stayed away from church until I got into high school and reconnected with someone I had known from our church’s children’s choir. She was active at church and pulled me into the youth fellowship group. The young associate pastor put me under his wing and it was through him that I started to understand what faith meant. There was little dogma in my church, most of the talk was about love and understanding. No talk about hell, sin, or damnation.
Who is going to hell???
My first exposure to more conservative Christianity happened when I was in college at Virginia Tech. I was curious about the Bible and took a Bible as Literature class the spring semester of my freshman year. Towards the end of the semester, a student evangelizer started making the rounds of our dorm. She went from room to room in the evening trying to … I’m not sure what … convert people to Christianity?
She had been at a friend’s room down the hall the night before, so my roommate Gail and I knew we were probably going to be visited that night. Our friend was Catholic and was very upset after the evangelizer told her that Catholics weren’t Christians and she was going to Hell unless she converted.
A cheery message indeed.
Gail and I were ready for the visit. Fresh off my exploration of the Gospels from my Bible as Literature class, I confronted the evangelizer with my understanding of the differences between the Gospels. How could she be so certain she was right when there were so many contradictions in the Bible itself? She doubled-down on statements of her faith without trying to counter my arguments. She said, “I’ll pray for you” as she left in a way that didn’t seem sincere or loving.
Explaining the unexplainable
I was confused. This was my first experience with evangelism, and I didn’t understand it at all. This was in the early 1980s, so we couldn’t turn to the internet for information (or misinformation). Gail and I made an appointment to speak with the pastor of the local United Methodist church. The two of us sat in his office on a spring day, with the sun shining and a blooming tree outside the window, trying to understand this evangelism thing.
We heard that some believed in “being saved,” and that only Christians can get into heaven. We asked the normal questions: What about people who’ve never heard about Jesus? What about babies who die before saying, “I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior”?
I don’t remember what the minister said he believed. I do remember leaving there with my mind, heart, and soul convinced:
If God excludes anyone from heaven, that’s not a God I want to worship.
Even at age 18 I knew one thing for certain: I don’t know all the mysteries of the universe. I don’t even know the breadth and depth of all I don’t know.
The God I worship accepts everyone
Then I examined my new conviction. Can I live with this belief? I was happy to believe heaven (at whatever conception of heaven I had at the time) was open to everyone. Having experienced the pain of exclusion and rejection in my young life, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone in this life or the next.
I asked myself, “What if I’m wrong?” I decided that if I’m wrong, I would be extremely disappointed in God. This exclusionary heaven is not where I’d want to spend eternity anyway.
This belief – that heaven awaits all of us – has evolved slightly over the years, especially as I had spiritual experiences that let me glimpse beyond the veil. The words I use are different now – Spirit, the Universe, that which is Transcendent – instead of naming the eternal “God”. The essence of love is deeper and richer than I understood at 18 years of age.
Being certain of that which is unknowable
I said in my post last week I often evaluate spiritual beliefs with two questions:
how does this spiritual belief help this person?
does this spiritual belief hurt anyone else?
I have seen the benefit of spiritual certainty in people’s lives, providing structure and often providing rules for living. Within that structure, the person is free to grow, learn, and love. Certainty can be steadying, providing stability in an unstable world.
I struggle when the certainty of someone’s spiritual belief system leaves room for no other way of understanding - and being accepted - by the Divine.
This is still one of my growing edges. How can I say I am open to all belief systems when I push against those who feel there is only one path to the Divine, one way of understanding that which is Transcendent?
This sense of certainty does not apply only to the religious. I’ve seen it numerous times in the spiritual-but-not-religious crowd and in atheists. What is held to be absolute truth is different, but the fervor of belief is the same.
So, to be honest, my “openness” only stretches as far as the intersection of someone’s certainty and how that certainty impacts their interactions with others.
I’m okay with whatever you believe, as long as these beliefs are life-giving for you.
But when you tell me what to do, how to think, what to feel? No. Full stop. Never okay with that.
My parents would be shocked if I were.
I've been having an ongoing discussion with one of our Deacons in the Catholic Diocese of Richmond. We have a respectful dialog, but it continues to amaze me how he thinks that the Church knows everything about what God says and that there is no room for revelation, the Holy Spirit or personal informed conscience. I, like you, don't believe in a God who would exclude someone from Heaven, especially for someone God created from birth.
I find it amusing that most churches believe that God is bigger than anything we can imagine, but then they turn around and build a box that God should fit in. They define God as only male when there many feminine references in scripture to God. There are many places where God demonstrates miracles and acceptance of all, but then the churches spend a huge amount of effort excluding many.
I look forward to a day when we will realize we really don't know as much as we think and accept that God is capable of so much more than we can imagine!
Oh my goodness, Joni… your stories reminded me of some of my own experiences.
I remember a time when I was 16. I had gone out to visit my dad’s family in New York. (I lived in Oregon and had only met them one other time.) They were Catholic Italians…
Religion must have come up a lot (or profoundly) during that trip because I remember a moment where I was alone with my father after that—and very sternly told him that I didn’t believe what he believed… that there was no fucking way I would ever believe in a god who sent people to hell because of their “ignorance” of not believing in him.
How can you condemn someone for not knowing something? Or having doubts? Or for making mistakes in life? For sinning and not “confessing” their sins…
None of that made any sense to me, since my understanding of “God” was that he was “all loving.”
That shit ain’t “love.”
And that “God” was no God of mine.
I distinctly remember telling my dad, indignantly…
“Well then, I guess I’m going to hell…”