Coming Back To Where I Never Was

I grew up goddy. To be sure, I never reached such august heights as co-hosting an episode of the 700 Club, that’s an impossible act to follow. But I grew up deeply steeped in American Evangelical Christianity. Vacation Bible School? Check. Being on the vanguard of the home-school movement complete with science curriculum that thought Young Earth Creationism was the result of proper Bible interpretation and scientific observation? Check. Not being in the Boy Scouts but the far more obscure Christian Service Brigade? Check. Doing a post high-school Youth With a Mission “Discipleship Training School”? Check. Moving to California at age 20 and joining a safe non-denominational church out of habit? Check. Spending several years being a junior high youth group leader, in part driven by my own poor experiences in such groups? Well, now we’re heading off the checklist. We’ll also leave out the part about starting to volunteer in said role, way back when, to try and get to know a cute girl, as that transcends both religion and culture (and it also never works).

This is my journey. It is one, which like many, is strewn with cast-off dogmas, ideas and beliefs. It was fifteen years ago I suffered crippling rejection in the middle of a youth group while in the middle of severe depression. It was thirteen years ago that I began to encounter ideas outside my childhood sphere, challenging what I thought I knew and believed. It was five years ago that I stopped attending church, not out of some sudden crisis of faith, but rather due to complicated personal circumstances. But, once gone, I never went back. And apparently, was not missed.

It doesn’t end there, of course. But in some ways, it started. Do I mourn for what I left behind? Not especially. Am I in a much different place? Yes, and I intend to write more about what that place is, how I got there, and where I think I’m going.

There never really was a pause on the journey. From five until about one year ago, I knew what I couldn’t believe anymore. I also realized I knew what I couldn’t couldn’t believe. Reconciling that isn’t easy. I’ll get to that.

Where am I now? I must sum before continuing with other essays. About a year ago, I started learning, if nothing else, about the depths of my ignorance. A little over a week, ago, on Pascha, April 26, 2008, I was chrismated into the Orthodox Church.

I am as a product of my times and of my culture as can be. My tendencies towards the logical, rational, naturalistic, reductionist, philosophically nominalist is deep deep in this young padawan.

And like the sola scriptura, and the young earth creationism, and the various trappings of evangelical Christianity I’ve already left behind, I’m also having to leave the above in the dust behind as well, penetrating core of my worldview and conditioning of my modern Western mind.

Because I know it represents a shadow of what is actual reality. And I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to realize it.

This is what I’ll be expounding on. Because I’m growing up goddy again, it seems, just not in a way recognizable to how I started. I’ve come back to where I never was.