When I give people the shortened version of how I came to find myself on a spiritual journey I usually say, "I was very hardcore atheist until I had some very strange and completely inexplicable things happen to me after someone I loved very much died." That’s true in a nutshell, but it leaves out so much of the detail.
Like most white Americans, I was born into a Christian family. I grew up in the Southern United States and from an early age sat through Sunday school and sermons at one of the Baptist churches. We weren't Southern Baptist, we were just Baptists who happened to live in the South. From what I understood as a kid the difference between our type of Baptist and true Southern Baptist is that our members weren't baptized in the muddy creek behind the church. I remember being baptized in the built in pool behind the pulpit and thinking that was bad enough. I was glad I was inside a warm church instead of on a creek bank soaking wet. I was baptized when I was twelve. I never had the heart to tell anyone that I hadn't made up my mind whether or not I believed in God. I just wanted to be a full-fledged Member of the church. According to my pastor, only people baptized in the church were members. I thought to myself, you mean I come sit and listen to these sermons every time I can't find an excuse to stay home with Dad, and I'm not even a member! We'll fix that! I pictured members receiving special treatment, like being invited to exclusive "adults-only" parties. I didn't think of that in a sexual way, I was only a kid. More of a "get to stay up to midnight" way.
As a gift for my baptism, my paternal grandma gave me a King James' Bible. I sat in the pew, still dripping with water and hefted the thick book in my hand. I decided I was going to read it, from cover to cover. The idea made perfect sense. After all, shouldn't I read this book that was being used to guide my life and which held the secrets of Heaven and Hell? It wasn't a terribly thick book. Surely most other people read their copies, too, I thought to myself.
Over the next fifteen months I slowly made my way through the entire Bible, both Old and New Testaments. I still vividly remember reading the last sentence in Revelation. I shut the Bible and laid on my back in my bed, staring at the ceiling. For a moment my mind was completely still. I thought about everything I had read and willed it to have some discernable impact on me. I felt nothing. Nothing I read in that book convinced me that God was real. It was just a book. I was more convinced that Captain Ahab and Ishmael were real after reading Moby Dick than I was that God existed after reading the entire Bible. The biggest problem was that The Bible is, in the end, just a book. I expected to see a vision of Angels, to hear heavenly voices singing, to hear a clash of thunder. I wanted something extraordinary to happen. Instead I simply shut the back cover on a boring and somewhat confusing book and that was the end of the matter for a while.
Love and light,
Reneé
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