With Ash Wednesday, Lent, and Easter arriving in the next several months, my thoughts have been straying to the action of God and religion in my life, as well as to my life in general. A convergence of literature in my various classes—all focusing on or mentioning confessions, testimonies, biographies, or journeys toward God—supports this consideration and places such things even more on my mind. Hearing of the conversion and development in faith of a single person can prove surprisingly restorative for fellow Christians. In writing this post, I seek to give testimony to God for my particular journey, following after past authors and converts and ordinary folk and partaking in their tradition. Forgive this interlude of an autobiographical personal story into considerations of universal themes on this blog; however, even though this post lacks an explicit argument or any explication of themes from literature, it—I hope—still serves the Kingdom of God through an implicit argument for the action of Grace, Providence, and Charity on the level of the individual soul.
I was not always who I am. I was only officially baptized a Christian on Easter Day, April 20th, 2019, in the second semester of my freshman year at Hillsdale College (a fitting day, given that I was born in this Earthly kingdom on Easter too). Since then, I have been involved in a variety of Christian ministries and events on campus and outside of it, have attended church at Holy Trinity Anglican Church essentially every week, have volunteered in capacities as a reader during services and in children’s catechesis education, and have engaged in off-campus prayer groups, among other religious things. The overall picture? A committed person to Christianity, although I absolutely think of myself as only a faltering, small, ordinary Christian with much more growth ahead of me before I am even “average” in faith or virtue. Yet this is only the middle of the story, of my story. I was not always who I am and cannot be understood—nor can God be understood—without the inclusion of my past.
I grew up in a family that practiced Christianity. My mother was raised in a Methodist church; my Dad was a Christian and attended the Methodist church too, though he also had some Baptist roots. By the time I was of an age to start noticing things, my family was “bouncing” around to various churches, trying to find the most reputable one in a town that tended to contain churches who treated Scripture liberally. Being homeschooled, I read a bit of the Bible as a child and picked up some other scraps in the intermittent Sunday school classes that I attended at church. In all honesty, though, church did not matter to me as a young child and any faith I held was the rote and innocent faith of a child who has not yet thought of her place in existence, nor of the presence of anything transcendent. In fact, I mostly remember feeling uncomfortable during Sunday school and, at other times, feeling a desire to scoff at the few young friends I knew who did constantly talk about Jesus. Knowing no better, I would have called myself a Christian as a traditional label in order to fit in with expectations in society. I was not.
Fast forward to around age eleven or twelve. My family was no longer going to church at all; I am sure that my parents never strayed in their faith, but I never asked them, nor did that thought cross my mind at all. I still did not care about church, since church or the transcendent would have distracted me from the mundane activities of life that I sought. Namely, I was trying to cobble together my existence by achieving things academically and elsewhere. I had joined 4-H (a youth development and leadership formation organization) at age eleven, which introduced me not only to a variety of other youth but also to a variety of project areas to perfect—and to learn. In particular, I focused on the livestock projects, though I did engage in everything from photography, to archery, to shotgun shooting, to drawing, to knitting, to baking and cooking, and to everywhere in between. But I spent most of my time raising and showing chickens and rabbits, caring for and showing dairy goats and meat goats, and learning every possible chunk of information about sheep, cattle, and horses. I came to raise and show national quality—and nationally winning—chickens and rabbits at shows throughout Wisconsin, the Midwest, and elsewhere. Most of those shows necessitated hours of travel early in morning and late in evenings on Sundays and Saturdays; this competition and perfection of both my “creations” of the animal projects and myself became my “religion,” in a very strong and very real sense. My sense of self and worth depended on my success or on the success of these chickens and rabbits, in what I would argue became a very unhealthy way, even while I enjoyed these experiences (and still recognize their value).
In no way do I desire to give the impression that I had my life “together” during that period of twelve years old onward until at least the beginning of college—if then. In no way was I living my life according to principles of virtue, transcendence, Christianity, God, beauty, or “the Good,” except by accident or out of tradition or guilt. My busyness—while definitely keeping me from God—and my parents, who highly involved themselves in every detail of every single thing that I did, prevented me from going horribly astray in terms of morals or, rather, in any actions pertaining to those morals.
But please understand me, I was far from God. Did I believe in a God during those pre-teen through teenage years? In all honesty, maybe not. Or, if I did, the God I believed in was Somebody who created a crooked and doomed world and “left” people like me in it. Perhaps I never doubted God’s existence—though I may easily misremember that—but what I can say with absolute certainty is that I doubted God’s character, His goodness, His love. It is perhaps the worst thing that someone can do, to believe in a Being above who does not care about her; at least an atheist can satisfy himself with his convictions and form his “own” world and worldview, but to feel the presence of a God who seems impersonal and uncaring—or even malicious—is never to escape from an aching sense that something is “wrong” with the world or the self, and from all the anger that goes along with that.
Indeed, my overall internal vision of life was a tragedy. Hidden by my external successes, I was in truth an often angry, frustrated, uncharitable, ungrateful, snappy, secretive, lying, and manipulative person. I just about felt like life was meaningless; I guess you could call me a near-to-full nihilist, though I never labeled myself anything, nor really thought of anything philosophical. I was angry and prone to despair at life itself. I felt alone, basically friendless. My accumulated leadership positions, agricultural projects, and awards and achievements were all attempts to fill an existential emptiness—to create a “god” for myself, you could say. The world seemed to be in disarray; good actions more often than not resulted in poor results; suffering and sickness and hardships seemed “so badly arranged,” to quote a Rush song (The Larger Bowl). I was going through the motions of life, even succeeding at that, but I had no real love for the world or in the world. I would look at the generation before me—parents and older friends—and wonder sometimes how they had lived so long. My general thought was, who cares about living long in this senseless and hollow and frustrating and cruel world? In all honesty, at age twelve (as horrible as it sounds, it is true), I distinctly envied those in the military who could live just a brief flash of a life before fortune passively destroyed them. God, eternity, meaning to life, the spreading of the Gospel, and the value of the individual human person were alien thoughts to me.
Although it was unrecognized by my hardened and nihilistic and (arguably) cynical mind at the time, God pulled me out of what could have been—believe me—a horrible existence, situation, or end. He did so through, of all things, literature and story. You see, during all of those destructive (and frankly embarrassing, looking back) years, one small and peculiar spark never died in me. While other books and sources played a role, two particularly stand out in their almost “salvatory” effects: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and the many and various Star Trek television stories. When I would read Tolkien’s work or watch the movies, I would feel Something in my heart, almost a little rise of Hope. Something about his characters and their community, the refusal of Good to give in to Evil, the evident love and care among Frodo and Sam and the rest of the Fellowship, and the haunting simplicity and purity and Reality of the Shire—and even more than that, of Rivendell—yanked at and buoyed my soul. At some level or another in my mind, Tolkien’s creation, where people and the transcendent mattered, pointed me to another Place and method of existing. I sought the community and meaning that The Lord of the Rings gave an inkling of, even if I was too uneducated and ignorant to recognize that beyond the “impression” that it painted within me. A “longing” or “yearning” without an accounted-for source seized me, and still does, when I read The Lord of the Rings; it seemed strange to me then, and still does now, that I would strongly desire something that I have never seen or known but that only arises from a fictional book, unless the book touches the peripheries of some Truth and Reality, as much as any man-made object can. Other things, like a strikingly colorful and beautiful sunset, or a vast field of grain under a blue sky with a gentle summer wind and the buzz of a lazy faraway airplane, do lead to the same “longing” in my soul, but those occurrences at least exist in real life, unlike the fantastical “world” of Tolkien.
Likewise, although Star Trek is in no way as complex and transcendent a series as The Lord of the Rings is a book, it presented to me a vision of “another way” of life. In Star Trek episodes and series—all of which I watched multiple times, with Deep Space Nine my favorite alongside The Original Series—the idea of Something “out there,” unknown and yet marvelous in a universe of which man and Earth are just parts, spoke to me. Strange as it sounds, in Star Trek, I saw that community, belonging, love, and purpose could coexist with suffering and tragedy. I held out hope that I would see that on Earth, in one way or another, in real life someday, somehow. Tolkien and Roddenberry taught me to hold on and to imagine better times and an overarching purpose for life that would transcend my particular self. I could not name what was “out there” that offered this Hope, nor what precisely I hoped for, but I believed ultimately that Something did.
And so, I waited. The part of me that loved Something in great literature and stories was being prepared by God to find in Him the answer to nihilistic emptiness. It held out Hope and sought the community it had only seen in story or in dream-worlds. For some reason, Hillsdale College awoke or spoke to the same surviving “spark” when I reached senior year of high school and applied to colleges. Although Hillsdale was never the logical or most cost-effective college choice for me, I felt “haunted” or “called” by it, by what it represented and taught, and by what a yet-unseen version of myself could become if surrounded by higher things, better thoughts, and fellow travelers on the journey of life. I chose Hillsdale College because I “knew” at some level of my soul (crazy as that sounds) that I was missing something—something that I believed could exist, given my experience with literature and that “longing” described earlier. Providentially—though, again, I did not assign that word to it at the time—a series of pieces, financial and otherwise, fell into place that allowed me to attend Hillsdale College. Once there, more unlikely events, unlikely encounters with people who brought me to Holy Trinity Anglican Church and became good friends, and the shepherding of truly upstanding Christian leaders on campus pulled me into the organized Church and to Christian life. Since I began attending Hillsdale and entered Christian life, I have gradually learned more and more about God, both about His existence and His good character.
By no means have my three years of “official” Christianity been easy or free of questions and doubts and even anger at God and at parts of His world; I count the hymn, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” as one of my favorites (it was my baptismal hymn), partially because of these lines that mirror my wandering spirit and dependence on Grace:
Oh, to grace how great a debtor Daily I'm constrained to be Let Thy goodness like a fetter Bind my wandering heart to Thee Prone to wander, Lord I feel it Prone to leave the God I love Here's my heart, oh take and seal it Seal it for Thy courts above
However, I can say that I have gained meaning and more sense of purpose in life. I have learned more about what Love is and how to love in ways that I never knew possible, but often hoped for, before conversion to Christianity. I still need God’s forgiveness and Grace every day and must confront the inevitable sorrows and sufferings of this life in this postlapsarian world. I still look back at “what a fool I used to be” (to quote another Rush song, Presto) with some, even a good deal, of regret.
And yet, while I am still quite foolish, I can at least say that I am a Fool for Christ—and that my life will never again be the same as before April 20th, 2019.