Robert Novak's epiphany

A small epiphany that led to my faith...

Okay. In 2003 and 2004, I kept a journal almost every day on my spiritual journey. Many of my entries pertained to the conflict between my homosexuality and my Roman Catholic upbringing, and my intense anger towards the Roman Catholic Church that led to my leaving the church. One day in 2004, I realized that Gene Robinson had been elected bishop of the Episcopal Church USA in 2003 and entered office on March 7, 2004, and I hadn't recorded a thing about it in my journal. I simply refused to write about it. I tried not to think about it. I tried not to feel anything about it. I was more attached to my anger toward the RC body politic than to my sense of being part of a wider communion of all believers. So long as I held on to my anger, I wouldn't be able to fully appreciate the magnitude of what just happened: for the first time in my lifetime, the Christian Church opened its hearts and minds to accepting gay and lesbian persons as equals, equally potential sinners and saints, equally beloved children of God. I could begin to forgive even the RC church, just as a parent recognizes that not all of its children are going to develop at the same pace, to the same degree of brightness and flowering of love as all the other children, and yet are still worthy of love. Some three years later, as I am currently preparing proudly to be received into the Episcopal Church, I can point back to March 7, 2004, and an entry in my journal that I did NOT write as a small yet telling sign that I was finally ready to forgive a human church its wrongs and begin to embrace again my Christian calling with all the passion in my heart.

0 x 0 = Atheism.

My calculator helped me embrace the raelity that faith is not based on wishful thinking, mythology, or a throw of the Darwinian dice.

"for the first time in my lifetime, the Christian Church opened its hearts and minds to accepting gay and lesbian persons as equals, equally potential sinners and saints, equally beloved children of God."

I didn't want to criticize, just to correct mistake.
Joe, you may find in church literature that Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians accept gays and lesbians as equally potential sinners and saints and beloved children of God. Do you know that even father Seraphim Rose had homosexual inclinations in his youth? but later he became a great autority for christians, his books are published in great ammount and sold almost in all russian churches, and something tells me that sooner or later he will be canonized as an american saint.

Two stories:

1) I remember, during my annoying adolescent atheism phase, looking out my bedroom window one evening and saying aomething along the lines of, "Mary, if Jesus is God, then you are the Mother of God, like the Catholics say, so please pray for me."

2) As a young teen, I read a book called "To Kill a King" by Madeleine Polland. It's a smushy sort-of historical romance, but one of the secondary characters was a Queen Margaret of Scotland. I liked her -- who wouldn't -- and thought the author quite clever to have invented her. Years later, in the process of becoming a Catholic, when I was told I had to find a patron saint for Confirmation, I opened "Butler's Lives of the Saints" in my college library, and there she was: "Saint Margaret of Scotland".

I think the two ladies were praying for me all those years, and hope they continue to do so. And now you know why "Scotch Meg".

Some months after Sept. 11, while the fear was still fresh, especially for me as the wife of a police officer, I walked into a Catholic Church with my two children (one age 4, one a newborn) for the first time.

I remember a calm and a peace came over me that I can neither explain nor describe. In that moment of grace, I knew that I had found a home.

The experience was remarkably different from my upbringing in a fundamentalist sect that stressed end-times theology to the exclusion of all else. When I was growing up, I had a deep sense of doom. That I was so flawed that God would destroy me and there was nothing that I could ever do to change it.

Catholicism allowed me to trust God again and to teach my children to worship him.

0 x 0 = Atheism.

Your math is as incorrect as your opinions Donny.

Aaron,

It seems inconsistent with how Rod wants this thread to work for you to bait Donny. (Or, if you prefer, to respond to his bait.)

As a secondary matter, I'm not really sure I understand Donny's post, but if you think he's incorrect, aren't you saying that Christian faith _is_ based on wishful thinking, mythology, or a throw of the Darwinian dice? (That's the reverse of what he said.) That doesn't sound like what you'd believe.

-O

As a secondary matter, I'm not really sure I understand Donny's post, but if you think he's incorrect, ...

I'm saying his equation makes no sense mathematically, that's all.

I grew up in the Methodist Church, but it never meant much to me. Just something we did on Sundays. I went off to college, then grad school (in English), and went through the usual atheist indoctrination, which shaped my life (or didn't, rather) for the next couple of decades. Just last year, at the age of 41, it occurred to me that I was doing my five-year-old daughter a disservice by not taking her to church. As a student in the public school system, she would certainly not learn about Christianity at school, and I felt it was important for her to know about this major aspect of her cultural heritage.

So, a week or two before Christmas, I dressed her up and took her to the old Presbyterian Church downtown to hear the choir perform the Christmas section of Handel's Messiah. Just thinking about it, even now, makes me cry. That music - music I had grown up with, since my parents sang in THEIR church choir – just pierced my heart. It was a sudden, jarring recognition of truth and beauty like nothing I'd ever experienced. I just sat and wept through the whole thing. And I loved everything else about the service, too. Saying the Apostles Creed again after 20 years, the Lord's Prayer, everything. It all came flooding back like a beloved friend I didn't even know I'd missed. I decided then and there that I would join that choir and my daughter and I would start attending the church. (My husband, an agnostic, is still not on board.) A few days later, I checked out "Mere Christianity" from the library, and it completely blew my mind. I've been reading C.S. Lewis and everything else I can get my hands on ever since, have joined the church choir, have become very involved in the church, and have found a great Bible study group. Believing in God has changed everything. Everything. My only regret (besides the fact that my intellectual husband thinks I've lost my mind!) is that I wasted so much time. But thank God it's never too late.

Rod,

I've been wanting to read Merton for years, after Fr. Seraphim Rose gave him so much praise.

Margaret, thanks for your story. It gives me hope for my two young adult children who have rejected Christianity. It seems that God does look for his lost ones, and as someone once said, how could God refuse the tears of a mother?

Elizabeth, I'm glad my story gives you hope! It seems everything about today's world conspires to blind us to the truth of God, but if He found me, a VERY tough nut to crack, He will certainly find your children. Keep the faith.

Sorry for the comment on a comment, Rod. But this topic is simply too good not to discuss!

I was raised in the Lutheran church (my dad was a Lutheran Pastor), and I read nearly all of C.S. Lewis by the time I'd turned 21. Then I "converted" to socialism, and decided that everything to do with religion could go to the back burner for a while.

I did call myself an atheist at the time, and I remember my father saying, "I've never met an intelligent atheist!" My father aspired for me to be what he called "a Christian agnostic." Lo and behold, that is pretty much what I am today. Agnostic about the existence of God, but eager to learn all I can about Christianity.

My epiphany had to do with a time when I was probably in the greatest danger of my life, living in an abusive situation and feeling (and being) very isolated. I knew I had to get out but did not feel I could do it on my own. So, I prayed for help, and even for a sign that it was time to leave.

I got the very sign I asked for (and it was pretty unusual) and also got the help I needed, though I did have to take some personal initiative, too. Was it God who helped me? What I felt at the time, and still feel today, is that there is some force in the universe that wants the best for us, that wants us to become ourselves, and that knows and grieves when we have temporarily "lost ourselves."

1) Grew up an evangelical Christian in Texas, a "good kid" who never drank, never got into trouble, and graduated at the top of my class. Joined evanglical groups in college.

2) Took a New Testament Literature class in college, which was my first exposure to scholarly Biblical criticism. The class convincingly exposed contraditions in the Bible, as well as the very human hands that made it. Because I was invested in a nearly inerrant (at least broadly consistent) Bible, my faith was in tatters. I wasn't sure if I believed in this stuff anymore, so I decided to stop following some of the "rules." Essentially, I became agnostic, veering toward atheist.

3) In a philosophy of religion class, I discovered that there were other ways of reading the Bible than the ones I'd been taught. I discovered that Christianity was not synonymous with conservative evangelicalism. At the same time, I realized that the Jesus preached good news to the poor -- which mattered to me a lot after spending a lot of time in Latin America. These two experiences changed my worldview.

4) With a theology degree, I continue to struggle with exactly how I believe. While the mainline gets a lot of criticism, it has basically allowed me to keep my faith. I continue to flirt with Catholicism as well.

In my case, I gradually came to realize that I was a jerk, and that my atheist friends were miserable because they were selfish. While looking for an alternative, I was mugged by Kalamiros's "River of Fire."

Five and a half years later, I and my son were received together by baptism at Sf.-ul Ilie in Bucharest. Unlike my son, I did not pee on the priest's vestments.

I was raised broadly evangelical, by parents then recently converted, in the 1950s. In the 1960s, I went off to a evangelical boarding school where the peculiar view called "dispensation premillenialism" held hegemony (as it hadn't been in my parents' home or Church). Dispensationalism seemed to stretch Bible prophesy awfully far, but I knew no other way to read prophesy, so I half-heartedly endorsed it.
I'll skip over epiphany #1 (at age 19, which kept me from the folly of abandoning "organized Christianity" because of the racists I saw in it while studying down south).
Epiphany #2 (late twenties): there were other ways than dispensationalism to read Bible prophecy; the alternatives to dispensationalism were not just variations on infidelity.
The mainstream of Calvinism seemed to have an especially good way of reading prophecy (amillenialism). And - Bonus! - Calvinism was 500 years old instead of less than 200 years old like dispensationalism. I thought I'd finally found "historic Christianity." I began seriously questioning and almost always rejecting any doctrine that seemed of recent coinage. I was okay being labeled a Calvinist, but I preferred "orthodox." Orthodoxy to me meant adherence to the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds "without mental reservations" as I often boasted.
Epiphany #3 (late forties): I had unwittingly been holding mental reservations to the Creeds - if by "mental reservations" one includes "intending something contrary to what the Church meant when it wrote the Creeds." I wasn't deliberately lying, but I had not dealt seriously with what the Nicene Creed really meant.
Specifically, I had never dealt seriously with the meaning of "one holy catholic and apostolic church." When I realized what it meant, I had to stop saying it or start believing it. Stopping saying it was tempting given the reality of hundreds or thousands of Protestant groups, but I took the other route.
I'm now "Reader John," a tonsured reader in the Orthodox Church. Having been so very wrong several times before, I can't rule out epiphany #4. God isn't finished with me yet, and as I repent I may lose some more scales from the eyes.

If it is possible to call epiphany some particular moments which made me think about God's existance, there were some. Perhaps they are too banal.
1. First time- aged 13 or 14 i was sitting by the window at the second floor of our house (in the evening) and looking at piles of clouds and slunting beams coming from behind it, pile of clouds looked like a mysterious city, in the garden where many blossoming flowers and scent of wild roses reached balcony, i thought about paradise and that i m such lucky person to live in it -such beauty around and noone of my friends or relatives or even aquaintances ever died, i lived in the world where death existed only in books or TV and then thought about my grandfather who was about eighty and soon had to die, and looking at that city of clouds through hand i closed eyes and imagined that when i open eyes the it will look like hand of 90 years old woman, tried to persuade myself that life will pass the same quickly as closing and opening of eyes - the clouds will look the same, roses will smell the same and i will see the same tops of pines and birches, i thought that such beauty can't disappear and my grandfather will not disappear and perhaps we will meet after death. the city of clouds looked very material and it encouraged that thoughts

2. Second time - several years later-we visited cemetary one morning in May, also nature was blossoming, and suddenly we heard singing of psalms or something other religious, it seemed strange in deserted end of cemetary overgrown with trees, we went to the voice and seen an old priestat at one of the graves singing alone, he looked big and respectable, dressed in red-golden clothes (it was in closest weeks after Easter), he waved censer over the grave(the grave was old), he was completely absorbed by singing of that psalms or prayers and obviously did it with all his heart, bumble-bees flying around and birds singing, the whole picture was so beautiful and inspiring that i again thought about eternal life.

That's really beautiful, Masha. Thank you.

Earliest childhood: I was touched by the "Godliness" of our next door neighbors, wonderful people very devout to Mary, who got me saying the rosary with them at age 6 in the Legion of Mary, St. Luke's Church Erie PA. They really lived their faith, in a joyous beautiful way. And my mother's wide-open view of God's love, her gentle answers to all my distressed questions about whether the Jews, non-believers who lived decent lives, people not in their right mind who commit suicide, etc., were going to Hell.

Unfortunately, that early bloom faded. I experienced a sense of isolation from my peers as a result of feeling "too religious", and as a result remained reverent but determined to be as "cool" as I could and have friends. Sad, but true. I drifted along this way until college, when two things got me thinking more deeply about spiritual matters: the rather abrasive, confrontational atheism of the crowd in the university Honor's Program made me examine (and strengthen) my belief in God, and my growing despair over my homosexuality drove me to start praying harder.

Inspirations:
-- A trip to Europe and the opportunity to sing the Latin prayers of the Mass with a choir in Mont St. Michel and several other wonderful old churches. There was a powerful mystery and sense of connection to 2000 yrs of Christianity.

-- The Creation story in Tolkein's Silmarillion, where music of the angels based on themes laid out by God (Iluvatar or "The One" in Elvish :-) is the foundation for creation. One of the Ainur (the Lucifer equivalent) takes it into his mind to create music of his own in disharmony with God's and is joined by other angels, but as other angels join Lucifer and the music grows discordant, God introduces a 2nd theme that subverts the strongest parts of Lucifer's cacaphonous music into God's music. That God could take the evil born of our sinful nature and free will and transform it to fit His larger purpose had never occurred to me or been taught to me before. Later, in reading Julian of Norwich, I discovered this is not a radical (or new) idea.

-- I second whoever posted about Handel's Messiah bringing them closer to God. The glory of that music! "He Shall Feed His Flock" and "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth" ( particularly the line "although the worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God" ) just get me everytime. I find it hard not to cry.

Recovery:
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When I was 35, I finally came out to my family after years of lies and careful hiding/shadings, and I finally started tackling some personal demons I'd been carrying with me but couldn't address for fear of exposure. Bill W and Dr. Bob and all the recovering people who've together built the recovery community of today saved my soul, my spirituality and my life, quite frankly.

Reading:
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-- The books of Henri Nouwen really speak to me, particularly "The Prodigal Son" and "The Inner Voice of Love".
-- Merton's "New Seeds of Contemplation"
-- A little meditation book based on the writings of Julian of Norwich that my mother gave me.
-- The Spirituality of Imperfection (as a perfectionist par excellence, I need all the help I can get)