Latter Day Sinner

I grew up Episcopalian. My father, an Episcopal priest, more than anything taught me the moral lessons of the Bible. I also learned the Nicene Creed and the weekly confessional prayer by rote. But the miracles and the prophecies of the Bible were secondary. For instance the story of David and Goliath was presented as a true story but not a particularly miraculous one. I read CS Lewis from an early age, so by the time I got to his false trilemma that Christ could only be a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord I considered all three a possibility. I never really fell in love with the Bible and I didn’t really start to think about The Book of Common Prayer until my twenties. It was just there, and it was just true… Until it wasn’t.

The Episcopal Church started losing me because I never saw the sacred in it. The hope that the Liturgy would become central to my life never materialized. They were exercises in reasoning that seemed more and more unreasonable.

But I think I’ve gotten a little ahead of myself. Before I lost confidence in the Bible and the Liturgy I graduated high school and went straight to the Army and college. In basic training I got an extra hour away from the drill sergeants on Sunday by practicing in a non-denominational church choir. I got a little plastic cross at the end which I have kept to this day. At college I was inundated with a very different set of values; Communism, Atheism, and Free Love. I did not fit into either the Army or college and my upbringing did not prepare me for the incredibly rude awakening that both presented me. I probably lost my faith in the Episcopal Church somewhere in that time period. And when I did I realized I had never had faith in Jesus Christ.

After I was kicked out of the military and failed out of college I came back to what I would eventually call my hometown. I tried another few semesters of community college and especially enjoyed anthropology. The second semester I broke up with a girlfriend and became depressed. I fell behind and tried to withdraw. It was too late in the semester for me to make that choice, so I had to get a committee to approve it. They refused and accused me of doing drugs. I failed out of college again. I was drinking at the time but didn’t start smoking marijuana until after that accusation. I figured if I was going to be punished for doing drugs I might as well do them and make the punishment worth it.

By then I had pretty steady work and was living mostly by myself. I had no spiritual anchor so started soul searching. I read the Quran and it moved me in a way the Bible never had. I was also reading the Bhagavad Gita and the Tao TE Ching. I considered converting to Islam, but I was praying with both Jehovah’s Witnesses and Baha’i by then. I was searching for the sacred in ways I’d never found. I met the Mormon missionaries. The story of my Mormonism is mostly in My Conversion.

And yet all these years later I still have trouble believing in miracles and prophecies. I have found the sacred in more mundane things. The Gita taught me that work is holy and that lesson stuck. The principle lesson from Islam has been to surrender to the divine and only the divine. The Tao TE Ching gave me a sense of the mystery of language and the need for the feminine principle in the sacred. And the Book of Mormon remains more than anything a force in my life. I love them all more than the Bible, but it was my first touch with the sacred which has never really gone away in all my searching and struggles.

I have remained a dreamer through all this and the sacred comes to me most often and with the most power between the space between the conscience and unconscious. I’m having visions which I’ve also shared here, and answers to prayers, and cats. Perhaps this is enough for now. May you have peace and stay awesome.