The Calling
I was raised godless. This in itself is not so bad. After squirming away from my father's manically dogmatic atheism my agnostic childhood was a sort of spiritual tabula rasa, and once I learned believing in anything from the healing powers of crystals to the tenents of the Roman Catholic Church would be equally repulsive in my father's eyes, I was free to explore what, if anything, I believed.
First I was just curious about the faiths I saw around me, or rather the politics of those faiths. I noticed the same hipocracies I saw when I was a child, but maybe in a kinder light. I think it was this first gentling of the spirit that warmed me towards Christianity. There wasn't a lightning bolt moment when I knew I was going to be a priest, nor was there one when I first decided, concretely that I believed in God. Well, there sort of was.
I was sixteen, maybe 17 at the time and was heading up to Laval Conservatory with my high school chorale. A few days earlier a friend, responsible for getting me into the chorale in the first place, had been killed in a car accident on her way home from practice. The first death of a peer is probably a seminal experience for everyone, I was no exception. While we hadn't been close, she had been my age. I had known her and seen her a few hours before she died. It shook me to the core, in that same angsty way every teenager realizes, if they realize at all, that they could be dead in an instant, the result of wet leaves in a pothole and a second of attention diverted from the road to opening a can of coke.
On the 22 hour bus ride up to Montreal, I was mostly numb and quiet. Self-absorbed, too. Wondering what her death meant to me. I felt for the first time a despair I couldn't explain away. I didn't even know it was despair, since it would be another seven years before I read Sickness Unto Death and understood, at least marginally, existential angst. I didn't feel let down by God, or angry at him. I simply didn't believe a God existed.
One day we visited the Sainte Anne de Beaupré and were left to our own devices. To my surprise it felt automatically, instantly, almost sickening like home, but not a home I had ever actually experienced, more of a platonic ideal of "home". It was particularly strange since I had always been ill at ease in grand cathedral's before (I grew up in the shadow of the National Cathedral), and I became almost violently ill at the shock. It was what I've come to call Las Vegas God. The God that sets aside all subtlety and points with big flashing neon signs to the direction He wants his querant to go.
I'd like to say I became a faithful unquestioning servant from that moment on, but I didn't. The fact was I didn't WANT to believe in God. Too many biblical contradictions, too many hypocrites. Too many people looking down their noses all week except for that hour on Sunday where they bowed their heads to pray not to end up like that-slut-Franklin-woman-who-did-I-tell-you-used-to-be-loose-in-high-school?. I had of course, confused the politics of church with the profundity of faith.
A year later I breached the subject with my father about wanting to be baptised. He kicked me out of the car and I had to walk the 11 miles home to my mother's house, in an area where only weeks before two girls had been kidnapped and murdered. He said "you have only one father, and that's me." That shut me up but good for the next year and a half until I graduated high school and went on to college.
I entered and was summarily kicked out of a very good school, a family legacy, because I didn't attend class. I spent all my days at a hostel in Back Bay listening to a retired Theology Professor from Oxford talk while I baked blueberry muffins for the guests. In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm not sure if this guy was a loon or not, or if he even knew I was listening, but by that time I had a powerful almost nauseatingly strong draw to listen to him.
Then I entered the university where I would spend the next few years and was, by way of a spaghetti dinner, introduced to Canterbury, the Episcopal Campus Ministry. The old farm house on the Main street of the small college town was the only place, other than the Chesapeake Bay and The Shrine de Sainte Anne de Beaupré that had ever felt like home.
I didn't even remotely want it. I had already decided to be James Bond and follow in my grandfather's footsteps. My contribution to the church would be an annual sizable donation to the Harvard Divinity School, whereupon God and I would call it even and I'd get a nice little crimson coffee mug in the offing. Apparently God had a different plan. Again, I didn't feel so much that I was searching for anything as much as I was being lifted bodily and "put" somewhere, with the instructions "here, this is what you have to do, so pay attention this time. Geeze"
I suppose that from that moment in the shrine I knew in a sense, but that's only retrospectively. My decision to not fight joining the ministry (much)came sometime in the year that followed. I became friends with the priests at the local church, and, realizing they were flawed, funny, dirty joke telling people with genuinely good hearts who still had questions about their faith and what it meant to believe in God and do his work. They weren't beyond reproach and they weren't perfect. They were like me. The next two years I helped my roommates (first one and then the other) go through the tedious process of discovery and entering seminary. It all was so terribly, terribly real, and while I knew this was what I had to do, I also knew I wasn't ready for it at 20.
I'm not ready for it at 25. I'm still too young, too dumb, too self absorbed (although I'm infinitely less so than I was five years ago). I don't want to be married too young, not even to Christ. I'm plodding slowly through the discernment process. Picking up credits when I can afford it, reading the greats (Kierkegaard, Lewis, Mackey) when I can't. I'm still thinking and arguing with myself, God and people who know more than I do. I'm still talking to the clergy and professors who may or may not know I'm there, and putting in hard labor at my non-profit, to keep my feet on the ground even when my head is in religious academia.
I wish I could give a better answer than "I just have to" when asked why I want to become a minister, but sadly, or maybe importantly, it's the only one.
First I was just curious about the faiths I saw around me, or rather the politics of those faiths. I noticed the same hipocracies I saw when I was a child, but maybe in a kinder light. I think it was this first gentling of the spirit that warmed me towards Christianity. There wasn't a lightning bolt moment when I knew I was going to be a priest, nor was there one when I first decided, concretely that I believed in God. Well, there sort of was.
I was sixteen, maybe 17 at the time and was heading up to Laval Conservatory with my high school chorale. A few days earlier a friend, responsible for getting me into the chorale in the first place, had been killed in a car accident on her way home from practice. The first death of a peer is probably a seminal experience for everyone, I was no exception. While we hadn't been close, she had been my age. I had known her and seen her a few hours before she died. It shook me to the core, in that same angsty way every teenager realizes, if they realize at all, that they could be dead in an instant, the result of wet leaves in a pothole and a second of attention diverted from the road to opening a can of coke.
On the 22 hour bus ride up to Montreal, I was mostly numb and quiet. Self-absorbed, too. Wondering what her death meant to me. I felt for the first time a despair I couldn't explain away. I didn't even know it was despair, since it would be another seven years before I read Sickness Unto Death and understood, at least marginally, existential angst. I didn't feel let down by God, or angry at him. I simply didn't believe a God existed.
One day we visited the Sainte Anne de Beaupré and were left to our own devices. To my surprise it felt automatically, instantly, almost sickening like home, but not a home I had ever actually experienced, more of a platonic ideal of "home". It was particularly strange since I had always been ill at ease in grand cathedral's before (I grew up in the shadow of the National Cathedral), and I became almost violently ill at the shock. It was what I've come to call Las Vegas God. The God that sets aside all subtlety and points with big flashing neon signs to the direction He wants his querant to go.
I'd like to say I became a faithful unquestioning servant from that moment on, but I didn't. The fact was I didn't WANT to believe in God. Too many biblical contradictions, too many hypocrites. Too many people looking down their noses all week except for that hour on Sunday where they bowed their heads to pray not to end up like that-slut-Franklin-woman-who-did-I-tell-you-used-to-be-loose-in-high-school?. I had of course, confused the politics of church with the profundity of faith.
A year later I breached the subject with my father about wanting to be baptised. He kicked me out of the car and I had to walk the 11 miles home to my mother's house, in an area where only weeks before two girls had been kidnapped and murdered. He said "you have only one father, and that's me." That shut me up but good for the next year and a half until I graduated high school and went on to college.
I entered and was summarily kicked out of a very good school, a family legacy, because I didn't attend class. I spent all my days at a hostel in Back Bay listening to a retired Theology Professor from Oxford talk while I baked blueberry muffins for the guests. In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm not sure if this guy was a loon or not, or if he even knew I was listening, but by that time I had a powerful almost nauseatingly strong draw to listen to him.
Then I entered the university where I would spend the next few years and was, by way of a spaghetti dinner, introduced to Canterbury, the Episcopal Campus Ministry. The old farm house on the Main street of the small college town was the only place, other than the Chesapeake Bay and The Shrine de Sainte Anne de Beaupré that had ever felt like home.
I didn't even remotely want it. I had already decided to be James Bond and follow in my grandfather's footsteps. My contribution to the church would be an annual sizable donation to the Harvard Divinity School, whereupon God and I would call it even and I'd get a nice little crimson coffee mug in the offing. Apparently God had a different plan. Again, I didn't feel so much that I was searching for anything as much as I was being lifted bodily and "put" somewhere, with the instructions "here, this is what you have to do, so pay attention this time. Geeze"
I suppose that from that moment in the shrine I knew in a sense, but that's only retrospectively. My decision to not fight joining the ministry (much)came sometime in the year that followed. I became friends with the priests at the local church, and, realizing they were flawed, funny, dirty joke telling people with genuinely good hearts who still had questions about their faith and what it meant to believe in God and do his work. They weren't beyond reproach and they weren't perfect. They were like me. The next two years I helped my roommates (first one and then the other) go through the tedious process of discovery and entering seminary. It all was so terribly, terribly real, and while I knew this was what I had to do, I also knew I wasn't ready for it at 20.
I'm not ready for it at 25. I'm still too young, too dumb, too self absorbed (although I'm infinitely less so than I was five years ago). I don't want to be married too young, not even to Christ. I'm plodding slowly through the discernment process. Picking up credits when I can afford it, reading the greats (Kierkegaard, Lewis, Mackey) when I can't. I'm still thinking and arguing with myself, God and people who know more than I do. I'm still talking to the clergy and professors who may or may not know I'm there, and putting in hard labor at my non-profit, to keep my feet on the ground even when my head is in religious academia.
I wish I could give a better answer than "I just have to" when asked why I want to become a minister, but sadly, or maybe importantly, it's the only one.