When I left off last month *blush*, I had just recounted my call to ministry. After returning to school that fall, i was not shy about recounting my tale to the fundy set I hang out with at the lunch table. The general response was as follows.
Me: I've been called to be a preacher!
Them: No you haven't.
Me: Why not?
Them: You're a girl.
Me: So, my youth pastor's a woman! (I was raised united methodist, which had started ordaining women some time back)
Them: Well, that's an abomination under god, and your church has gone astray from Christ. Don't you ever read the bible?
Then would follow rapid bible flipping and declamations of "gracious submission" passages, during which I was keeping up as best I could, given that my church didn't go into the same sort of passage memorizations that most of my baptist and Church of Christ chums grew up with. After that humiliation, I started reading the bible more on my own, not just the stuff that got mentioned in sunday school or at bible club. That grew into a realization that the world wasn't divided into Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, pentecostals, and "other".
I began studying comparative religions, an intellectual hobby that remains to this day. Eventually, my teenage brain quickly decided there were two general definitions of god in world religion--one where He was Judge, rulemaker, and punisher, arbitrarily condemning millions to hell for no crime apart than a quirk of birth or upbringing, and the other of a loving god who cared for all his children regardless of how they came to honor Him. Logically the latter made more sense--but the former was such a part of the time and place where I was raised that i was scared witless of giving it up as a fairy tale. And how does a loving god rationalize some of the things I'd lived and experienced and struggled through in my life?
On one hand, the notion of a loving god didn't fully flow with my life experience. On the other, all the traditional view of god seemed to do was make people angry or ashamed or hypocritical. A good friend of mine contemplated suicide until he ws "cured" of his homosexuality, at which time he promptly impregnated his best female friend with the full knowledge and support of the evangelist who had cured him. They were both 17. The Local baptist church camp was (and still is) well known through the high school as the state's best haven for illicit teen sex. My youth pastor was drummed out of our church by a cadre of fundamentalist parishoners, because of plays we performed that were too "liberal", her tendency to lead prayers with "Creator God" instead of "Heavenly Father", and other such heretical acts. If God WAS love, which seemed to be the only thing the bible was consistent about (and the only thing that both the fundys and my other, "secret" view agreed on), how were any of these actions at all consistent with God's will?
I prayed, I read, I thought. My ideals of becoming a minister had been long forgotten, but the old drive to understand God remained. As I left high school and entered college I began to understand that the struggles I had faced in my life were not punishments, but lessons. Each "tragedy" I had faced helped me understand something about human nature, or myself. They had helped me grow stronger, wiser, and more empathetic. They had helped me become a person, in short, who could no more believe in a harsh, judgemental, fear-inducing God than I could the easter bunny. I became a Deist of sorts--I believed in god, but in an intellectual way that allowed that all religions that were based in love were valid paths to God. Which was all well and good, and is still an important part of what I believe today, but left me with a question. If God is in all religions, which one do I follow? All I knew is the the hypocricies I had grown up with would make it impossible to follow the faith or my parents.
Next: Part 3 of 4, in which I study in Scotland, dabble in Catholicism, Embrace the Goddess, and marry a quirky Episcopalian geek at the height of the dot-com boom...
