Finding Faith Again
I can remember the exact day and time of my conversion experience– I was seven years old, and during the Thanksgiving Eve service at our church, I whispered to my mom that I wanted to accept Jesus into my heart. After we got home she and my dad took me up to their bedroom and prayed with me and I cried. A little while later, before family prayers at bedtime, I announced to my siblings that “I became a Christian today.” I remember feeling slightly embarrassed and self-conscious, but also pleased at the affirmation of my parents and my older siblings.
My deconversion, on the other hand, has no fixed date. I was twenty-six when I first began to allow myself to ask questions which I knew were considered dangerous by the Christian authorities I had always looked up to. I was twenty-nine when the structure of my faith began to crumble around me one pillar at a time, but even in the midst of the ruins I still hung onto my Christian identity. I can’t recall a particular day or time when I consciously decided “I am no longer a Christian.” But somehow, by the time I was thirty-two, I was done. I felt too many doubts about the divinity, death, and resurrection of Jesus for me to feel like he could keep me in the fold, and I no longer wanted anything to do with the Christendom I had been raised in and its past history and current reputation of hatred, violence, oppression, racism, homophobia, and cruelty. I made no great announcements. I remember mentioning to a couple of my siblings and a couple of friends that I was no longer a Christian. These were safe people for me, and my shift in identity was accepted without hostility or even much comment. I felt some grief for my lost faith, but I had mourned my Christianity while I was still in the process of losing it, and there was a sense of relief, even freedom, in accepting its death.
For a year or so I existed in a kind of limbo, unsure of what I was or what post-Christian faith or spirituality could look like for me. I was not an atheist, but neither could I feel any certainty about the existence of a God, whatever God might be. I had more questions than answers, but they were not questions I could just ignore. I knew there exist many millions of comfortably secular people who don’t trouble their minds with thoughts of the divine or eternal, yet to me that felt just as impossible as trying to force myself to continue believing the doctrines I was raised with. My spirit still yearned for the transcendent, for those tastes of awe, wonder, and joy that cannot be explained by secularism. I longed for a spiritual community where my questions would be welcome, where diverse perspectives and beliefs might be accepted.
My husband and children and I moved to Atlanta in the summer of 2023, and I decided that, after six years of living without church, I was ready to try again. One Sunday morning last October I showed up at the local Unitarian Universalist church, where I was welcomed kindly by many in the small congregation, both when I first walked in and during the service itself. Instead of a sermon, various members read poems on the theme of “You Are Not Alone”. The final hymn was a tune familiar to me as a Christian hymn, but with new words to reflect the diversity and inclusivity that are part of the values of Unitarian Universalism. As I sang I remembered what it felt like to stand in a church, to believe and feel like I had fellowship and belonging with the people around me. So many years had passed since I had that feeling, and this service had brought me hope that perhaps I might have found a spiritual community where I could find that sense of belonging again.
By the end of the service, I was quietly crying all my mascara off, trying to hide it by staring at my phone as I texted a friend, and hoping nobody would try to talk to me while I was a sloppy snot-mess. I waited until the sanctuary was mostly empty before sneaking out, too much an emotionally vulnerable introvert to face the second hour classes. But I went back the next week and stayed after the service, landing in a group called “Faith After Doubt”, full of people of various ages and backgrounds. There were people raised Catholic, Mormon, Jehovah Witness, and in various Evangelical denominations, who now identified as atheist, agnostic, Pagan, and Wiccan, as well as those who still retained some sense of Christian identity. There were gay and trans people who had been rejected by their religions. What we all had in common was outgrowing or leaving the religious faiths in which we had been raised, and we were all figuring out what came next, how to continue on our spiritual journeys outside the boundaries that had been prescribed by our old religious communities.
I continued to return to the church and the group, and for the first time in a decade I felt myself at home. In February I decided to take the step of becoming an official member of the church. What I love about Unitarian Universalism (UU for short) is that it has shared values instead of shared creeds.1 You can be a UU and be a Christian, a Buddhist, a Pagan, a Muslim, an atheist, or “spiritually murky” as I described myself when I first arrived.
In many ways, that description is still apt. I still have more questions than answers. There are days when I am able to believe in God, though I tend not to call it that any longer, the name being too loaded with negative baggage for me to be helpful. There are days when I look at the horror of the world and despair sends me spiraling. But I would say, on the whole, there are more days of hope than despair. Out of the wreckage of my old faith I am finding and forming a new one, and it is rooted in love: a “Never-Stopping, Never-Giving-Up, Unbreaking, Always-and-Forever Love.”2
Five years ago, when my old faith was breaking down, I wrote that "the heart of God is love.”3 I was trying desperately to reconcile that belief with all the things I’d been taught about God within Christianity, with doctrines about Hell, Penal Substitutionary Atonement and Limited Atonement, Divine sovereignty vs. man’s free will, the origin of evil, and others. (In the end, I couldn’t force the reconciliation.) Now that I have let those doctrines die, I am able to put my faith in that belief without reservation: the heart of God (when I believe in God), of the Universe, of the divine web of all existence, is Love.
The world is full of horror, violence, hatred, and death. I cannot minimize that. There are days when existence feels like a burden too heavy for me to carry. On those days, when news of mass shootings, war crimes against children, oppression and violence against minorities, and the indifference of the wealthy and powerful are all forces pushing me down into despair, I whisper to myself my mantra: Courage, dear heart.4 This is my faith: that Love is stronger than hate, stronger than violence, stronger even than death.
I look for it everywhere– in my church community, in the faces of my children, in an excellent book, a beautiful piano composition, a cluster of pink, lavender, and powdery blue hydrangea blossoms in a neighbor’s yard. It is a love that can be found in all religions though it cannot be contained by any of them. It is a love that seeks the healing and wholeness of all humanity and of the planet.
Love is the only answer I have.
The principles, or core values, of the UU church are as follows:
The inherent worth and dignity of every person
Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations
Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations
A free and responsible search for truth and meaning
The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large
The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all
Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part
Sally Lloyd-Jones, The Jesus Storybook Bible
https://meredithmuddles.com/2019/07/21/the-heart-of-god/
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C.S. Lewis
Love this! Thank you so much for sharing this part of you!