Where to begin?...

So where to even begin? Besides having an orange and vodka that is...

So I thought maybe I should write about my background as relates to religion. I am nearly 33 years old and for 31 of those years I have been immersed in the Christian faith. I was brought up in a protestant denomination called 'Churches of Christ' which is not to be confused with 'The Sydney Church of Christ.' The denomination I was involved in is very similar to the Baptist denomination. The particular church that I grew up in, however, was rather more fundamental than most.

I grew up believing the obvious Christian doctrines:

-We are all sinners and in need of God's grace, forgiveness and redemption.
-Jesus procured this for us by his death and resurrection on the Cross
-Those of us who believed in the name of Jesus had been specifically chosen to be his children and were destined to spend an Eternity of bliss with him.
-Those who did not believe in the name of Jesus were destined to eternal suffering in Hell.
-We should endeavour to live our lives according to the word of God which was the manual to good living.

Up until very recently, I believed all of this to be true. This is not to say that I never questioned my faith or that I never disagreed with things that I was taught. Being a rather outspoken person as well as one who needs to understand why I believe the things that I do, I was never comfortable with simply accepting things to be so because I was told to. In retrospect though, I can see that there was a myriad of beliefs that I didn't even realise I had accepted without question due to the fact that they were so deeply ingrained into my thinking.

When I was 23 I committed the 'unthinkable' according to my family! I became Catholic. After suffering great depression and anxiety, I found the Catholic expression of faith to be extremely beautiful and comforting. It was a very meditative religion and happy to rely on the knowledge that God was 'mystery'. Coming from the very black and white, fundamental, Protestant approach, I found this to be a welcome relief. The physical expressions of faith, such as the icons and statues, I found to be very appealing to my imaginative spirit. I still have extremely fond memories of my time in the Catholic church and I am very grateful for the comfort and peace that the Catholic faith gave me during some very difficult times in my life. Yet it was inevitable that eventually even this faith would be brought into question.

As the years passed by, I began to question more and more church teachings with the ultimate result being that I had to reject them entirely. Some of these teachings were:

-The prohibition of contraception
-The belief that homosexuality was a sexual perversion
-The acceptance that the God of the Old Testament was the same God of the New Testament and therefore was justified in condoning all the atrocities recorded there.

And this is only to mention a few!
I began to feel uncomfortable with being associated with the Church in general as I must confess to being rather embarrassed by it. I used to frequently say that while I was 'unashamedly Christian' out of all people that annoy me Christians annoyed me the most! I often felt rather guilty for feeling like this as I felt that since I was a Christian I should be supporting them. The fact that I wasn't made me feel a little uneasy. The truth of the matter was that I had already left my faith behind me...I just hadn't realised it yet.

The moment of clarity came when I began my Master of History. I had previously completed a Bachelor of Nursing and a Bachelor of Music. After working as a nurse for close to ten years, I finally realised that, due to my anxiety, it was not a good environment for me to work in and I let my registration lapse. My music had always been mostly a hobby and didn't look likely to develop into anything more than that. But when I began my history studies, I felt everything within me come to life. I had always loved history but never thought it was something serious I should pursue. But every word I read made my mind feel that rain was falling after an incredibly long drought. And knowledge...my mind soaked up knowledge like it had been waiting for it all my life. I was studying Ancient History and my very first subject was 'Pagan religions of ancient Greece and Roman.' That subject literally changed my life.

 As I began to study past religions I realised that my religion was nothing new. I had always been led to believe that Jesus brought something new, something novel to the world that it had never heard before. Well I realised now that this simply wasn't true. The themes of Christianity were most likely as old as humanity itself but they had been encountered through many different faiths and under the names of many different deities. There truly was 'nothing new under the sun' to quote the writer of Ecclesiastes. I realised that had I been born 3000 years ago, I would have believed that Zeus, Hercules and Aphrodite (to mention only a few) were real deities and (according to Christian teaching) for no fault other than ignorance, I would have been condemned to an eternity of Hell for not knowing Jesus Christ. Although not all Christians take this stance, just the existence of similar religious structures before mine had even been heard of was all I needed to take a step back for a second and look in on my belief system like an outside observer. And that was when I realised that my belief system was no longer what I thought it was! And that was that! Almost overnight, I realised that I had been walking along a different path without even knowing it.

About a year has now passed. Needless to say, that though the moment of realisation may have been filled with clarity and simplicity, nothing else on the journey since then has been. Life has been a constant mishmash of confusion, re-evaluation and redefinition. I am slowly starting to rebuild my belief system but it is so hard sometimes to know where I begin and my beliefs leave off as so much of who I am has been formed on a religious framework. I have come to realise that this will always be the case. Religion is a part of who I am and in order to embrace the future, I do not need to discard the past. If history has taught me anything, it is that it can lead us into new and amazing realms of experience and understanding if we only acknowledge and pay attention to it. For me to discard every element of religion from my life would be to discard 31 years of my life and indeed to also rip out pieces of my soul and throw them away. So I have kept my picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus because of all that it represents for me. A sacred heart, purity, unconditional love. These are things of beauty that I wish all the world to see. Though I no longer believe that Jesus is a deity, what his story represents remains real and beautiful for me.

So I take the next step into a future full of swirling unknowns. But my past is secure behind me and my present is bathed in the light of hope and precious dreams. Thankyou for walking this journey with me!

Until next time.
Peace and Happiness
Amber