My Little Coming-of-Age World View

This summer, I went a little Bible-crazy.  It’s fine, you guys. I’m fine.  I had no conversion experiences, no brush-with-death leaps of faith, no immaculate conceptions.

I was neither saved nor born-again. The last time I went to church was once this summer, and I spent most of the time like I usually do in a church — looking around at the parishioners instead of the pulpit and wondering about what they are thinking when they bow their heads in prayer.

I have always had a general interest in how different religions operate, a curiosity-killed-the-atheist-cat kind of situation that I was actually born into as an unbaptized daughter of liberal atheist scientists who took me to a different house of worship every weekend to “see what’s out there.”  I developed a tolerance for other people’s beliefs, so I guess their parenting mission was a success, but I also ended up with a very amorphous understanding of what it means to belong to a faith community and to subscribe to a historically and socially recognized belief system.  Despite spending nine summers with overly patriotic Evangelicals at a Bible camp masquerading as an outdoor adventure camp, attending a Tibetan mandala ceremony with a moved-to-tears crowd of ex-hippies and sitting through four years of Catholic high school masses, I had yet to feel anything resembling conviction or devotion — not to mention inner peace.  So somewhere around pre-teenage-hood, a time of incomparable wisdom, I decided that religion stuff was all pretty inconsequential and relished my status as a little lost punk.  If you don’t understand it, write it off as stupid — American youths’ most charming credence.

But at some point in the last six months, for a conflagration of reasons, I started to connect to Biblical text with a quiet clarity and certainty that I had never formerly experienced.  (Note that this is a text that has been sacred to a good deal of humanity for much of recorded history, so I should probably stop feeling so visionary).  These verses were starting to meet my little coming-of-age worldview. Our worldview is that personal philosophy we develop sometime during the drama of our twenties, when we can be our most self-centered and tragic and searching.

Despite their newfound, inexplicable importance, the biblical epitaphs weren’t enough to convince me to join the group.  I see tiny, beautiful, universal connections and they move me, but I still balk at the idea of believing, with equal conviction, in the whole enchilada of anyone’s organized religion.  Most of the whole messy, human-construed playbook seems unappealing — the orders to attend church or to not eat meat on Fridays or to condemn other people and culture’s ideas about love and life.  I still grimace when I see Facebook statuses spouting bible verses or presidential candidates invoking the heavens.  I still don’t believe that I’d actually be praying to any entity.

So how on earth does a godless, flighty girl flirt with religion?  Is it, as my mother also likes to call my obsession with Gwyneth Paltrow’s blog “just a phase?”  I’d like to think my “spiritual journey” has more gravitas than my cultural sensibilities, but then again, I read Vanity Fair more than I read scripture, so let’s agree to maintain a healthy amount of skepticism in my authorial qualifications.

I’m hoping this column will be a biweekly concern with this problem, and in part, an investigation of the different opportunities of religious life offered in Middlebury.  I hope to engage with some manifestations of spirituality in our daily lives — a sphere that is sometimes disregarded because of our usual preoccupation with our physical/mental/emotional ones.  I will be attending masses, Shabbat, a gathering of the Intervarsity Christian group, a Hindu Association event and a Quaker Friends meeting.  I will be hunting down the sacred spaces available for student use on and off campus and interviewing the spiritual leaders on campus.  Ideally, I’d like to raise those feelings of curiosity and discomfort that are important to encounter once in a while — like trying out bikram yoga for the first time or going to Catholic confession, but maybe without the excessive sweat or paralyzing guilt.