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Today is the feast of the conversion of St. Paul. Most of you are familiar with this story, but if not, you can read it here. At any rate, I am a convert to Christianity myself, although not in such a dramatic fashion.
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I was raised Unitarian Universalist… the Unitarians were a Protestant denomination that took root during the reformation, first in France and later in Transylvania. The main pillar of Unitarian thought exmphasized the unity of God as one indivisible being (a refutation of the Catholic trinity) and the autonomy of the individual (a refutation of Calvanist and Prebyterian predestination arguments). As time went by, the Unitarians became more open in their interpretation of scripture, culminating in their merger with the Universalists in the 1960s.
The Universalists were a school with Enlightenment roots arguing that, since ultimate truth is unknowable, a rigorous search for truth is more important than what is actually found.
After the merger, the church became a draw for other groups of people. The church’s liberal approach to theology attracted atheists on the one hand and paganists on the other. Denominational support of progressive causes attracted gays and lesbians and feminists with a variety of religious background and beliefs.
I still have many friends who were and are Unitarians, and I still enjoy Unitarian services when I have the chance to attend them. Starting in eighth grade, however, I started to wonder if this faith might not be for me. I clearly remember during the summer 1994, fueled by an obsession at the time with both Romania and the former Yugoslavia, riding my bike seven miles in the blazing heat to St. Michael’s Byzantine Catholic Church outside Flint. I met with two priests there, who led me around the church, explaining the symbolism in the icons and the tumultuous history of their faith. I learned, firstoff, that the Byzantine Ruthenian church wasn’t strictly Orthodox Christian, though it incorporated many elements of orthodox theology (ie. we cannot define what God is, but what God is not). The Byzantine Ruthenian church, like many in Eastern Europe, was caught and implicated in many conflicts between imperial powers, the Russians, the Turks, the Hapsburgs, the Prussians, and so on. The result in this case was a church (ultimately) formally allied to Rome, but allowed to retain many Orthodox christian practices, such as the iconostasis and the use of bread for host instead of wafers.
This was a lot of history to digest, and a lot of bike riding to attend these sessions. As 1994 wore on, I had new priorities. I eventually gave up on the Byzantine Ruthenian church and put organized religion on the back burner.
I spent a long time thinking upon other religions I’d encountered, though this was a more passive exploration. One full year of Unitarian Sunday school had involved visiting places of worship for different faiths and speaking with religious leaders. We visited a mosque, a synagogue, and a Hindu temple. At that time, there weren’t any Buddhist shrines in the Flint area, but we spent several sessions discussing Buddhism.
In the end, my cultural distance from many of these faiths ruled them out. I did not find the midwestern Buddhists to be disingenous, but their lifestyle was so similar to that of the Unitarians, and so far removed from most of their chosen faith, that I saw little value in attaching myself to a religion I already knew except through cultural perspective. Unless I were to commit wholeheartedly to understanding that milieu. While I increasingly appreciated the theology and science of the Islamic Empire and Hindu civilizations, the Hajj was a distant concept to me, and castes even more so. If a culturally foreign faith was to convince me, it would have to overcome the additional hanicap of my unfamiliarity with its fundamental concepts. On the other hand, many close friends, mostly Southern Baptists, came from an intimitely familiar background and were more than willing to win me over by any means, including terror. Despite their determination and good-intentions, I never stepped too far down that path. The closeness, judgmentality, and their own cultural biases almost immediately informed me that I would never be “a good Baptist.” I flirted with Judaism for awhile, but for all of its immense history and grandeur and elegance, it still felt to me like a play missing the third act. I wanted to reconcile the Mosaic texts with Tobit and Isaiah, and the Law didn’t entirely convince me.
These are all my impressions, and while I shouldn’t apply them, as if facts, to others’ arguments, I would be just as remiss to make my own decisions without taking such impressions into consideration.
If I’m honest, I knew that I could be moved and I would be moved. A statement that I still stand by, and that will brand me a heretic in many people’s eyes is that God goes by many names, singular and plural. More importantly, God is recognized, acknowledged, and obeyed through acts of faith unknown to us, and far more sophisticated than our clumsy and imprecise declarations and oaths. Humans, then, should focus on sincerity of action, rigorous altruism, and humility. Determining (discriminating?) the “name of God” is a necessarily inellectual process, and one which the Universe will win, not us. So: We should focus on our faith instead.
In other words, I wasn’t looking for “one true faith” as much as the one faith I could most truly respond to. This took a lot of my energy, and so I put off the experiment through the rest of high school. Ironically, most of my friends at this time were Catholic. They went to Luke M. Powers Catholic High, were taught by nuns, sometimes had candles lying around their homes, and even knew snippets of Latin. Their stories and experiences honestly were a part of my high-school experience. It wasn’t something we talked about. It was just there, in the background.
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College gave me a tremendous burst of energy: moving to Chicago from Flushing, Michigan, to an intense academic institution from the laid-back acquiescence of Flushing High… a lot had already changed, so I felt equal to the religious quest once again.
For two years I gave Unitarianism an honest second stab. I even involved myself with the Campus Ministry group, which each winter performed a lay service at First Unitarian in Hyde Park and got together every month or so for pizza and a service. But I’d also intensified my study of Romania, which gave the Orthodox argument appeal, and had maintained ties with Catholic friends in both Flint and Chicago, while taking a couple furtive looks at my own family’s history.
My family’s own religious history is muddy and unusual. My parents were both raised Methodist. I know very little about my maternal grandfather, but my maternal grandmother was of Swedish descent, lived in Dutch-Reformed influenced western Michigan (near the town of Holland, in case you disbelieve), though her family at some point was Christian Scientist. Additionally, much of my mother’s family has moved to Utah, and many converted to Mormonism.
My father’s mother’s mother’s father (my great great grandfather) was a Methodist circuit preacher who started out in Massachussetts in a covered wagon and preached his way to Flint. My father’s father’s family, however, was largely of Irish descent. My great-grandfather Mark Francis Coyne, born during or shortly after the crossing had somehow picked up a venomous hatred for the Catholic church. Since they weren’t coming from a remotely part of Erin (specifically County Clare) We’ve deduced two possibilities; the less interesting being a land dispute and the more interesting being a deliberate reinterpretation of Cohn or Cohen as Coyne, meaning that we may have been Irish Jews.
By the end of my third year of college, I’d essentially narrowed down the list to three final choices. I realize this is a very clinical way to talk about one’s faith of choice, but as I’d proceeded some religions would reveal something that made me say, “that’s not me.” These three had been holding out: Romanian Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Unitarian Universalism.
This all came to a head during my visit to Romania and Ireland during the summer of 2000. At this point, the “credentials” of each faith in my life seemed equal to each other, and I wound up for a couple weeks in Transylvania, the one part of the world where almost everyone belongs to one of those three faiths. At some point I realized that, regarding Romanian Orthodoxy, as I had observed with Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism, I could not examine the theology of this faith distinct from its incubating culture. While I loved Romania and hope to return there, I never inhabited the soul of its people, and I have not found an Orthodox Christian faith to which I would comfortably belong. Back in Chicago, when I took my Catholic girlfriend to a UU Campus ministry event, and she was ignored by practically everyone else in the room, I realized that even a faith given to equality and a pursuit of truth does not always sustain these goals… and in the absence of another unifying theme, a foundation on which to lean, I lacked the access that I needed.
I finally made up my mind in January, 2001. Above all, I was convinced by the idea of the Catholic church not as a prosthelytizing church, but a catechising church, a church in dialogue with other faiths and beliefs, looking for similarities and differences and enquiring as to their meaning. A church trying to untangle, strand by strand, the elaborate puzzle of existance. That, and a church obsessed neither with individuals nor groups, but believing that the essense of an individual is suspended in the relationships they maintain with others.
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Of course, that’s the ideal Catholic Church, the platonic Catholic Church… in many ways the Church I joined has established itself on the opposite side of issues important to me. And while I couldn’t have reasonably foreseen all of the developments in the recent years, I certainly knew the general direction of the wind. Does that mean I should leave? No. Paul didn’t leave, although some might argue that he changed almost everything. It is my responsibility, now that I have found this faith, to cleave to it and adhere to what is true and beautiful in it, and decry and deplore what works against this beauty from outside and within.
All I’m saying is: It didn’t get to happen all at once for me, with blinding light and a fall from a horse. My role is necessarily much smaller that Saul’s or Paul’s; I may be called to listen more than to speak. But I do speak and walk and listen. I have followed my nose on this one for over a decade, made a number of wrong turns, and hit a number of dead ends.
Many friends of mine are going through the same process, and they are headed, I believe, toward very different destinations. Yet this has never interfered with friendship.
Conversion and conversation. Consternation and concentration.
We’re surrounding and immersed in these difficult and ongoing things.
END OF POST.