An excerpt from Syra’s Scribbles IV, originally written in May 2010
Most Christians have a Come-to-Jesus moment that they can share at testimony time, at least that’s what I remember from that brief stint as a Baptist, but it feels like my conversion was and still is a journey. I have found the Orthodox Church, the ancient church with the fullness of the faith, but there are still so many ways for me to grow as a Christian, to be the person God calls me to be.
One thing I love best about being an Orthodox Christian is that while I believe that I have found the true church, I also believe that God is the truth and that those who look for truth will find Him. Only God knows where anyone is on their path. I trust that God is working in my loved ones’ hearts and circumstances to bring them to Him because that’s what He did for me. I’m thankful for all the people who told me about Jesus and for the friend who introduced me to the Orthodox Church and said, “Come and See.”
As I relive these memory moments from my non-christian upbringing, I see the hand of God in my life. There were many moments of connection along the way and so many signs of Christian influence. After becoming a Christian, stories of people praying for me came to light. My half-sisters’ grandmother, my parents’ friends, my friends’ parents, the saintly deacon at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, and Mom. The list goes on. It’s through their prayers and by the grace of God that I am the Christian that I am today.
The earliest story of my faith was told to me by my grandma after my baptism into the Episcopal church when I was a teenager. With a smile, she described how we had lived with her when I was a baby and how I’d spend my day as a toddler playing for hours in my “kitchen,” the pile of rocks where I’d make mud pies and soup. She said that one day when she was outside with me, I had looked up at her and said, “I believe in God.” Grandma frowned as she continued, “You said, ‘I believe in God,’ just like that. You had it right back then. Why do you have to complicate everything with religion?”
Grandma had left the church in bitterness after playing the organ for many years to make ends meet. When her husband fell ill, no one supported her, and she abandoned the Christianity that had failed her. Mom and Dad didn’t go to church either. It’s hard to understand how the word, “God” could have entered my vocabulary, but I suspect that it was Mom.
My first memories are from our time at the ranch house, the house that Mom grew up in. Brief images of Mom pregnant with Ellen, stomach bulging, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, when I was two.
Standing below the oak tree holding someone’s hand. Looking out over the valley below our hill. Sitting outside in the shade of a tree with dirt and rocks. The breeze heavy with the scent of flowering bushes. There is something bigger than me. Peace.
We moved out of Grandma’s house into a three-bedroom rental on a side street a mile down Twenty-First Avenue. There were a couple of houses and a huge empty field where grass grew wild to a height above my older sisters’ heads. Maya remembers bringing me into the field to explore and make hiding places. The church across the lot figured into many of our imaginary games and was a comfort to me even though we never attended services there.
The tops of the grass wave high above us, and I’m afraid of being lost. I look up to the sky and see the steeple of the white church across the field. It is my landmark, my guide.
We moved into a six-bedroom house in downtown Vancouver when I was five. My parents were followers of the Baha’i Faith in my first memory of religion.
I sit at the feet of my sister Gretl on the green shag carpet in the living room. She plays the guitar while my sisters and I sing a hymn. The words tell of the wind singing in the valley that the promised one has come. I have no idea who the promised one is or what he has to do with God, but I feel close to my sisters. They want my small voice to join theirs. The song is beautiful, and the idea of the wind singing appeals to me.
Mom was Baha’i, but I suspect that she wasn’t in it whole-heartedly because it was about that time when she came to me and told me it was time for me to learn to pray.
Mom walks upstairs with me and waits while I put on my yellow footie pajamas. She instructs me to kneel down beside my bed and fold my hands upon the bedspread, a patchwork affair in bright Crayola colors whose squares are illustrations of places I long to visit and scenes I want to join. I am so small that when I kneel, my hands on the bed are at the level of my head which I bow and recite after Mom, “Our Father who art in heaven…”
Mom and Dad also discussed joining the Rajneeshees in Oregon in the early eighties the at the time I started elementary school. This was well before the Rajneeshee leaders were arrested for bioterrorism in 1985.
Dad sits at the table at breakfast, poached eggs, toast, and coffee before him. He reads the newspaper and tells Mom about the commune. He wants to move there. I don’t understand his arguments. Mom’s answer is no, but the threat of moving away worries me. I share a tiny half-bath upstairs with my sisters but have a bedroom all to myself. I like my house and my school and don’t want anything to change.
Mom held her ground through the heated discussions over the next few months. Later she told me that she was offended by the Rajneeshee’s anti-family sentiment. She wouldn’t be one of the parents who left their children behind to join the movement nor did she look kindly on the free-love and wife-sharing that attracted Dad.
Instead, they joined a Unitarian church a mile away from our house. I longed to join the adults in the big room upstairs to learn something but was left in a small basement classroom where the teacher read us “The Giving Tree,” a depressing book about a tree that sacrificed everything for a kid who didn’t care about it. I showed up with hair unbrushed and socks mismatched not because of neglect but because Mom didn’t notice these things the way the mean kids in the class did. I hated Sunday school, but something resonated with me about that place. I’d ride my bike up to the church property after school to be near God. One afternoon during this time is vivid in my mind.
I sit in the front yard trimming the grass that grows along the chain-link fence separating our yard from the fisherman neighbor next door. The warm wind is thick with the rich scent of grass, and roses and rhododendrons, and the sun kisses my face. I lift my eyes to the sky and am certain that there is a God and that I matter to Him.
We stopped going to the Unitarian church when Dad moved on to Sufism. He took it seriously enough to change his legal name. Mom didn’t join him this time. Dad would take me downtown Portland to watch him dance with the Sufis.
He tucks me into a cold corner to watch them twirl around in circles, and chant words in a foreign language. I lay on my coat, tucked under his brown sports jacket, and fall asleep, forgotten until the end of class.
I was in fourth grade when Dad took us to a Methodist Church. I sang “Kumbaya” in the children’s choir and played both a talking munchkin and a flying monkey in their presentation of The Wizard of Oz but didn’t learn much about Christianity. At home, family life was imploding. I remember the service at the height of Dad’s hypocrisy.
He stands at the front of the church, shoulders shaking, his face wet with tears. The reverend, a man with a permanent grin who never ever stopped smiling, embraces Dad and cries too. Adults surround them. I turn away from their words of praise and want to puke.
They were shocked when Dad left us and showed them who he had been all along. I haven’t had anything to do with my father since. I heard that he married a Mormon lady a year later and that they divorced. I looked him up on the internet a few years ago and saw his name on a Wiccan meet-up site. Who knows where his path has led him since?
After the divorce, I was a twelve-year-old girl with a profound belief in the existence of Satan and evil in this world. Abandoned and broken, I could not believe that anything would ever ease my pain. Once it had been so easy to believe that God existed and that He cared. Now God felt as far away as my father.
When Mom was left to choose for herself, she decided we would become Episcopalian, the denomination she remembered most from her childhood. She was a feminist and liked that they had ordained their first woman priest. She wanted my sister Ellen and me to be the first girl acolytes ever in that parish, which happened in the fall of 1987.
In the summer of 1987, I read A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, and though it wasn’t overtly Christian, it was very profound to me. I finished it at midnight on a Monday night. The picture she painted in my head of the war between good and evil in the universe overwhelmed me, and I was desperate to make a stand on the side of good. Somehow to me that meant getting baptized. I woke up early the next morning and told Mom that she had to drive me to church so I could talk to Rev. Harvey. He was at the church office and met with us that day. Rev. Harvey was hesitant to baptize us right away. He said that they had had a baptism the previous weekend which had made for a long service and that the congregation didn’t like to have them so close together, but I begged to be baptized without delay.
My knowledge of Christian doctrine was limited at best. Jesus was born in a manger. He died on the cross and rose again. God and Jesus were good. Satan was bad. It seems so strange to me looking back that the reverend baptized me with no more than a read-through of the Apostles Creed, but I trust that he saw something in me that made it all make sense. He read each line and asked me if I agreed, and I said yes. The next Sunday, August 23, 1987, Rev. Harvey sprinkled water on my forehead three times: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” I was baptized. I considered myself a Christian from that point on, though I later changed denominations over and over again, and once doubted the validity of my first baptism. When I became an Orthodox Christian, they accepted my baptismal certificate and chrismated me without a new baptism. Now I look back on the day of my baptism as the start of my Christian journey.
We attended St. Luke’s for a year or so before grandma tempted me to join her at her place of worship, the Unity Spiritual Center in Portland. After the divorce, we were dependent on her charity. Feeling that dependence and loving her because she was my grandma, I went to please her. The message I took away each Sunday was that there was no such thing as sin and that we were all wonderful people.
At the end of the service, we stand in a huge circle holding hands and sing a song about peace on earth starting with me. Everyone smiles at each other, but I know that grandma doesn’t like them and that they don’t know anything about me. While we smile and sing about unity, I wonder if their smiles are as fake as mine.
I used to preach the message that sin wasn’t real to my friend Naomi Cannell who was a few years younger than me. Her steadfastness in clinging to the Christian doctrine that she was raised in surprised me. Our moms had been best friends since I was in first grade and our families had done everything together. After the divorce, though we moved to Grandma’s property and their family moved to La Center, Washington, Mom and Nancy visited each other every chance they had. John and Nancy Cannell began to invite us to the Sunday evening services at their church Mountain View Christian Center in Ridgefield.
One evening after many such services when the pastor called sinners to come up to the altar to repent, I answered the altar call. So many Sundays I had stood there stoically adamant that it would never be me up there. I had grandma telling me that I wasn’t a sinner and memories of Dad at the front of the church deceiving the world to keep me from answering the call. I had my own pride as well, but there was also the small voice of a hurt child asking for help.
I’m up at the front of the church without being able to remember walking up. A woman asks if I want to give my life to Jesus and I nod yes. She leads me in a short prayer, “Lord Jesus I am a sinner. Please come into my heart…” A warmth fills me and it’s as if a cloak of bitterness and anger falls from my shoulders. The woman embraces me, and I feel loved.
I didn’t go back to Grandma’s church except on the occasional trip to her beach house in Oregon. Even though Mom also answered the altar call, she didn’t drive on freeways, which made going to the Cannell’s church in Ridgefield difficult to do every Sunday morning. The Episcopal Church didn’t feel right to me anymore either. My altar call experience didn’t fit in with what their services were like. Thus started a church-hopping experience that lasted for the next four years: Baptist of many flavors, Evangelical Free, Non-denominational of all sorts, Assembly of God, Four-Square. Once we visited a Vineyard church, but they howled like dogs during their service. We never went back. Every few months, when I wanted to change churches, Mom would follow me, bringing my sister Ellen with us. We started out as liturgical Episcopalians, and by the time I left for college, we were speaking in tongues and dancing down the aisles, hands waving in the air during the rousing full-band worship service.
I went to every Bible study I could find and attended multiple youth groups each week. Mom sent me on any outing any church offered, a mission trip to Mexico, a children’s choir tour in Canada, inner-tubing in the snow near Mount Hood, canoeing, water skiing. Joining churches opened many opportunities that a child of a single mom wouldn’t have otherwise had. One memory that stands out is a summer camp where I was baptized in a lake.
I’m crying in the cabin thinking of all the suffering I’ve experienced. The camp counselor comes and listens to me share one of the many hurts that still gape open after all these years. She tells me about how Jesus suffered and tells me that I must forgive as He forgives. In essence, she tells me not to wallow. She doesn’t understand me, but her words have truth. I will not define myself as a victim. I belong to God and will do as He wills.
The next day they asked who would like to be baptized and I decided to renew my vows to be a Christian. I also wanted to make sure I was baptized since no one there knew if a sprinkle baptism counted. I was one of many children who walked down the small sandy beach into the water up to my waist.
The lakeshore is bounded by a pine forest on all sides, the sky above blue and cloudless. The sand is smooth on my feet but bites into my knees as I kneel down three times completely immersed in the water.
When it was time to leave for college, I was firm in my faith and ready to stay a Christian no matter what happened away from home. There was a lively church in the small college town that welcomed me with open arms. They let me dance during the service and loved my youthful energy. They saw me at every meeting and Bible study that someone could drive me too. I loved it for a few years, but they became stranger and stranger. Their worship had no order, and they began to read books that told about Adam being a superhuman. It felt off to me but anyone who questioned their teaching was told that they were blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. By the time Mike and I started to date, I was more than ready to look into other churches and move to a more liturgical worship.
Mike and I attended almost every church in our college town trying to find a Christian denomination that would work for both of us. We didn’t go to the Episcopal church because I felt like I had tried that already, nor did we attend a Catholic church since we had both been exposed to a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment and didn’t think to look there. I remember one drive we had from Mike’s parent’s house in Albuquerque, New Mexico down to Socorro where we decided that the true church didn’t exist and that the best we could find was the Lutheran church where Mike grew up.
The pastor met with me for many weeks before confirming me into the Wisconsin Lutheran Synod and flew up to Vancouver, Washington so he could marry Mike and me at our Wisconsin Lutheran wedding. We stayed in Mike’s family’s church in Albuquerque until we left for graduate school a couple of years later. I loved seeing Mike’s parents, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents each week, but something still felt missing. I struggled to understand their catechism because it didn’t follow my own interpretation of the Bible nor did they give a reason that their interpretations had any authority. Still their beliefs in the sacraments of baptism and communion made sense to me. I did my best to conform. It was also hard to give up physical worship, but I joined a worship dance troupe which met on Tuesdays at a Foursquare church close to our condo and felt content.
It was shortly before we left for Notre Dame that Mike’s friend Aidan, who knew Mike when they were growing up in Albuquerque, told us that he had found the true church. We had dinner with him and his wife every Friday and always ate shrimp scampi with bread and margarine. No meat or dairy which is the fasting tradition on Fridays for Orthodox Christian. Wade refused to debate theology with me but kept repeating, “Talk to my priest,” and “Come and see.” When we came for our first service shortly before going to graduate school at Notre Dame, I was awed.
The smell of beeswax candles and incense fill the air which is hazy with the smoke from the censer. The icons of saints lining the four walls color the sanctuary in blue, red, and gold and reflect the light glowing from oil lamps and candles. Someone chants prayers in English at a music stand to the left in front of the iconostasis, the icon-covered partition that separates us from the altar. The priest sings at the door in front of the altar and the choir answers, “Lord have mercy.” Words that resonate in my soul. It is worship unlike anything I have ever known before. I am in the presence of God. The Orthodox Christians around me make the sign of the cross and bow to the ground, their hands touching the floor, but I can’t move. I stand the whole service afraid to sit in the presence of such unearthly beauty.
Mike and I moved to Indiana where we attended a Lutheran church but continued to study the Orthodox Faith. The more we learned, the more we realized that we didn’t understand. We didn’t even know the right questions to ask. We decided to drive around Lake Michigan one three-day weekend and though we didn’t get all the way around, we came back with the decision to attend an Orthodox service. At our first vespers service, they asked us to come again the next week and then the next and then to their Sunday Liturgy. They were preparing to receive the Patriarch of Antioch in Chicago, which sounded amazing, so we kept going. We met with Father Antony after vespers each Saturday and attended liturgy on Sunday. By the time we had made the trip to Chicago and saw the Patriarch we were convinced that the true historic church existed, that Eastern Orthodoxy was what we had been looking for all along. The sense of mystery and tradition was beyond anything else I had experienced. The service was both liturgical and physical in nature with icons, incense, and prostrations. It was all so beautiful, and the people welcomed us with joy and love. Every need was satisfied. My years of church-hopping ended.
Mike and I are converts but each and every one of our children are cradle-Orthodox raised in the faith. They experience communion in the womb before they were born. Mom started going to an Orthodox Church after visiting us in San Diego in the summer of 2004. She came to live with us in January of 2005 and we were able to see her Chrismated as an Orthodox Christian that Pascha. She is also content to stay an Orthodox Christian though she might be happier still if there was a Western Rite Orthodox Church in Albuquerque since their services are more like the Episcopal church. We are still praying for Mike’s folks. His mom seems interested. Lord have mercy. I am so happy in the Orthodox Church and my gratitude at finding myself here is renewed every day with my morning and evening prayers.
Syra's Scribbles 