9 Things I’ve Realized After 24 Months Of Studying God

The last two years of my Mdiv studies have been the most strange and wonderful, illuminating and refreshing, challenging and destabilizing. Who I am becoming is something more precious and refined, solid and crystalline than I could have imagined in 2019, when I began this program. The metamorphosis is not finished yet, but I’d like to take a moment to share where I have landed, for now. 

Usually, people go to seminary to become a pastor, but I [still] have no intention and no sense from God that I’m supposed to be a regular pastor.  Instead, I feel called to write and just talk about Christianity from a fresh, honest perspective.

Here are some of my landing spots from the last two years of seminary studies.

1. Christianity Is not Just About Beliefs. It’s also about Experience and Practice.

Western Christianity can sometimes feel fixated on beliefs. Make sure you believe the right thing or else the doctrine police are going to come and cast you out of the sanctuary.

However, as I’ve waded into the deep end of Christianity through my seminary program, I am realizing that while beliefs matter, it is my personal experience and practice that matters more. If it is Jesus that compels me to sacrifice my time, love and effort to serve others, should I really pay attention to someone who says I’m not a Christian because I believe the “wrong” thing?

I once rejected Christianity because it felt like it bound me to a set of beliefs. Now I see that Christianity also involves a deep well of experience and practice. What have I personally experienced about God? What does the practice of the faith do to my life? This is what keeps me around.

2. My spiritual journey is going to be unique. My understanding of Christian is unique.

This is perfectly ok, even good. 

I’ve written previously about this idea, but it deserves to be mentioned again because if you grew up in church (or any prescribed religion), you know about the pressure to conform. Your soul’s salvation and the fear of eternal torment becomes wrapped up with the psychological need for love from our parents and it’s a dangerous, traumatic concoction. 

I have a sense of peace now about my spiritual journey, one that is distinct from my parent’s Christianity. Yes, my mom and dad are still Christian pastors, and it’s easy to assume that they are the reason I’m a Christian, but it is way more nuanced than that.

On the surface, we might believe similar things, but my personal specific beliefs about Christianity, I’m sure, are quite different. They haven’t read the books I have, they didn’t grow up in a world with the Internet, and they haven’t gone backpacking in Africa.

And that’s ok. I accept now that even on their deathbed, my parents and I might not agree on some tenets of supposed Christian “beliefs,” but that doesn’t mean that Jesus is not alive in me.

Giving myself permission to disagree with other Christians on supposed “make-or-break” tenets of the Christian faith has freed me. Studying the history of Christianity has been so refreshing for this reason. I can see that what people believed about Christianity has evolved. The people who were heretics of one age became the heroes of another. And this happened over and over again! Somehow the faith lives on, and that, may be the very proof that Something Beyond Us is going on!

3. I am in good company.

 I am enthralled by the weirdness of this movement of people who have found Something in the Christian Story. As I unpack the wide variety of experience — the first Christians, medieval kings and queens, emperors, professors, preachers, mothers, mystics, social reformers, monks and nuns — it seems like I start to breathe in the atmosphere of heaven that they must have breathed.

I no longer feel alone as I wrestle with my questions about God, as I challenge the prevailing ideas of our age, as I walk forward into something beyond a church with flashing lights and a $100k sound system.

I am surrounded by a cloud of witnesses through the ages who have all looked at the sacred stories about a God and a human named Jesus and found something that touched their souls. I am in really good company.

4. Christianity Is always influenced by culture.

Christianity is a child of Judaism, which itself has beliefs that were likely influenced by Zoroastrianism. People who believed that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah were considered the crazy ones by the religious elite in Jesus’s day. 

Sometimes I walk through my neighbourhood and I wonder who are the crazy ones today? We, who believe that making more money, flipping houses and buying cottages is the “good life”? Or we who believe that serving others, loving the hurting and giving to the point of self-sacrifice is the “good life?” 

Christianity has always interacted with the existing political, social and spiritual temperament of every century and faithful Christians have found ways to express their best attempt at being a people of God. That’s why there were monasteries. That’s why there are hundreds of Christian churches denominations. That’s why there are gothic cathedrals and contemporary production stages that all claim to be a church.

In other words, Christianity has always been fuzzy at the boundaries.  It was and always has been influenced by its surrounding culture, whether that be Chinese, African, Western or Latina.

5. Whatever is at the center of Christianity is Sacred.

The analogy of the mountain is often used for spirituality. “All roads lead up the mountain.” In his book, The Heart Of Christianity, Marcus J. Borg offers an additional detail that I had never considered. If you’re climbing one of the great peaks like Everest, you cannot actually see the summit from the bottom. The summit is always hidden in clouds because it is so high, that it’s in the realm of clouds. As you walk up the mountain, be it through Christianity, Buddhism or Islam, at a certain point, you cannot see the people at the summit.

We call them saints. They are people who are so profoundly, thoroughly good, giving, and self-sacrificing that it makes you question yourself. That realm up above the clouds is the Sacred. The Sacred calls to us. It beckons us.  It feels like Home.

There is a certain point in our spiritual journeys will we start to glimpse the Sacred. If we keep going, then we will touch it, taste it, and everything about us will change. The bliss and the “goodness of God” at the summit surpass anything that this human life could offer.

6. I will Keep Walking Up The Mountain

I have found something profoundly, good, true and beautiful in the Christian story and so I have many reasons to continue walking up the mountain. 

The idea of belief in a great and beautiful transcendent being has been around long before Christianity, but the life of Jesus obviously has left a deep mark on humanity. ( Ie. We think it’s the year 2021 because of Jesus. In reality, the year 19204740 (*or some wildly large number we can hardly imagine, so old is the universe.) 

7.  Personally, I intend of continuing to learn about and from other religions and spiritual paths.

I recently discovered a whole host of Christian scholars who have written about inter-religious dialogue, and it’s something I will explore with the remainder of my program. (I’m so excited! I feel like I found my people!) More to come!

8. I accept that speaking into Christianity is part of my destiny.

I have two Christian parents who have been pastors for most of their working lives. My mom, age 61, is getting her doctorate in Christian Education right now. Clearly, my participation in Christianity was clearly written in the stars. There is no avoiding it.

Whereas it used to annoy me that I had this depth of Christianity in my family, I now accept that it’s part of my life purpose to help stir the pot. I’ve got things on my heart, things which I believe are from God, and I believe that I’m supposed to do something about them.

Say them. Talk about them. Write them down. Share them.

If God wanted to shut off the valve on all the things that bubble up in me, I’m confident he would. But God doesn’t. Instead, God lead me into seminary — the one thing that would actually give me some street cred as I write and talk about Christianity. (Without seminary, I could easily be dismissed as someone who “doesn’t know” any theology.)

Now that I now accept that I’m in good company and that there will always be people who disagree, I am not afraid. I walk boldly, with certainty, into the path God leads me on.

9. I am changing, and I like who this Anita is becoming and un-becoming.

The more I walk in the Christian river, or the more I drink from the found that circles around Jesus and the Christian God, the more something is changing in me. The same Intelligence that met me in Montenegro in 2017 is still at work. My life is permeated with synchronicities, spiritual blessings and mysticism that are undeniable. 

It appears that the spiritual vortex — the thin place —  I always sought as I travelled the world is opening up right before me.

It has nothing to do with my physical location. The key to the door was always in my soul.

As I open myself to God — to all these ideas about God, the prayers and people, the stories and songs, the theology and themes — God seems to actually enter me.  

Something so lovely, good and true inhabits me, inhabits my life. 

There is a lightness and clarity that is present in my life, that is my life. 

I have no fear of death. (I had already sorted that one out in East Africa at age 21.) 

But now, I have no fear of life.

So here I am: an intrepid traveller finding her way through the forest of Christianity, and to something beyond it.

I follow the ancient whispers of the saints in the wind.

I follow the Light that seeps in through the leaves, my constant compass towards the horizon.

Along the way, I kiss the trees and bless the paths that were paved by our ancestors. God-willing, I might even help lay to rest a few trees that dying, carving a new path for others in the process.

A new path, so that more of us don’t have to get lost in the forest.

We can find our way to the Source of the Light.

Infinite Love,

Anita

PS. if by some divine appointment you were loosely considering seminary and want to talk to someone about it, feel free to send me an email using the contact form on this site. :)