I called myself a truth seeker: I just want to know the truth.

Not the little truth, the things they were telling me, but the big Truth, the one that stands upright when opinions bend.

Something told me that there was more to Christianity than what I had been taught. Surely, the summation of a 2000-year old faith could not be this dozen teenagers in a youth room eating Doritos. Surely, there something is missing if there are stadiums packed with worshipers, a sea of arms outstretched high, when my own parents’ church can’t fill seats on Christmas day. Surely, Christianity is either a scam preying on the weak and unmotivated, or it is something else altogether.

I was 17 and had nobody that I could talk to about these things. The adults I trusted I had let me down in other ways, so I wasn’t about thrust my existential questions on them.

I wanted this ominous, vengeful deity out of my life, but unfortunately for me, languages learned during childhood are never forgotten. On the long journey between rejecting God, ignoring God, and accepting God, I stumbled into books that used language I could recognize.

My eventual acceptance of God’s existence was a long, caution-filled process. If God was real, he or she (or it) was butting it’s head into my life playfully, as if to not spook me. God would pop into books I was reading, like a stranger I kept seeing on the seeing on the street, each time in a different disguise. I would turn to take a second glance — “Wait, do I know you? Are you following me?” — but he or she would be around the corner before I knew it. I could always recognize the soundbites of God.

“I am not my body. I am free.”

“God is in everything that I see.”

“I choose the peace of God today.”

“Let not my world obscure the sight of Christ.”

I was 24 and looking for a miracle after my first attempt at starting a business was giving me anxiety attacks. I found the videos of self-help guru, a brassy, blonde, New Yorker who taught from a book called A Course In Miracles.

My mom thought A Course In Miracles, the blue and gold, 1000+ page book, was heresy, but the I was certain: Stranger On The Street had left this breadcrumb for me.

Through the simple practices of meditation, stillness and remembering in that book, my heart slowly opened to the idea that God was real and good.

Though I am now employed at a church right now, I still don’t like to call myself a Christian. When I say that word out loud, I’m afraid that I’m conjuring up your idea of what a Christian is. In a passing conversation, I don’t get to define the word on my terms.

What exactly is your idea of a Christian? My idea used to be Boring People Who Don’t Drink. Don’t do drugs. Don’t have sex before marriage. Don’t lie. Don’t read Harry Potter. Go to church on Sundays. Read their Bibles.

I’m afraid if I call myself a Christian, you’ll think that I’m going to smack you on the head with a phone-book sized Bible for the sins you’ve committed.

But what if by Christian I mean that I believe we are all called to love as Jesus loved us when he walked the earth?

Father Richard Rohr’s definition of a true Christian, a mature Christian, “is one who sees Christ in everything and everyone else.” He says, “We need to look at Jesus until we can see the world with his eyes. In Jesus Christ, God’s own broad, deep, and all-inclusive worldview is made available to us.”

What if by Christian, I mean that I choose love over fear? Whether I make this choice to love because I have been exorcized out my demons, or because the Holy Spirit has transformed me or because the incarnate Jesus lives in my heart, I’m not sure.

But I still choose love.

What if I believe that we are each put on this earth for a unique purpose? This belief happens to line up with the Christian idea that we are made in the image of God and loved by God, but it’s possible not to believe in a benevolent supernatual being, and still believe that you have a purpose.

For many years, I didn’t believe in God. But I still believed in a divinely-ordained purpose for my life.

Some progressive Christians have started calling themselves things like, “Christ-follower”, “Jesus-Follower”, to get around the millennia-sized baggage of Christian.

I’d prefer to stick with truthseeker. A truthseeker who happens to be doing my truth seeking in Christianity-steeped water.

How about… I am a pilgrim on a journey of constantly uncovering the mysteries of what it means to live, who or what Divinity is, as I try to live the most courageous, meaningful, and kind life that is possible. I, and my beliefs, are frequently being transformed by my life experience, personal revelations and new and ancient teachers. My beliefs are constantly being molded, layer after layer, from the time my mom was uttering the Lord’s Prayer to the glob of cells in her womb that would become me, until now I am adult-sized homo sapiens.

It just so happens, by a stroke of destiny, that I was born to parents who are devoted practitioners and propagators of the Judeo-Christian tradition. My childhood was a vibrant array of Noah’s Arks, salvation cards and Sunday School songs. I have 18 years of experience being steeped in Christianity (albeit only one version) that I cannot erase. The God in Christianity is my starting point for processing other belief systems, worldviews, spiritualities and religions.

It would impossible for me to start my pilgrim journey again from a Buddist, Hindu or Muslim starting point, but I can still learn about them. My experience of other spiritual traditions will not be the as a life-long practitioner, but I do believe that other paths have gifts to offer humanity.

Is Christianity the only spiritual tradition that can help people to live with more clarity, peace, love and purpose? Of course not.

Is the Christian tradition the best one to follow? I’m still working on that answer.

What I do know is that the Christian traditional not entirely evil. It has good gifts to offer the human race. By engaging with its stories, teachings, spiritual practices and community of adherents, I am seeing something positive occur in my life.

Do I need to engage with the artifacts of the Christian tradition?

No, I don’t need to, the same way I might need water to survive. But much like our bodies need to consume something to flourish, our souls need to consume something.

When my body is thirsty, I can feed it a cup mineral water, or I can feed it a litre of ice cream. During the moment of consumption, my body will react according to the substance. Ice cream makes me feel giddy, but if I continue eating ice cream for a week, my body will react differently than if I drink mineral water for a week.

My soul also needs something to consume. Humans are wired to make meaning of life. We crave stories, love and relationship.

If I don’t consume a steady diet of spiritual things, I will start to consume a steady diet of Youtube channels, self-help books and Netflix shows. They start to magnify this longing in me… like eating ice cream and still being thirsty.

If I don’t feed my thirst for truth with ideas that seem to point to truth, I will start consuming the ice creams of ideas: that Paris Hilton documentary, home decor ideas on Pinterest, recipes for vegan no-back protein balls.

So I try to feed my longing for truth with truth.

How do I know that it’s a good idea for me to feed myself with ideas, stories, songs that hail from the Christian tradition?

1. Fate.

As I’ve shared before (somewhere on this blog), I ended up with a job at a church is quite different from the one I grew up in. There were multiple serendipitous omens that showed up (and continue to show up) when I started working here. It cannot be a mistake. It would be like finding out that a child prodigy grew up in a family that loved music. I can reject this fate, and I did, but it seems before unwise, and basically, mindless rebelliousness to reject it. Imagine a child determined to learn how to play the marimba when her home is housing dozens of guitars? There is some kind of divine intelligence ordering my life, and it seems to do a better job of rising the sun than me, so sometimes I follow along.

2. The more I wade into the deep end of Christian, the more gold I find.

What is theology? What is eschatology? (The study of the end times.) You mean extremely intelligent people have written books about this stuff and they’re not just 20-somethings with a hunch? I am like a child who always like tomatoes, but now I get to learn about the nature of soil, light, gardening, botany, biology, geography.

Occasionally, (ok, frequently), I feel like I’ve waded in too deep and I’m going to drown in ideas, but then I step back and look at the whole garden. The mystery of a tomato has now become miraculous. I am steeped in theories and theologies, saints and sacraments, prophets and prayers and it is not such a bad thing. I have to feed myself with something…

When I first enrolled in this seminary program, I was afraid that I would be waisting my time in the weeds of Christianity. Now I feel as though an invisible hand is leading me through what I thought was a weed-ridden field. An invisible hand shows me that I thought was a weed is a wildflower here, a shrub there, saplings over here, herbs over there, bird nests everywhere.

So, it’s a strange thing to be truthseeker and uncertain Christian while I work at a church and study at a Christian seminary. I used to feel like, one day, they’re find me out and kick me out of the church or kick me out of the program. This fear is one of the reasons I stopped posting online and writing about spiritual topics.

Now, two years later, I feel more sure in my relationship with and personal understanding of God. My beliefs are certainly not identical to some of the traditional Christian “Statements of Faith” (something I’ll unpack another day) but I trust that God has placed me where I’m meant to me.

On the outside, my life looks as “Christian” as it gets, in inwardly, I am still in search of big answers to my deep questions. I have realized that the answers I seek will take years to come together, and while I absorb, dissect and formulate the answers, I have a human life to live.

Christianity is not a cage, it’s a way. A path for a seeker.

Infinite Love,
Anita

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