Boviosity!

I started listening to Dr. Laura.

Heavy-handed moralizing? Check.
Sneering condescension toward non-believers? Check.
Reliance on easy answers based on hastily-considered scripture? Check.

But. But. But.

There was no denying that she was a smart lady. And there was no denying that she was doing good work: her foundation was helping the poor and sick, and she was obviously putting her heart (not to mention her blood, sweat and tears) into it. I admired that. And, most importantly of all, I found that I never, or hardly ever, disagreed with the advice she gave her callers.

This post is not intended to be a defense of Dr. Laura, and comments attacking her will be ignored. My intent is to describe how I started thinking differently about religious people. She was the first religious person I'd ever heard who I didn't want to immediately put into a sack and drown. And so she got me to thinking.

I thought about people like C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkien - believers all, and people who I knew to be brilliant. How is it, I thought, that I have rejected out of hand (and out of ignorance) that which these brilliant people have believed? Am I really that much smarter than them? Or, for that matter, that much smarter than the preachers I'd heard? What made me think I knew, really knew, what was going on in their hearts and minds? The preacher who preached about last week's episode of "Touched By An Angel" had, I knew, at least twice as much education as I did; maybe he'd learned something. Maybe I'd learn something by listening to him or someone like him.

I told my wife I wanted to start going to church. She was happy to oblige and we started exploring. I set some ground rules: I would walk out if I heard people I loved attacked. I would walk out if I was threatened with Hell. In short, I would walk out if I found the church living down to my previous, easy stereotype of it.

None of these things ever happened. I think I might have been lucky. We stuck largely to Episcopal churches for Tasha's sake, and Methodist churches for my sake (I'd attended a Methodist church during a teen "believing" phase, where "belief" is defined as "belief that it was a good way to get next to some girls who went to the church.") I heard nothing overtly offensive, although I noticed some things that bugged me. For instance, I felt compelled to tell someone once that I could tell the difference between the thrumming of a low pedal key on the organ, and the Spirit moving me. (I'm still cynical about showmanship's place in the church, no doubt about it, although I sing in the choir.)

Things stayed this way for about a year, until we moved to our home in Gwinnett County. We'd been living in a Buckhead apartment and had never settled on a church. We'd felt like outsiders everywhere we went, probably because we felt like outsiders in our own lives - we hated our apartment and so we hated (largely) our lives.

Then when we moved, we started attending one church regularly. St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Snellville is a smallish but rapidly growing parish with a wonderful man named Doug Coil as rector. The people were accepting and seemed genuinely glad to have us there.

All that was fine as far as it went, but after a few weeks there we stopped going - Tasha was pregnant and our daughter was born in December. To our surprise and delight, Fr. Doug appeared in Tasha's hospital room and blessed Annie, and then fell asleep in one of the chairs in the room.

So we started attending again after Annie came home. And something else started happening. I started feeling a new relationship with the world and the people around me. I looked inward and found something there that I'd never seen before. Just as visiting a gym every day and climbing onto the treadmill will eventually strengthen your heart, I found a part of me being strengthened that I'd never paid serious attention to before. It's hard to describe - it was an acceptance of people's flaws, a desire to see the best in the world, a hope for the best for the people around me, a hunger for knowledge beyond the remotely intellectual. I call that my spirit.

I listened to the liturgy and the homilies and was reminded of what I'd read of Eastern spirituality, of the duality of existence and the importance of seeing the now for what it is, and more importantly the past and future for what they are not. Scripture that I'd previously read as rotely proscriptive of feeling or doing fun stuff, I now came to read as pointing to a new understanding of the fun stuff, of its insufficiency to fill the Now, of the distance it places between us and the Now.

This is all starting to sound gobbledy-gooky again. The important thing to me, and the reason I willingly recite the Nicene Creed every Sunday, is because of my gratitude to God's church, for what it has done for my spirit, and for what I believe it can - must - do in the world - one believer at a time. Contrary to every media representation of the church, and there are plenty, I have never been threatened with Hell at any church; I have never been singled out for any behavior and told that it was sinful. Some of the people are tiresome, but largely they're happy tiresome people, and that makes a huge difference.

Bottom line: believing in God has changed my life for the better, and nothing but the better. I am an example of Hell being defined as separation from God, because I separated myself from God and I know that's where I was.

I don't want any of my atheist or agnostic friends and family to think that this means I think they should change or that I'm better than you are. I believe, as Fr. Doug once told me, that "Evangelism is showing a hungry man where there is bread." I long ago gave up my mind-reading attempts, and so I will not presume that you are among the hungry just because you're not eating at the banquet I have found.