The feeling of enlightenment has never quite reached me. I attended church as a child, from the newborn stage to about five years old we went to a Baptist church every Sunday. I remember sitting quietly, surrounded by other children with the youth pastor, making Christmas crafts and listening to their lessons.
My parents eventually fell away from the church. My mom no longer wanted to wake up early on Sundays, and my dad felt good in his faith, so he felt it was no longer necessary for him to attend weekly. After we stopped going to church, religion was barely mentioned in our house. We never prayed over dinner—with the exception of dinners with my grandmother—I was never told who the people in our nativity scene were, and I never held a Bible in my hand.
I didn’t think anything of this lack of spirituality until I mentioned something in conversation about Noah’s Ark, and my dad corrected me. He then became very upset that I knew nothing about God and his teachings. This interaction made me reflect on the role of religion in my life.
After years of envisioning a connection with God and waiting for it to come to me, I decided maybe I needed to make the connection myself. My friend’s dad is a pastor and did church at home, so I stopped in a few times. I enjoyed the meaning of the messages and thought they led to a good ideology, but I lacked the connection. I went to Young Life a few times, and I savored the community and lessons. Through Young Life, I went to a bible study brunch and expressed how I was looking for a connection with God, and they all supported me. But the connection I looked for still didn’t come, and I felt like a fake being surrounded by such passionate people.
I like the idea of religion and belonging to a group, feeling the sense of belonging and having a structure to navigate my path. The morals of the Christian faith and other religions are ideals I already live by. But the feeling of exclusion and inequality that comes with the Church doesn’t feel right. In my experience, there always seems to be a power differential between members and newcomers. It feels like people who are outside of the church seem to be ‘less than’ and that makes it hard to join the community, and I don’t want to make others feel that same isolating feeling. I dislike when people preach a faith but act against the ideals of it. If you say this is how a good Christian should live, yet you sin just as much as the next person, why are you the exception to the rule?
I try to remain impartial and open to the idea of it, and I do long for the connection and community of religion, but I don’t want to assimilate with a religion I don’t fully trust or believe in.
I hope that one day the feeling of enlightenment comes to me, and I finally understand the connection that has, for so long, escaped me. For now, I am content living by my moral compass and being open to new ideals shared with me.
