A Little Biography, part I

This is who I am. I was born in 1960, in Austin, Texas. My mother was a legal secretary (think Mad Men with a drawl), my father a salesman (half the buildings in downtown are held together by his products). In between assorted child-rearing, work, and church obligations, she shopped and he hunted. So the pickup had a gun rack full of rifles and their closet had a shoe-rack full of Ferragamos. I was on the cradle roll in a mid-sized Southern Baptist church, where mother sang in the choir, daddy joined the deacons for a smoke between church and Sunday School, and my grandmother played the piano. Services Sunday morning and night, Wednesday night prayer meeting, and (eventually) Thursday night youth group, summer camp, Vacation Bible School, youth choir trips -- this was full-immersion Southern Baptism. I learned to read by standing in the seat beside my mother during the song service, and following her finger under the words of The Old Rugged Cross and At Calvary. I learned the importance of fellowship with believers, as daddy rose early on Saturday mornings to cook for the Men's Prayer Breakfast. I learned a lot of Bible, and a lot of American frontier theology. I learned that God is personal, that Jesus died for our sins, and that church is important. I came to Christ when I was 7, and I stayed.

So after my first year at UT, when a traveling singing ministry did a gig at our church, I signed up, and spent the next 3 years in the US and Canada singing, leading Bible studies, running summer camps, doing skits and puppet shows, and finding a husband. Jeff and I married, and while he worked, I had our first baby and finished undergrad, started grad school, dropped out of grad school, and had two more babies. Jeff ran the youth ministries at several Baptist and "Bible" churches in town, building an orphanage in Mexico with his charges. I sang in the choirs, and taught in the Sunday Schools. We were active and busy and I was bored in my faith.

The Christians we associated with were earnest and faithful; they studied and prayed and sang and taught. But it didn't seem like any of us were being transformed by God. It felt like we were hitting the marks laid out for us, but getting little that distinguished us from those folks who spent their Sunday mornings reading the paper and tending their gardens rather than pulling on pantyhose and heading to church. I despaired.

And then we moved to Colorado...

Where to start...

So let me tell you why I'm doing this (other than an inordinate fondness for the sound of my own typing). Well over a year ago I was having lunch with my friend Shannon. We aren't often in the same city, so it took a while to work our way through the family-and-friends news. When we moved onto more random subjects, we started talking about Art Bell -- you know, that guy that has the amazing late-night talk show that features UFO aficionados, alien abductees, and callers enamored of various extra-terrestrial forces. We marveled at the wide variety of psychologically suspect belief systems that crop up on that show.
And then she said, "So what's new in your world? I answered, "Well, I don't think I can be Protestant anymore." And then I gave her the highly condensed version of my rather haphazard study of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. It went something like, "So there's a priest, lots of fasting, a liturgy that's 1500 years old, and incense, and etc.etc.etc., and icons, the Theotokos, saints, etc.etc.etc., and more fasting, Roman Catholicism splits off in 1054, standing during the entire service, etc.etc.etc., mystical transformation of the elements during communion, etc.etc.etc., and did I mention kissing those icons?"
When I finally ran out of steam, she said, "Hmmm. So, if I google this 'orthodoxy' thing, am I going to find that this isn't much different from the stuff those Art Bell callers come up with?"

Ouch.

So it occurs to me that over the last couple of years, as I've been talking with friends about this little journey, that there's way too much information and contemplation to dump onto someone in one sitting. And I do confess to a good deal of convert enthusiasm, that can make my exposition a bit incoherent for the uninitiated. So I hope this blog can be a space to explore and consider, and trace the path Jeff and I have taken to this point.