Born Again: A Conversion Story

Fritz Williams

I grew up in a religious tradition that doesn't put much stock in conversion. First as Lutheran and then as Episcopalian, I was among people who take it for granted our religious beliefs grow and evolve gradually. We didn't trust those denominations where you have to be born again, where you have to go through a convulsive, life-changing experience. We looked down our noses at all that "holy roller" stuff.

For the most part, I think the Lutherans and the Episcopalians are right. We become who we are, what we are, through very gradual, almost imperceptible changes. We grow up, we mature, we age, and we hardly notice what's happening to us - until we stop and look in the mirror, and we realize how far we've come and where our journey has taken us.

Still, there are times when change is not gradual. When it's sudden and dramatic, and it hits us all at once. Change comes on like that, I think, mostly because we've been trying so hard not to change, because without realizing what we're doing, we've been fighting it off. We've been resisting ideas and insights that challenge our beliefs and assumptions - and our way of life.

We can go on for a long time with our lives on hold. But at some point, the weight of everything we've been holding back gets to be too much for us, and something inside gives way. Woosh! The whole thing rolls over us like a flood. At that moment, we have the feeling that maybe the Lutherans and the Episcopalians are wrong, and the folks who say you have to be born again have it right.

I had a conversion experience. It was a long time ago when I was a minister in the Episcopal Church. I was just a few years out of seminary, and I was serving a small congregation near Levittown, Pennsylvania. The church was doing pretty well, and I loved the work. I thought it was about the most important thing I could do - bringing people to Christ and helping them grow in their faith.

But while I was working at that church, I was also a part-time graduate student at Princeton Seminary. Princeton was only half an hour away across the river in New Jersey. I was studying Hebrew Bible and Septuagint, an early Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. It was an unusual and demanding program. But I did it because I was good at languages - and because I thought it would add an important dimension to my ministry. It would bring me closer to the events on which Judaism and Christianity are founded. It would make my preaching more lively and real.

At Princeton, the emphasis was on studying the Bible in the context of what is known about the history and literature of the Ancient Near East. We learned what archeology is teaching us about the Bible. We studied the writings of people throughout the region - writings from Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Egypt. We examined the Bible as literature and how it was pieced together from various documents and competing traditions. We learned about different manuscripts and versions - in Hebrew, Greek and other languages including points where they disagreed with one another. We observed how meanings change when you translate from one language to another. We read books written between the Old and New Testaments - the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls. And we read the Nag Hammadi documents - long-lost writings representing an unorthodox, Gnostic version of early Christianity.

A lot of the Biblical knowledge I was exposed to has been repressed and ignored by churches and religious leaders. Sex abuse is not the only thing the Church has covered up. The cover up of clerical sexual misconduct has gotten more press, but the cover up of Biblical scholarship is actually more serious. It goes right to the heart of the corruption of western religion. It's a major scandal. But having studied the stuff, I can understand why it has happened, why the findings and opinions of Biblical scholars remain surrounded by an ecumenical conspiracy of silence to this day. The things these scholars have discovered are filled with devastating implications for traditional believers.

At Princeton Seminary, I had to deal with the fact that the Biblical creation stories and flood story in Genesis are revised versions of stories which had existed in the Ancient Near East for hundreds, even thousands of years. I saw that the exodus and the conquest, the central events of the Hebrew Bible, are full of contradictions and are not supported by archeology. They could not have happened as they are represented in the Bible. I learned that the origins of Biblical worship, prophecy, wisdom, and law, the primary institutions of ancient Israel, were not specifically Jewish, but were rooted in the cultures of the entire Near East.

I learned that the New Testament is even more problematic. The gospels are full of difficult inconsistencies, especially between the first three gospels and the Gospel of John. Not only are there huge discrepancies in the events they cover and their chronologies, but also in their portrayal of Jesus. At times they seem to be describing two different people. In the first three gospels, the synoptics, Jesus is a storyteller. He speaks in parables. But in John he delivers theological meditations. At some point, I learned that Jesus' resurrection appearances are missing from the earliest manuscript of the Gospel of Mark, the first of the canonical gospels. And this suggests that accounts of Jesus' words and deeds may have circulated originally without the claim that he rose from the dead.

But these complications and inconsistencies were not my main problem. It was the feeling I had that I was developing a fully naturalistic, unmiraculous overview of how Judaism and Christianity came to be. Yahweh had evolved from a desert God... to a national God... to a universal God... to a cosmic savior-God in conflict with the forces of evil. Based on what I was learning, He was not a God who had acted in human history, as the Bible claims, but a God human beings had invented and developed - and were continuing to revise and refine.

My teachers and fellow students were generally ordained clergy. Somehow they reconciled their naturalistic, scholarly understanding of the Bible with their faith in a God who acts in history. But it seemed to me they did it by treating Biblical events as fully historical in church when they were preaching, and as mythical and symbolic in academic settings. As far as I was concerned, they were talking out of both sides of their mouth. It was double talk.

Once this crack opened up in my faith, other doubts and misgivings found their way in. I began to question the benefits of being a Christian, the value of my work as a minister. I didn't expect the members of my congregation to be perfect saints - the name of my church was All Saints - but I did look for evidence of the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives. What I saw when I looked out on a Sunday morning were people who derived comfort and sense of community from their faith. But it seemed to me our faith supported narrow-mindedness. All too often, it stunted our growth and made us less alive, less compassionate, less human.

I had to admit that science was not revealing a world that was consistent with a Christian belief in a ruling, caring, loving God. Now what I began to see in nature and the world was not a divine presence, but rather an absence, an emptiness. God had not prepared this world for us. We arrived here by a process of evolution. It was not a world where God numbers the hairs on our heads and takes note of every sparrow that falls. It was a world ruled by competition for survival, wonderfully diverse and beautiful, but cruel as well.

Thoughts and feelings like these troubled me from time to time even while my work in the parish was going well. They were like physical symptoms that come and go, warnings perhaps that something is wrong, but easy to ignore when we're not feeling them. More and more, I began to have these feelings on Sunday mornings. Feelings of detachment. Estrangement. Unreality. Is this me? Wearing these robes? Saying these words?

One Sunday after church, I went back to the rectory. I closed the door behind me and I stood in the hallway alone. I made myself say it and say it out loud. "You don't believe this stuff any more." Saying these words and hearing them come out of my mouth had a powerful effect on me. It was a moment of truth.

I changed clothes and hopped on my bicycle. I wanted to get away - away from my parishioners, away from the church. Riding a bike is physical. It's a great way of connecting with yourself, of being alone with your own breath, your own pulse, your own thoughts. But this was the loneliest bicycle ride I ever took. It felt as if a caring presence had gone out of the universe.

The God I was losing was the God who had guaranteed my immortality. I understood as I had never understood before that I am going to die - and that death is not a transition to something else. It is ceasing to be. I never thought I'd been denying my mortality. As a minister, I'd had my share of contact with death and dying, but now I discovered that my own death had never been real to me before.

After that, I thought about death a lot. I thought about it practically every day for some time, for years. I wrote poems about it. I wasn't afraid of dying. I was puzzled and dumbfounded by it. Overwhelmed by the mystery of being - and then not being. The futility of struggling to grow and become a better human being only to grow old, experience declining capacities, and die.

It's interesting. A few years earlier, some folks in the "Death of God" movement had the audacity to conduct funerals for God. They held these ceremonies on a number of college campuses. I wrote them off as media events. I dismissed them as irrelevant to believers and unbelievers alike. Either you believe in God or you don't. God doesn't die. But here I was in a state of theological bereavement. Grieving for God. And as we always do at funerals, grieving for myself and for all of us.

As I've said, these changes in my thinking were triggered by the things I learned in Biblical studies - but there was something else, too. At that time, I took part in sensitivity training. It's almost embarrassing to admit it now. Sensitivity training was one of the things people did in the '60's that was supposed to change the world, but soon went out of favor. What I remember now is about a dozen of us in one room twelve hours a day for ten consecutive days with one objective - learning to communicate more effectively. Learning to speak, hear, feel, and respond more honestly and demanding the same honesty from everybody else. It was very intense.

In that room, I was forced to confront my own inconsistencies and hypocrisies. I saw how often I put up a false front, pretended I had everything under control when I wasn't feeling very secure at all. I saw how I repressed my fears, conflicts, and insecurities, lied even when I thought I was telling the truth. The training helped me become a little more honest. It put me in touch with my gut feelings. It reduced my tolerance for phoniness and dishonesty. It lowered my bullshit threshold.

I suppose it was sensitivity training that set me up. Maybe if I hadn't been so concerned with honesty and integrity, I might have figured out how to absorb the contradictions. Maybe I could have learned how to do the dance the others at the seminary were doing, the dance of treating the Scriptures on some occasions as myths, and on others, as eye- witness accounts of literal and decisive events in human history. But I couldn't do it. I was too much of a fundamentalist. A holy roller. I packed my bags and left the ministry.

Having faced the pain of unbelief, I began to experience new feelings of liberation and joy. I read books and articles in science, philosophy, and psychology I had only pretended to read before. Suddenly they were filled with excitement and meaning. I entered into conversations that had not been possible when I was so sure I understood what life was all about. The pain and loss I'd gone through led to surprising growth and joy.

At times what I experienced was amazingly religious. My new awareness that there's no built-in meaning or purpose for life, no creator and no plan, filled me with a sense of wonder over the miracle of life and the evolution of human consciousness. I had new feelings about the preciousness of a human life, short and vulnerable as it is. Believers often say non-believers have no sense of mystery. But I can tell you, it's not true. For me, the mystery was heightened. The loss of the religious beliefs I had once taken for granted opened the way to a kind of spirituality I had never known before.

I remember one particular walk in the woods with my wife. We walked where we had walked when we were just dating. It was an afternoon in December, and the sun had already dipped below the tree tops, and it was flickering through the bare branches. We walked ankle deep in the leaves, kicking our way through them like little children. That's one of the wonderful things about being in love. You can be like little children with one another.

The leaves on top were crisp and dry and light as air. But underneath they were thick and black. They were turning into leaf mold. We were walking through the cycle of life. The trees were dropping their leaves and giving themselves back to the earth, and they were taking their life from the earth, which they were helping to replenish.

As we walked through the leaves, I thought about the fact that our own lives are part of that process. Not just the physical elements that make up our bodies, but our thoughts and deeds, too. We are part of the giving and the receiving, the taking and the giving back. As a religious believer, I had imagined myself somehow separate from nature, superior to it - in the words of the Psalmist, a little lower than the angels. But on that afternoon, walking hand in hand with my wife, I had a new feeling of kinship with the rocks and the trees and the sky and the earth. I felt at home in the universe. I was at peace with my own small, momentary place in it. It was a mystical experience. It was communion.

I had a new awareness of the tragedy of life. The knowledge that there ain't none of us getting out of this thing alive. That awareness had a softening, even feminizing effect on me. I had gone through the experience of having my belief system and my defenses crumble around me. As a result, I was less inclined to judge others or to think I knew how to straighten them out. I was more content just to reach out to them, to keep them company, and to join them in joy and suffering, which are what life is all about.

Not only do I know how a conversion happens and what it feels like, I know something about how it works itself out. After this thing happened to me, I went off in contradictory directions. I put my clerical collar and my black shirts in the drawer and made up my mind never to put them on again. I wanted as little to do with the church as possible. I was angry because of the dishonesty and double speak I'd had to fight my way through. I took special pleasure in the company of people who were defiantly anti- religious, people who said refreshingly blasphemous and shocking things about the church, the Bible, religion. I embraced people who attacked the most entrenched tyranny of all - the one that's presided over by almighty God.

At the same time that one part of me was separating from religion and vowing never to have anything to do with it again, another part of me was trying to reconstruct what I had lost. I missed the ceremony, the beauty and expressiveness of the liturgy. I missed the vision of universal connectedness it expressed, the act of reaching out in faith for something higher and better in life. I rejected the notion that my ordination to the priesthood is an ordination for life, but I couldn't escape a sense of religious vocation that just wouldn't go away.

I wrestled with the possibility of returning to the kind of religion that is practiced by agnostic clergy in my own denomination and by friends in the Unitarian Church. A religion that lets people hang on to the old religious language and ceremony and make of them whatever they will. A religion that lets them experience the reality of God when it works for them, and lets them interpret God symbolically when it doesn't. A religion that let them draw comfort and inspiration from all this ambiguity and confusion and holds out the hope that maybe some profound and honest insights will seep through.

But I have to admit, I'm a fundamentalist, a holy roller. I'm a fundamentalist about telling the truth. Especially in my conversation with myself. It is a powerful moral and religious instinct. The spiritual connection I seek must be honest and real. And that's why, frankly, I've come to the conclusion that modern religion begins with the experience of loss. The loss of God. Theological bereavement. And there's no way of getting around it.

But what's so surprising about that? Maturation and growth always involve loss. The loss of important people in our lives. The loss of youth and youthful dreams. The loss of lots of things we once believed in and hoped for. These losses are an important part of coming to an honest understanding of who we are and a knowledge of what really matters in our lives. They are how we learn about sorrow, compassion, and love and all the deeper issues of life.

Carl Jung once warned that the purpose of organized religion is to prevent people from having a religious experience. I think it's true. The loss of God and traditional religious beliefs opens a path to authentic religion. It is a modern version of the vow of poverty. It is traveling light in a world on the move, where science is writing an amazing new history of the universe. This is the kind of religion I have finally come back to. Some would say it's not a religion at all. But after working for 30 years in a secular career far afield from the vows I took as a young man, I have made this modern, stripped-down religion my second priesthood.

People have said to me, traveling light like that sounds okay until trouble comes. Death, loss, failure, suffering, tragedy. Then you'll find out it's not such a good thing for human beings to be on their own. Not such a good thing to try to make it without a supernatural support system. Traveling light may be a more honest way to go, but people are just not up to it. When life puts you to the test, you'll see that we can't do it without God and the promise of better life after this one.

But as I grow in my own humanistic religious outlook, I must say I don't find this to be true at all. I become more and more convinced, in fact, that the strength I need resides in my own integrity, my zest for the journey, and the honest companionship of those who are journeying with me. And it resides in discovering that, even in my weakest moments, especially in my weakest moments, I have strength to share.

Paradoxically, my lack of answers, my theological uprooting, has liberated a humanity in me, a love for being alive, a capacity for intellectual and emotional understanding I had not been open to before. I think I'm a better friend now, and more able to minister to others than when I was a Christian pastor. This humanity is all I have to offer, but I have discovered that it is surprisingly powerful. And it's the kind of down-to-earth companionship I want. It's how I want others to minister to me in my times of suffering and need.

Copyright 2004 by Fritz Williams

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