Getting my life back

[This is a Part II to the post Putting Our Lives on Hold.]

This weekend will mark my fourth Mother's Day as a mom. It's stunning to think of how much things have changed since that first Mother's Day not that long ago. Three years and two more babies later, I see now that it was the crucible of motherhood that shattered the fragile life philosophy that I learned from the secular world, made me fearlessly seek truth and, ultimately, taught me the true meaning of life. Here are my reflections.


Back when my first child was born, I had a certain amount of angst about being the mother of a baby. It was odd. I loved my son dearly and saw the great importance of shaping another person's life...and yet, there was always this voice in the back of my mind that murmured, "What about my life?" Despite my tremendous love for my child, there was a part of me that felt like I'd hit the pause button on my life the day he was born. The full-time care that babies and toddlers require was so wearying, and I frequently commented to my husband that I couldn't wait until our youngest child went off to elementary school so that I could finally "get my life back!" I felt like there was always a carrot stick hanging in front of my nose, distracting me, promising the glory days to come when I would no longer have little ones around and I could finally get back to really living.

In my mind, the phase of life with babies and toddlers underfoot was drastically different than other phases of life. As I mentioned in my first post on the subject, I assumed that the only way to find fulfillment and meaning in life was to be self-focused. This was the default, the only way to live life to the fullest. Being the mother of little ones was a rare situation in which you were thrust into being temporarily other-focused, and was therefore something to just grit your teeth and endure until it was over and you could get back to the default.

After my second child was born in the midst of painful medical complications, life with little ones got even harder. You'd think that I would have found myself more desperate than ever to move on from this grueling time in my life, and yet, that didn't happen. This was around the time I had started to take a serious look at Christianity, and in the process of reading up on God and what he's revealed to us through his Word and his Church, I started to notice something interesting:

My life as a mother started to make a lot more sense when seen through the teachings of Christianity.

I've said many times before that reading the Christian explanation of why we are here, what we are to do and how we are to live was like reading an articulation of words that had been written on my heart all long -- and this was especially true when it came to motherhood. I increasingly found that my secular, godless worldview offered me no lexicon for describing what was so beautiful about motherhood, and why it was worth it; yet Christianity described it perfectly. I started to find some very interesting answers to that nagging question, "What about my life?"

Christianity was telling me that all those thing I yearned for that fueled my self-focused pursuits -- happiness, excitement, security, youthfulness, joy, importance -- were actually yearnings for God, and that I'd never find peace until I sought him. At first that claim sounded crazy, even after I thought it was possible that God might exist. But when I took a hard look at my worldly pre-motherhood life and recalled the travel, the parties, the socializing, the trendy size 8 clothes -- all those things that were supposedly my "real life" that I was so anxious to get back to -- I started to realize something: none of those pursuits ever brought me lasting happiness. In my self-focused life without God there was certainly happiness and joy, yet it was fragile. There was always a feeling of restlessness, a never-ending search for the next big thing. I felt like I couldn't stay still too long, or the happiness might go away.

"OK, I'll bite," I thought after contemplating this for a while. "If I've somehow been groping around for God this whole time and won't be able to truly rest until I find him, how do I go about doing that?"

It was when I got the answer to that question that my entire life -- in particular my life as a mother -- finally made sense.

I discovered that the path to God is the path of agape, of self-giving love. When John wrote in Chapter 4 of his first Epistle, "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love," he wasn't talking about just any kind of love. I "loved" traveling and sleeping in on weekends and pretty much anything that involved me doing things for me without having to make sacrifices. But that's not the kind of love John was talking about. The kind of love that leads to God, that God is, is agape: self-emptying, other-focused, inconvenient, sometimes-painful love.

When I started to seek God by seeking agape, everything changed. For one thing, the carrot stick disappeared; that siren song of the self-focused glory days to come when I no longer had children in diapers was silenced, the tension gone. My life as a mom of little ones was no longer in such sharp contrast to my future life without young children: either way, I'd be serving others. I found that this was the meaning of life, the secret to lasting happiness, the hidden key that unlocked the mysteries of the spiritual realm that I'd spent my whole life trying to find.

And, ironically, after I came to embrace the idea of a life dedicated to agape, I actually ended up with more time for myself. Because in my secular mindset the other-focusedness of the childbearing years was a temporary situation that you would extricate yourself from as soon as possible, my mentality was to just hold my nose and plow through it. I would have thought that to further embrace selflessness would lead to mental and physical collapse! But what I realized, through Christianity, was that a life of agape is not a life of running yourself ragged. To truly serve God and others to the best of your ability is to humbly accept that you are only human, and that there are limits to what you can do. Using the Rules of Life of religious orders as examples (I once posted the daily schedule of the Missionaries of Charity here), I began to see that it was simply not optional that I regularly find time for rest and prayer. I saw that the other-focused life doesn't mean that you can never take a time for recreation and relaxation -- quite the opposite, in fact. It means that you must regularly take time for recreation and relaxation, but that you put these activities in their proper place, realizing that they're not the meaning of life.

After doing it backwards for so many years, it fit like a glove to live a life that was other-focused for the long term and self-focused in the short term.


As this fourth Mother's Day rolls around and I look at my life with three children in diapers, I find that it's a perfect encapsulation of the mystery of human existence, a testament to that most counterintuitive, most important of all truths: that it is only by going through the discomfort of becoming other-focused that we will find what we're really looking for. To paraphrase the Evangelist John, it is only by knowing agape that we will know God.

I've mentioned before that I'm particularly ill-suited for this job: I'm easily irritated, disorganized, sensitive to noise, introverted, and come from a background of being a spoiled only child where I never had to lift a finger around the house. My daily life is not usually what you would call "pleasurable," at least not in the same way as my pre-kid days. I would almost certainly have reported more days as being overall "fun" or "easy" back when I had a cool career than now. From a secular, self-focused worldview, my life should be worse now than it was before. But it's not. I wouldn't say that "my life is better now," as much as I would say that "my life has started now."

Through Christianity, I understand that that the tension I used to feel about my life as a mother was the tension of resisting God, of fearing that if I emptied myself of ego and selfishness that there'd be nothing there to fill me back up. I finally understand that the life of a mom of little ones is in such sharp contrast to the typical life in our godless, secular culture because it is inherently a life of self-giving love, of being close to God.

The lessons I've learned are objective truths about the human experience, applicable to everyone in every state of life, whether or not they have children. Yet, for me, it took motherhood to teach me these lessons. I am so hard-headed and was so entrenched in my old ways that it took the tidal wave of agape that could only come with a house full of babies to break down layer upon layer of selfishness encrusted with fear, and free me to seek the truth.

Through the beauty of motherhood, I think I now understand what it's all about. And I finally got my life back.

Looking for the tow truck driver

A recent comment I left over at one of my regular reads, A Former Leader's Journey, got me thinking about some of the best advice I've ever received in terms of understanding God's will:


Coming from atheism, the whole concept of there being a personal God who is somehow involved in all that we do was amazing...and intimidating...and confusing. As anyone who has read my 2007 archives knows, for many months I was fascinated with the concept of knowing exactly what God's plans were for all the little details of my life. I looked everywhere for signs: did my invitation to a friend's wedding get lost in the mail because I wasn't supposed to go? Did my computer crash while writing for my blog because God didn't want me to publish that post? Did all the difficulty we had getting to church mean that we should switch parishes? I wanted all the answers NOW, and wanted the world around me to act as a sort of spiritual Ouija board in which God gave me clear Yes's and No's when I asked him questions (that way there'd be no uncertainty and I wouldn't have to mess around with that sticky "childlike trust" thing).

At some point I realized that, unless being a Christian was supposed to make you neurotic, I was probably doing it wrong. So I emailed regular commenter Steve G. and asked him for advice. The details of my question and his answer are here (I highly recommend that you read the whole thing), but the summary is this: I offered him a hypothetical situation in which my car breaks down on the way to an important meeting, and asked how to know the mind of God based on that situation. How do I know if God means the car breaking down to be a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down about the subject matter of my meeting? Or could it be that God is trying to tell me something about my relationship with the person I was planning to meet? Steve G.'s response was not what I expected, not what I was looking for, and not what I wanted. But it was a profound insight, and it changed the way I saw the world. In summary, his answer was:

Maybe it's not about you at all. Maybe it's about the tow truck driver.

He countered with a hypothetical situation in which there is a tow truck driver who is in a bad place in his life and is having a crisis of faith. He takes a call about a woman whose car is broken down on the side of the road. When he gets there he sees a Bible or something on her seat that indicates she's a Christian, strikes up a conversation about faith, and ends up being led back to God through the discussion they have. In other words: I am not the protagonist in that story. I'm just "the Christian woman whose car broke down," a bit player with a small speaking role.

It was this advice that led me to one of the biggest paradigm shifts in my entire conversion: the realization that to be a Christian is not to make God part of your story, but to realize you are part of God's story (that phrasing borrowed from this fascinating post at Purify Your Bride). Up until this point, I would have described my goal as a Christian as "to make God a big part of my story!" To understand that it's not about me, that the story was never mine to being with, was so humbling, so intimidating. What would this mean? How was I supposed to control everything if I didn't even know where God was going with all of this?!

Though Steve G. actually offered the ultimate answer in his response, it took months for it to sink in. I had to learn it on my own, the hard way (as usual), after banging my head against the wall by trying to do it my way a few more times. Eventually I realized that what it means to accept I am part of God's story is to ask in every moment not "What is God trying to tell me with this situation?" but rather, "How can I better know, love and serve God through this situation?" It is to stop reading tea leaves to see what God thinks of all my great, important plans and to realize that my plans are neither great nor important in the grand scheme of things.

Whenever I am tempted to forget this lesson (which is often), whenever I get so mired down in the frustration or difficulty of a situation that I can't imagine how this could possibly be part of God's plan, whenever I get so fixated on my own desires that I fall into thinking of all events in my life as related to them, I remind myself to "look for the tow truck driver." The tow truck driver has become a symbolic reminder for me, a call to put it all in perspective and remember that I have the great honor of being but a small player in the story that God writes. And, sure enough, nine times out of ten when I set my gaze higher and look outside of my own little bubble to see what's going on with the other players on the stage, I find that it is surprisingly obvious that the drama that I find myself in the midst of is actually not about me at all. Indeed, it's usually about the tow truck driver.

Welcome, Drew Mariani listeners

I had a great time on the Drew Mariani show today. For those of you who missed it, we talked about my conversion from being pro-choice to being pro-life, my conversion from atheism to Catholicism, and how to evangelize to atheists. I think the interview will also be available in the Relevant Radio audio archives (you have to register to get access, but it's free).

Some posts related to the subject matter from the interview are:

• How I Became Pro-Life
• The "Approaching Atheists" interview series
• Finding God in Five Steps
• About this site
  

Also, this interview was sponsored by DarwinCatholic since MrsDarwin was kind enough to come over and watch my children while I did the interview. Hopefully while I was on air you couldn't tell that a mere door separated me from six rowdy children ages five and under.

Thanks again to Drew and his producer Cassie for having me on!

The Drew Mariani Show - today at 3:45pm CST

I will be a guest on the Drew Mariani Show on Relevant Radio this afternoon at 4:00pm CST / 5:00pm EST. You can see if there's a station near you here, or listen online for free here.

UPDATE: This interview has been moved up to 3:45pm CST. Sorry for the last-minute notice!

Approaching Atheists: Top 9 Don'ts for Talking About Christianity with Atheists

In our continuing series about evangelization and atheists, Jason and I established that by far the best thing Christians can do to evangelize to their nonbelieving friends and family members is to simply pray and show Christ to others through their actions and words.

However, those of us who have many atheist friends, family members and/or coworkers often find ourselves in friendly discussions about religion even when we don't actively seek them out. Jason and I collaborated to put together a list of do's and don'ts with some tips for navigating these kinds of conversations when they arise. Our first list, Top 9 Don'ts for Talking About Christianity with Atheists, is up over at his site.

Being stung by scorpions in bed: some people are bothered by this idea, others are not, and never the twain shall meet

Yaya and I had another go-round about scorpions today (although this time, thankfully, we were talking about theoretical scorpions and not actual scorpions that were being shaken in cups in front of my face). It all started when I explained to her that that it keeps me up at night to ponder the following data:

(click to enlarge)

In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that a few weeks ago a nice friend at a baby shower told me that when she lived in France they had scorpions in their house and this never happened to her. At first her statement shattered my perception that scorpions always target people in beds at night. But then I had a delayed reaction in which I realized that she said this was in France. These are French scorpions. These are work/life balance scorpions. Maybe her experience indicates that not all scorpions are as inherently aggressive and creepy as I thought they were, or maybe les scorpions were en grève because the threadcount on her sheets wasn't high enough. The data is inconclusive, hence it has been omitted from the chart.

Anyway, after taking a moment to ask if I seriously lie awake at night stressing out about things in chart form (yes, welcome to the world of a neurotic nerd), my mother-in-law gave me this look that all my Texan relatives give me when the subject comes up, a sort of bemused smile that says, "And the problem is...?" I wanted to react by sputtering hysterically, "And the problem is WAKING UP TO SCORPIONS STINGING ME IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT WHILE I AM SOUND ASLEEP HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE WHAT THE PROBLEM IS THERE?!" but I decided to make a futile attempt to have a civilized dialogue on the subject, out of morbid curiosity if nothing else.

Yaya took this opportunity to explain to me that it is only because of my pampered middle-class lifestyle that I even worry about this. She offered some light stories from her childhood of scorpions attacking them in the course of daily life. "Those suckers sure would get us good every time we got on that tire swing!" she recounted with a chuckle. "And we didn't worry about it when they got in our beds -- you'd just brush 'em off if they got ya' while you were sleeping." She assured me that if I'd grown up in rural Texas in the days before fancy-schmancy houses with things like insulation and well-sealed walls, having a few scorpions in the bed here and there would be just a natural part of life for me.

Umm, no.

This is not, of course, something I can prove empirically. But I am certain -- like really, really certain -- that under no circumstances would I ever be nonchalant about scorpions in my bed at night. Maybe I am missing some sort of gene that makes you chilled out about surprise nocturnal attacks by stinging arachnids, but I do not believe that my distress about this situation is due to lack of exposure to it.

Her next point -- one that I've heard before and found no less perplexing this time than the first 100 times I heard it from other Texan relatives -- was that scorpion stings are no worse than wasp stings. Really? And to think I was all stressed out about this! I mean, seriously, that was the only thing I was worried about, the toxicity level of the venom. Because, other than that, there is nothing at all disturbing about being woken from a peaceful slumber in the still of the night by an explosion of pain and realizing that there is a scorpion wrapped up in your pajamas, attacking you, repeatedly stinging you, and between the darkness and your delirious state you cannot immediately locate it to get it off of you. As long as it's not worse than a wasp sting, that should be fine. ...Oh, wait, no, that still sounds like a hellish nightmare.

At this point the conversation ended with me uttering a long, defeated sigh and Yaya needing to yell at someone named Billy Ray on her cell phone.

What I have found is this: if you don't see what is disturbing about the idea of being stung by scorpions in bed at night, it is not something I can explain to you. I have tried repeatedly to show Yaya and my other Texan relatives my way of thinking on this, to find common ground in our different viewpoints, and I submit that it cannot be done. It is an unbridgeable gap.

At least I have a blog. Evidently if this ever does happen I will get no sympathy from my relatives about it; but hopefully, somewhere out there on the internet, I will be able to find at least one person who could see why I might be unsettled about scorpions in my bed.

Putting our lives on hold

When I first started exploring Christianity, one of the teachings that was most surprising and counter-intuitive to me was the notion that we are called to live other-focused lives.

A product of secular culture, it seemed obvious to me that the way to find fulfillment and meaning in life was to be self-focused (not necessarily selfish, but self-focused). The way I used to see it, serving others was only one of a variety of good and worthy a person might choose to do with his or her free time. By default, you made your life goals based on pursuing personal interests and maximizing comfort; if possible, you would try to find some ways to give back to others, but to do so for any extended period of time would be to put your life on hold.

When I first heard that Christianity taught that our lives are not about ourselves and our own wants, that we are to look to serve God and others before serving ourselves, it was a radically different message than anything I'd ever heard...so radically different, in fact, that it sounded crazy. I resisted it. Wouldn't spending too much time focusing outside of ourselves lead to misery? How were we supposed to accomplish all our big goals and do all those fulfilling things we planned to do if we never optimized around our own desires and wants?

Yet, in the process of resisting this teaching, I began to take a second look at the self-focused philosophy I'd had all my life.

I began to realize that introspecting and focusing on my wants never brought me lasting peace, and that it didn't seem to work for anyone else either. I began to notice that as I started accomplishing some of those big goals that were going to bring me so much fulfillment...I didn't feel as fulfilled as I thought I would. I'd heard before that this Christian teaching about living to serve God and others was not the personal philosophy of the religion's founders, but an objective truth. I'd heard the claim that this, like all the other Christian teachings about moral law and how we are to live, was an articulation of the law that is written onto every human heart by our Creator, a statement of truth about what is best for each individual and for the world as a whole. When I first heard these claims they sounded like so much grandiose religious posturing. Yet more and more I realized that my way wasn't working, and I started to wonder if these Christians might be on to something.

I decided to give it a try. I'd make an effort to spend a whole lot less time searching for meaning and answers within myself, making all my plans for the day, the year, and the rest of my life based on what I felt like doing. Though I would set aside time for prayer and time to myself to recharge my batteries (as religious orders do in their rules of life), I would start to think of my purpose here on earth as nothing more than to serve God and others. Honestly, it kind of sounded like a recipe for misery. But I had learned over and over again that every time I thought I knew better than God and his Church...it turned out that I did not know better than God and his Church. So I gave it a shot.

Almost immediately, I began to see the power of this teaching.

Even with my halting, far-from-perfect efforts, things began to change. For one thing, ironically, I found that everything I sought by focusing on myself and my own needs -- peace, joy, fulfillment, direction, feelings of security about the future -- I began to find only after I stopped looking inward and started looking outward.

The biggest thing I noticed, however, was that to be other-focused is to create an economy of love. Every single time we set our gaze outside of ourselves seek to serve others, whether it's something overt like volunteering at a soup kitchen or something more subtle like simply saying a sincere, kind word to the checker at the grocery store, we add a little bit of love to the world. Through these actions there is more love in the spiritual economy than there was before. The other-focused life is, ultimately, a life of love.


I've been thinking about the power of this teaching a lot lately, noticing how differently I see the world now that I understand that serving God and others is not one of a variety of nice options we might pursue with our free time, but is actually our very purpose for existing.

All of my scattered thoughts on the subject were brought into relief the other day when I had a conversation with an immediate family member (whom I don't want to identify directly). He seemed depressed and uneasy about something, and when I asked him why he said it was about his retirement account. He's deeply distressed that he won't have enough money to afford anything other than a government-run nursing home in his old age. I reminded him that my husband and I would love for him to move in with us when it gets to the point that he doesn't feel comfortable living on his own. We weren't even talking about a situation where he might need intensive medical care, yet he flatly refused to even consider the notion.

"I would never do that to you," he said. "I would never have you put your life on hold like that."

We've had this conversation many times before, yet this time, the first since my conversion to Christianity, I was hit by just what a profoundly sad worldview this reflects. I've always wanted this family member to live with us when he can no longer live on his own, and he's always refused on the same grounds. That part is nothing new. Yet this time I saw clearly that the situation goes beyond an unfortunate refusal of help: it reflects a worldview in which well-meaning people like my relative believe that the best thing they can do for their loved-ones is to not burden them with their presence, where the very meaning of life has been twisted to suck love out of the world.

One of the logical results of the self-focused worldview that is so common in the secular world is that, if we assume that the best use of our lives is the unfettered pursuit of our personal goals and interests, we therefore don't want to get in the way of others doing the same. It creates a situation in which we're all constructing our own little self-sufficient desert islands, not wanting others to get in our way but also not wanting to get in others' way. It leads us to believe that if we were ever to lose our self-sufficiency, our presence would not just be an annoyance but would in fact prevent our loved-ones from fulfilling their very purpose in life.

When I compare my life with the self-focused worldview to my life with the other-focused worldview, the difference is striking. Not that I am anywhere near some saint-like level of always seeking to serve others before myself, but simply understanding that that is the goal, that my own life isn't about me, has changed everything. It's counter-intuitive, it requires sacrifice, and it isn't always the most comfortable path. But it is clear that, truly, this is how we were designed to live. After all these years of trying it my way, it's like I'm finally operating my life according to the instruction manual. And it is ultimately a manual for how to live a life of love, written by he who is Love itself.

Some announcements

Yaya is here all week. Imagine, for a moment, that you wake up one morning to find that a circus has invaded your house -- it's noisy, chaotic, extremely messy, and yet you can't help but enjoy yourself. That's what Yaya visits are like. I feel like having her here for a week will mean something for my frequency of posting, but I'm not sure what. Depending on how it goes I'll either be updating like five times a day or will find myself barely able to dash out one post that simply reads, "Help! Chaos!"

Speaking of not being able to write coherent posts, I spent all my free time yesterday writing something, only to realize upon re-reading it that I didn't even know what my own point was. I almost published it anyway just because I was mad that I spent so much time on it, then I remembered that other people can actually see those words that show up on the screen after I hit Publish. Maybe one of these days I'll borrow Veronica's idea and write up a list of posts that I spared you all from having to see.

Anyway, here are some announcements I've been meaning to make:

• Author seeking interviewees: Author David Seidman is writing a book about teenaged atheists. One of his chapters includes advice for teenagers who come to faith after being atheists, and for that chapter he would like to interview teenage ex-atheists and ex-agnostics. If you fit that description he'd love to talk to you. You can contact him at davidseidman |at| earthlink |dot| net.
  
  
• Dappled Things: After seeing my recent post about finally getting poetry, Bernardo Aparicio emailed me to introduce me to his Catholic literary magazine, Dappled Things. I enjoyed reading through the current issue so I wanted to pass on the link in case anyone else is interested in checking it out.
  
  
• Prayers to the Holy Spirit: A nine-day series of prayers ("novena") to the Holy Spirit starts this Friday. Tausign is inviting others -- particularly seekers and those who feel lukewarm in their faith -- to join him in doing the novena, and each day he will post reflections and invite discussion. You can find the posts here. I think this is a great idea. I'm in!
  

Happy Tuesday!

How do you decide which charities to support?

Tomorrow is my day to go through mail and pay bills. One of the things I always dislike about this activity (other than typing all those large numbers into Quicken when the student loan check comes up) is that, each week, I have to make the painful decision to discard a large stack of solicitations from worthy charities.

Even disregarding the ones that are suspicious and/or get a low charitable commitment rating from Forbes, there are a lot of wonderful organizations out there! Just last week I received pleas for help from reputable charities that help everyone from impoverished Native Americans to the elderly to abused children to women in crisis pregnancies to kids who need scholarships to the poor of America to the poor of the rest of the world. Every time I'm done going through mail I have this discouraging feeling of "SO MANY people need help SO DESPERATELY and I have SO LITTLE to give!"

I always struggle with whether to give a little bit of money to a lot of charities, or to focus on giving as much as possible to just one or two. Currently we're going with the latter strategy. We decided on Food for the Poor as our charity of choice and planned to give large amounts (by our standards) to them...although the effective outcome has been that we just blow our charitable giving budget because I end up writing lots of smaller checks for all sorts of causes that I just can't say no to.

And now Shannon and BooMama have me yearning to sponsor a Compassion child, which is going to mean re-thinking how much we give to other organizations in order to work it into the budget (after we look at other ways to cut back as well, although that's a whole different story).

So I ask you: Does anyone else struggle with this? If so, how does your family deal with this dilemma? Do you give a little bit of money to a lot of different organizations or reserve your available funds for just one or two? And advice?

Finding God in 5 Steps

I occasionally get emails that say something like this:

I'm what you could call "agnostic." I'm open to the possibility that God might exist. I've even been sort of seeking and have tried praying, but nothing has happened. I'm not any closer to believing in God than I was before, which I take to mean that either God doesn't exist or doesn't care if I know him.

I'm about to give up and just forget about it. I saw in your archives that you were in a similar place a few years ago and wanted to know if you have any advice before I stop what has so far been a futile search for God.

I know exactly how it feels to be in this situation. While it's important to understand that any kind of powerful experiences of God are a gift, that there's not some magic formula we can follow that will guarantee that we'll hear the voice of God or have a major religious experience, there are certain things we can do to make more room in our hearts for God's presence.

Based on lots of reading, advice from trusted friends, and plenty of personal experience of doing it the wrong way, I do have a few tips that might help anyone who feels like their search for God isn't going anywhere. For brevity I titled the post Finding God in 5 Steps, although a more accurate title would be, 5 Things I Learned the Hard Way That I Believe Fostered the Right Disposition for Gaining a Better Understanding of God but Since I'm Just Some Fool With an Internet Connection and Not a Pastor or a Theologian You Should Take This and Everything Else I Write With a Big Grain of Salt. So here it goes:

1. Seek humility first

If you feel stuck in your spiritual search, set aside the search for God per se and seek humility instead. The importance of this step cannot be overstated. Pride is one of the most effective ways to block God out of our lives. Throw all your efforts into becoming a more humble person. For inspiration, read up on people throughout history who were known for their humility. If you're not exactly sure what true humility involves (I definitely wasn't), this is an excellent article that explains that humility is not the same thing as low self esteem or thinking that you're bad.

2. Go on a cynicism fast

Commit to a period of time during which you'll fast from all sources of cynicism: give up watching TV shows and reading websites that make jokes at other people's expense (even if it's about celebrities or politicians); try to change the subject or say something positive if such conversations come up in person; avoid making cynical jokes or comments yourself. You might be surprised at how much this fast will transform your heart.

3. Read the great Christian authors

While a transformation of heart, a turning of the soul toward God, is the most critical step in opening ourselves to God, it's also important to realize that seeking God does not mean setting aside logic and reason; as I mentioned in this post, quite the contrary is true. Asking tough questions and hearing what the great Christian thinkers have said on the matter will only bring you closer to God. Some authors I recommend are C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo (I recommended some specific books that influenced my conversion here).

4. Do the experiment

I believe that God's existence can be "proven" in a certain sense, as long as you understand that God = Love, and what you're trying to prove is Love itself. This is not something you can know about from analyzing data or reading books alone. To get the "proof" that you seek, you must enter the laboratory of your heart, and actually conduct the experiment: live, for a while, as if God did exist. Pray. Follow the Ten Commandments. Show love and kindness to everyone, even your enemies. Read the Bible. Give God the thanks and honor and respect you would show him if he did exist. As Pascal suggested, just try it for a while, and see what happens.

5. Pray frequently

This is by far the most important step. I know, you feel like you're talking to yourself. You don't see the point of it. I was there for a long, long time. But there is no substitution for humbly, regularly turning toward God with an open mind and an open heart. If you're stuck for words, consider reciting something like the Prayer of St. Francis, or just pray, "God, I want to find you. Show me how. I'm listening."


The bottom line is this: seek, and you shall find.

This statement is true. If you understand what it really means to seek (using both your mind and your heart); and if you understand that the finding part doesn't necessarily happen immediately, that you're beginning the long process of building a relationship that will continue to grow and change for the rest of your life, you will find God.

Also, I would be delighted to include anyone in this situation to my prayers. Please feel free to leave a comment (anonymous is fine) if you'd like for me and other readers to pray for you (thanks to Tausign for that suggestion).

Approaching Atheists: What Can Christians Do?

The next installment of my interviews over at The Cynical Christian is up, this one on the topic of what Christians can do or say to evangelize to atheists.

Welcome, new readers!

Quite a few people have mentioned via email and comments recently that they're new readers, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to take a moment to introduce myself and welcome you to my blog.

First of all, thank you for reading. I would be delighted if you'd take a moment to introduce yourself over at this post -- it makes my day when I see a new comment there, and I hang on every word of all of them.


ABOUT ME
I'm 31, married, and have three children ages three and under. I have a background as a web designer/developer but am now Director of Chaos Management for my household.

I was an atheist my entire life until around age 26 -- I never once considered the possibility that God might exist, not even as a child. I saw no absolutely no proof for God's existence and couldn't imagine how a person could believe in an unseen deity.

Around the time my first child was born I started to think that maybe I should take another look at the question of God. Upon investigation I was shocked -- really, really shocked -- to find that Christianity had some compelling data points in its favor. I came to a dry intellectual belief in God but didn't know what to do from there. To make a long story short, my husband and I both converted to Catholicism in 2007 and today I am thrilled beyond words to be a Christian.


ABOUT THIS SITE
I started blogging about religion shortly after I became interested in Christianity. I had a lot of questions but didn't know many Christians, so I did what web developers do when they're seeking answers to life's biggest questions: I started a blog. I've been blogging about it ever since, so most of my conversion is chronicled in the archives (on the bottom left sidebar).

Though the main purpose of this blog is to simply share my experiences with religion after a life of atheism, there are certain topics that I've been particularly interested in lately. Here's what's been going on so far in 2008:

Bringing peace to daily life
Shortly after the new year, I got to the point of "being sick and tired of being sick and tired" -- I was tired of feeling overwhelmed and behind, living life a day late and a dollar short, and was desperate for change. I began to see that modern technology tempts me to overspend my time just like credit cards tempt me to overspend my money, and realized that I need some "hard stops" in my life. I decided to do something radical and structure my days around regular prayer times. I called it a "reckless experiment with prayer," the "reckless" part because I supposedly didn't have one extra minute to spare for prayer. It worked better than I ever thought it could and I've been doing it ever since. You can read all the posts on the subject here.

Lent and spiritual growth
This was my first Lent as a Catholic. When Ash Wednesday rolled around I realized that I love times of sacrifice and penance. When the half-way point rolled around I realized that I love times of sacrifice and penance for a few weeks, and then I'm over it. Some untimely temper tantrums and cat vomit made me realize what it means to "die to self," I ruminated on my future as a Christian, and thought up an analogy for faith. Then, some technical problems made me realize just what is involved in truly trusting God. It all culminated in a joyous Easter which marked my one year anniversary of becoming Catholic.

Motherhood, community and isolation
A big topic of interest for me is the isolation that those of us who are outside of the workforce experience. I recently wrote about an average day in my life, with an emphasis on the lack of casual social interaction with other adults. I followed that up with some thoughts on how the internet can provide a much-needed outlet for social interaction, and asked for tips about how we can get more real-life social activity as part of the natural course of daily life (don't miss the comments on those last two!)

Scorpions
The first time I saw a scorpion in my house, I could have never imagined that there would be any kind of upside to that situation. As it turns out, however, blogging about scorpions brings a lot of traffic to your site. My posts about scorpions in my bedroom, scorpions in my baby's room, scorpions in cups in my kitchen THAT WERE PUT THERE BY MY MOTHER-IN-LAW, and angry, undead scorpions have been some of my most popular posts. The entire saga can be found here. Though I haven't talked about it yet this year, scorpion season starts soon so I expect to be talking about it again any day now.


In general, though, I mostly write musings about what it's like to be a passionate Christian after a life of atheism. (You can find a sampling of these types of posts in the "Most Popular Posts" section on the left sidebar.) This is the diary of my ongoing conversion. I've often thought that a good tagline would be: Selfish, lazy, hard-headed atheist converts to Christianity and tries to be a good Christian. Hilarity ensues.

The readers of this site include atheists and agnostics and people of all faiths, and I appreciate every one of you. Welcome to my blog, and thanks for reading!

Art: the secret handshake of the soul

I had a major revelation yesterday morning: I think I might finally get poetry!

Poetry, like all forms of art, is something with which I've always had a love/hate relationship. I love few things more than a moving piece of music or painting or writing; yet the whole concept of "art" has often left me frustrated. I was never sure how to define what makes good art, or even what constitutes "art" at all. I knew what I liked when I saw it, and even felt like there was some universal line in the sand between "true art" and "crap that is called 'art,'" but could never quite articulate why I liked what I liked or where to draw that line.

At some point after my conversion, I heard about the concept that true art is beautiful, in some form or another, and that in order to be beautiful it must convey truth. I didn't get it. How can art be true? Though something sounded vaguely right about it, I had more important concerns to address, so I promptly resumed being ambivalent about art. Until yesterday, when I discovered a poet.

The always-interesting ProBlogger had a great guest post by a man who happened to be a poet. On a whim I clicked through to his website and, long story short, I ended up spending most of my free time yesterday just reading poems -- something I have almost never done before (his free e-book is here). It was one of those "ah-hah" moments when it all came together. I think I finally "got" poetry, and art in general. I think I now understand what it is, why we create it, and why it matters, and what it means for it to convey truth.

Let me see if I've got this right:

All good art, by definition, conveys truth. That is its purpose. But we're not talking about truths like "the grass is green" or "the sky is blue." We're talking about the truths that lie outside the material world, the truths that you'd have to have a soul to know about. For example:

• All beauty and goodness has a living Source. In modern parlance, we call this source "God."
• The closer we get to God, the closer we get to perfect joy.
• We have a strong tendency to drift away from God. Yet further away we get, the more unsettled and miserable we are.
• When other people drift away from God it makes our lives more difficult.
• The pleasures and comforts of the material world seem like they will make us happy, but don't.
• We love other people, but not as much as we should.
• Acts of evil are shocking offenses to the way things should be.
• There is evidence of God in the material world, and our hearts soar when we see it.
  

And so on. All of these conditions are true objectively (they're not "your truths" or "my truths"), all have been known in some way or another to every person who ever lived, and none can be discerned from the material world alone. It delights us to share our experiences of these truths with our fellow human beings, because it creates a bond that surpasses our animal instincts and connects us at the level of the soul.

And that's where art comes in.

Art is the secret handshake of the children of God, the inside joke among those with souls. The spark that is ignited within us when we are touched by a work of art is a spark of recognition: the artist has brought us a souvenir from our homeland beyond the material world, the place that none of us should know about, but all of us do. To connect with a piece of art is to connect with the artist as a fellow traveler, to realize that you are both walking the same rocky road, and that he is homesick too. And it matters because true art, art that seeks a connection of souls, makes it harder to devalue and dehumanize one another. It reminds us what it means to be human.

I think I'm finally starting to get Pope Benedict's Contemplation of Beauty, the Catechism's statement on Truth, Beauty and Sacred Art. I think I now understand why the Church understands one of its jobs to be to keep art and beauty in the world.

It only took 31 years, but I think I'm starting to get the whole art thing. Am I on the right track?

Reason, wonder and Pope Benedict XVI

Yesterday afternoon I found myself sitting on the edge of a foot stool in my living room, transfixed as the television showed the faint lights of a plane coming in across the Atlantic from Rome.

I didn't intend to watch much of Pope Benedict's arrival to the United States: it was during my kids' naptime -- my one chance for free time in the whole day -- and I had many other things I needed and wanted to be doing. And yet, there I sat. For about an hour. I'd never thought about it in detail before, but when I felt a sting of tears in my eyes as the jet safely touched ground, I realized just what an impact Pope Benedict XVI has had on my life and my conversion. To understand why, a bit of background is needed:

The beginning of my religious conversion was a lonely time for me.

I'd spent my whole life as an outsider to Christian circles, and it was hard to imagine that I could ever be comfortable being "one of them," the people whom I had firmly categorized in my mind as "other." I'd come to believe in God on an intellectual level, yet I felt stuck, unable to move forward from there. I'd known many Christians in my life, of course, but had never shared that part of their lives with them. It made me feel out of my element to even contemplate doing so.

I had this lingering impression that Christians and Christian culture were different from anything I knew. In my house growing up, the climate was one of a love of learning and reason, of wonder at the universe based on science and facts. As early as elementary school my dad would read books like Carl Sagan's Cosmos to me at night; when Halley's Comet was visible we drove ten hours to get to the best place to view it, and stood in the cold for hours, just gazing in awe at the sky; we'd visit our astronomer friend and look with great interest at the latest meteorites he'd collected, animatedly discussing the mysteries of the universe over dinner. There was a strong, distinct culture of wonder based firmly on the foundation of reason. On the rare occasions that the topic of religion came up, it was only to note that it was a shame that people let superstitious dogmas hold them back from the fearless pursuit of truth.

Ironically, it was this very idea of fearlessly pursuing truth that led me to Christianity. As I've said before, I didn't have a "personal encounter" with Jesus or a thunder-and-lightning conversion experience. I just did some research and thought it was true. And yet, that left me in a strange position. I had no idea how one gets to "know" God -- how can you know someone you can't see? I didn't understand what it meant to "have faith" -- did that mean setting all reason aside and believing all sorts of dogmas without question?

Many of the great Christian authors helped me gain an understanding of these concepts, yet one stood out from the rest. There was one author whose writing had a very familiar ring to it, whose way of thinking reminded me of the people I knew growing up, who built a bridge to unite in my mind the intellectual culture of atheism and the intellectual culture of Christianity:

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, whom we now know as Pope Benedict XVI.

Once I made the decision to become Catholic I figured I might as well find out more about our current Pope. I was aware that he was an academic who'd published many books, so I started to learn more about his writing. It didn't take much reading to feel an instant connection to this Pope. An example from a speech he gave in 2005:

From the beginning, Christianity has understood itself as the religion of the Logos, as the religion according to reason...Today, this should be precisely [Christianity's] philosophical strength, in so far as the problem is whether the world comes from the irrational, and reason is not other than a 'sub-product,' on occasion even harmful of its development -- or whether the world comes from reason, and is, as a consequence, its criterion and goal...In the so necessary dialogue between secularists and Catholics, we Christians must be very careful to remain faithful to this fundamental line: to live a faith that comes from the Logos, from creative reason, and that, because of this, is also open to all that is truly rational. [Thanks to Wikipedia for the excerpt]

Though I'd read work by other Christians who laid out logical, reasonable cases for their beliefs, there was something about Pope Benedict's particular style that reminded me of the people I knew growing up. Many times I thought that if my father and his scientist friends were to become believers and write books about why they believed, this is what it would look like. When I read his encyclicals, excerpt from speeches and books like Journey to Easter and Jesus of Nazareth, I didn't feel so lost in the Christian world anymore. I learned what it means to have faith, and that faith and reason go hand in hand. I learned that the zeal for knowledge and truth that I'd seen in my nonreligious upbringing could not only be found in Christianity, but was in fact one of its defining characteristics.

My new home started to feel as comfortable as my old home.

I've often quipped to my husband that Pope Benedict would make a good atheist. Not just because of his emphasis logic and reason and insistence on looking at the evidence that supports his faith, since that is a hallmark of many great Christian thinkers, but because of a certain je ne sais quoi that I recognize from the world of intellectual atheism. I see in him a particular combination of wonder based on reason, an ability to convey his passion for his beliefs without even appealing to emotion, and a completely fearless pursuit of truth that I've always seen in many of my atheist friends and family members whom I admire.

As I sat in my living room yesterday, watching the light of Shepherd One slowly grow brighter as it neared the American airport, I felt overwhelmed with gratitude for our Pope. I've heard the term "JPII Catholics" used to describe the generation of people who were inspired by the great Pope John Paul II. I think I'm a "BXVI Catholic." This Pope has spoken to me in a way I never thought a lifelong believer could, and has inspired in me an excitement about my faith that I never thought possible. When I saw him step off the plane, it was with deep emotion that I welcomed to my earthly home the man who helped welcome me to my spiritual home.


RELATED POSTS: Some other posts about Pope Benedict's writing are: The desert experience; Having it all in prayer; A reckless experiment with prayer.

Thoughts on atheism

A while back Jason at The Cynical Christian contacted me about doing a series of interviews about atheism. He's a lifelong Christian, and since atheism is an increasingly popular topic these days he wanted to learn a little bit more about atheists and atheism. Our first interview is up here, and his introduction is here.

I hope I threw in enough caveats to make it clear that my attempt in answering these questions is not to offer The Final Word on Atheism. Since it's the only belief system I knew for my entire life up until recently and I have many friends and family members who are nonbelievers, I thought that sharing my experiences and observations might offer some food for thought for those who aren't familiar with the subject. For anyone else who is unfamiliar with atheism but would like to know more, I encourage you to use my answers only as a jumping-off point for discussion and not as a perfect statement on the subject.

Comments are open over at Jason's blog.