I am participating 
in a discussion group (for me online; for others, either online and/or IRL) with the First Lutheran Church of Jamestown, N.Y. on the book, Holy Conversation: Talking About God in Everyday Life by Richard Peace. I was invited to the group by Tara Lamont Eastman, with whom I have become acquainted through the blog Sleeping with Bread and now her own blog Uphill Idealist. This will be my second post as part of that group. The first post can be found here.
The second discussion point is based on the questions: “What was your pilgrimage to God like? Consider the phases you went through in your pilgrimage of faith. What helped you move toward God? When you think of all the stages of your own transformation, what does that do to your perspective on other people’s pilgrimage?”
In talking about my pilgrimage to God, I don’t like to talk in the past tense. It’s not what it “was” like, but what it is like. It is a continuing pilgrimage toward God Much like my namesake for this blog, unfinished person, I am not complete.
That said, my pilgrimage to God began at a young age, as I believe I mentioned last week, when I recited the Sinner’s Prayer at the age of four. Through elementary school and early high school, it continued in the Assemblies of God denomination. Later in high school, it branched out ever slightly into other independent Pentecostal-like churches.
In college, I can disenchanted with the “Pentecostal movement” and eventually doubted my faith in God even though I attended a Christian liberal arts college. Throughout my four years in college, I bounced from church to church, at first among Pentecostal churches, then moving out wider to evangelical and finally more “structured” churches like Lutheran and Episcopalian.
Before graduating, I met a “cradle Catholic” at our school who began me on my journey, again which is ongoing, toward Catholicism. In addition to him, I later met a young woman, who also graduated from my alma mater, who converted to Catholicism. Through the help of that young woman, who later became my wife, and the assistance of the “cradle Catholic,” I began to learn more about the Catholic faith. In April 1995, I was confirmed in the Catholic Church and have been continuing that journey ever since.
For more on my journey into the Catholic Church, I have written about it previously here and here on my now-defunct blog, Journeying with the Saints, the posts from which eventually will be transferred to this blog.
Considering all the stages of my own continuing transformation, and that I continue to have close contacts with members of my immediate family who are Protestant, I tend to look at other people’s pilgrimage toward (and even away from, and no journey at all toward or away from) God in an ecumenical or catholic (small “c”) light. I count among my friends those of other faiths beside the Christian faith, including Muslims, Jews and those with “no faith” at all in a “Higher Power.”
As Dolly sings in this song:
Questions I have many, answers but a few
But we’re here to learn, the spirit burns, to know the greater truth
or as Bono (well, in this case, The Boss) sings in this one (one of so many great versions of this song available on YouTube):
I believe in the Kingdom Come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one
But yes I’m still running
