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By Rachel Dickson

My family has never been served well by religion. My father’s father left his family’s farming tradition on the eastern Colorado plains in a rather dramatic fashion: he gave more than 700 acres of land, his only inheritance, to a church that promised him a lifelong home and livelihood in exchange for all his worldly goods. Not surprisingly, the cult’s promises didn’t pan out, and my grandfather became an itinerant Methodist minister who provided his seven children with not much more than the incessant preaching of hellfire. The childhood stories my dad recounted were made of slums and hunger, but he kept the worst to himself: the physical abuse from his father, and the fact that all those sermons had settled in a deep place inside him and caused him nightmares even as an adult.

As for my mother, she had been raised in the Ozarks in a backwoods stew of ignorance, poverty, and Bible thumping. On their farm they’d had plenty to eat, anyway, but my mother’s hunger was enormous nevertheless. She wanted ideas, books, a life apart from the Southern Baptist path of adolescent marriage and endless proscriptions of anything that might compete with the entertainment that revivals provided. Her brains got her out of the woods, via a scholarship. She married my dad, and they decided that their children’s religious education should differ significantly from their own.

I will always be grateful to my parents that they kept us from the doctrines of their childhoods. All the thundering from the pulpit that they had endured was distilled for us into no more than a whiff of brimstone. As a result, we have a lot less to contend with than they, for what you are taught as a child about the nature of the Divine has great power to shape your heart, for always. Decades after my dad had turned his back on fundamentalist Christianity, its images of hell still dwelt within him, terrifying him of his impending death and leaving the people who loved him at a loss for how to help him. The New Church calls fundamentalist doctrines "falsities." I call it poison.

I myself was raised in the Unity Church, which is a very positive expression of Christianity, with none of the baggage. I haven’t attended a Unity Church for a decade, however, as its open message is susceptible to being startlingly transformed into some wild New Age teachings that I’m not comfortable with. Where I did find a high degree of comfort was in the academic treatment of faith. The first time I read the Bible was for a college literature course. While I enjoyed absorbing the lore and the majestic language, this experience left me mostly critical. Much of it seemed to me to be a justification for the genocidal crimes and land robbery of a primitive, ethnocentric people. The Ten Commandments seemed written for those who are morally remedial, and all those other strictures in Leviticus and Deuteronomy seemed like micromanagement at its worst. I decided that there was better history and better literature elsewhere. And wasn’t this a misogynist, repetitive, contradictory document, full of far too many scolding prophets? The semester wore on; I started skimming. I ended up with an A in the class and the unfortunate impression that a good grade can bring: that I was knowledgeable in a subject of which I was, in fact, densely ignorant.

I haven’t been exactly fertile ground for religious teachings. My family’s experience with the more toxic forms of Christianity and my own disappointment with my New Age background gave me what I only half-jokingly refer to as a belief disorder. I’ve been attracted to Eastern religions, and done some explorations there. But I found it hard to persuade all those exotic practices to truly live in my heart. I wanted a rooted religious life, yet the choices on my own culture’s menu did not appeal, largely because of the manner in which most flavors of Christianity lay exclusive claim to God’s love. So we–I now had a husband and two sons–had no church. I did my yoga faithfully, and every year or so we would make a half-hearted attempt to go church shopping. My search became more motivated as my father lay dying two years ago. My grief was only one of many shadows in my life, and in the darkness, I sorely needed community and comfort. So we headed back to the church we had liked most during our forays of the previous years, the New Church of Boulder Valley. This is not a story of instant healing, nor of spontaneous acceptance of the teachings. I couldn’t help but be disappointed that this "new" church was based on the same old Bible that had driven my grandfather nuts. And did the language have to be so male oriented? Perhaps we wouldn’t have come back if the kids hadn’t been assigned roles in the upcoming Christmas pageant, making us feel obligated to show up for four Sundays running. Still, there was always something in the service that I liked. I would sit there in alternate resistance and tears–my dad, after all, was slowly dying. And as I sat there, I changed. Darned if those Biblical messages didn’t work their way inside me via the songs we sang, for music finds its way to a place where words don’t usually go.

"I will break their hearts of stone, Give them hearts for love alone. . ." The lyrics seemed to well so joyfully from some divine place inside, that it took me a while to realize that they were out of the dusty, repetitive Old Testament. It still happens sometimes that I realize, startled, that the Word is beautiful. Just yesterday I was reading a quoted passage in a book that begins "How are thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning!" I thought, "How gorgeous, must be Milton." No, knucklehead, Isaiah. It is humbling to find beauty in the foundations of a faith you had comfortably rejected.

I feel indebted to Swedenborg for providing a divine vision pruned of the doctrinal growths that grew up over the centuries, so that you can see its beauty more clearly. Just when you thought you had seen it all, along comes Swedenborg with something different, yet reminiscent of the things I appreciate in other faiths: that mystical experiences are still possible; that the Old Testament stories I had found so distressing could be seen allegorically as a struggle to conquer the part of yourself that is reluctant to accept God; that the Ten Commandments have an inner meaning that is challenging and relevant; that it is just as simple, and as difficult, as turning toward the light.

People tend to want a snappy transformation, to suddenly be born again and to have the job done for life. But what I’ve seen is that a spiritual practice, be it yoga or going to church, changes you slowly–and when you stop practicing, it stops changing you. Little by little, my life is evolving into something better than it was, much richer, as I discover my everyday miracles. I had never seen that there is a place to go when your heart is breaking, that a proper church–my church, now–is a laboratory where kindness is practiced. What a surprise to find that the people who come to the New Church come ready to shine, to provide friendships that shine, too.

On days that things are flowing, I can feel my own heart of stone breaking, softening, healing. Sometimes, in the midst of song, I feel such a well of love in me that I could do anything–even see the desperation in my grandfather’s life, and forgive him the cruelty that so scarred my dad. I feel that I can afford to be more generous, now that I’m not so alone, and that the spiritual breadth of the people around me is inspiring me to find my own kindness in dealing with the challenges in my life. How I savor these new riches. The feeling that I have found my tribe. The feeling of being joyful, and strong with it. The discovery that I could become the first of three generations in my family to be well served by religion. And that’s how I became a churchgoer. There is a postscript. In May I was spending the night at the church, chaperoning a group of teens. Everybody got to bed late, and as I was lying there in the throes of exhausted insomnia, I found myself entertaining thoughts like "Why am I here? I’m never going to get to sleep. I should have stayed home." I did eventually fall asleep, though I didn’t realize it. In my dream, which I was convinced was waking reality, I was going down a wide dim corridor, full of obstacles and hurdles I had to get over. Suddenly, I was back in the room I had grown up in, back in my folks’ house on a bright morning. And my dad came in, no longer 84 years old, no longer ill. He was just out of the shower, and looked wonderful, the essence of himself, brimming over with enthusiasm in that way he had, his eyes snapping with joy. In my dream I thought, death has done wonders for him. He asked me, "Have you read Divine Providence yet?" I don’t know if I actually responded, I was so taken up by the glad feel of him. He said "It’s true! It’s true! Great God Almighty, IT’S TRUE!" And my father took me into an enormous embrace.