Wednesday, July 14, 2004
When God died
Throughout my childhood we had always attended church regularly (usually with my paternal Grandmother). We were raised in the Methodist and E.U.B. (Evangelical United Brethren) churches and I enjoyed going to church and sunday school. My grandmother was one of those very few people I had known that actually lived what she believed. She made no exceptions. What the bible told her to do, she did. I have never met another person quite like her.
About the same time that we started moving around (1960-1966), because of my fathers job I started to look into other religions and belief systems. I started to question Christianity as a whole because of the people that I had come into contact with. I tried to measure others with my grandmother and they never measured up. I began to believe that she was an anomaly. For me God wasn't dead, he was just hiding. I could never relate God to war or world famine or to many other atrocities committed in the name of God.
I started to look into Catholicism because my other grandmother had been a Catholic and into Judaism because I had a crush on a Jewish girl and when those didn't fit in with my beliefs I started to look elsewhere. I tried Buddhism, Shintoism, Confucius, Lao Tsu, And different Pagan religions. While living in Arizona and living on Indian Reservations I began to learn the way of the Dine'.
In 1966 we moved back to our home town and I returned to my Methodist roots. I became active in my local church, the youth fellowship, laity, and choir. Within a year I was also starting seminary and working within the ecumenical movement, all while attending high school. It was my belief that if you called yourself a christian then you were christian and whatever church you attended you should be learning the same moral values and way of life. It didn't take me too long to realize that whatever people professed to be they didn't live up to my expectations.
I began to look at the people rather than the principles and I couldn't separate the two. I was becoming frustrated with other people and how they practiced their religion. I was beginning to believe that I was the chosen one who could change the world. I became an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. I thought that I was the only one who could do something and yet I felt so small. Then somewhere I had heard or read that when the true son of god would climb to the mountain top and shout "SHALOM", "PEACE", the world would change. A miracle would happen.
Since I believed that I was that person I took it upon myself to test it. I climbed a mountain and yelled Shalom. When I climbed back down and found that the world had not changed I lost my faith in God. The Vietnam war was still on. People were still dying and starving all over the world. Nothing had changed and so I blamed God. I thought that since nothing happened then there must be no God or that he had turned his back on me. Therefore I would turn my back on him. He was dead in my mond.
I began to live life as if there were no rules, no moral foundation, except what I beleived and I could make up my own rules as life went on. There was no God to me. I was my own God. The God that I had believed in and searched for had abandoned me. It never occured to me that I had already abandoned Him.
Thirty-seven years later I would ask for help, but for all that intervening time He was dead to me. I lived a godless life and abandoned all those principles that I had, for so many years, believed. For the first time in my life I was truly alone.
About the same time that we started moving around (1960-1966), because of my fathers job I started to look into other religions and belief systems. I started to question Christianity as a whole because of the people that I had come into contact with. I tried to measure others with my grandmother and they never measured up. I began to believe that she was an anomaly. For me God wasn't dead, he was just hiding. I could never relate God to war or world famine or to many other atrocities committed in the name of God.
I started to look into Catholicism because my other grandmother had been a Catholic and into Judaism because I had a crush on a Jewish girl and when those didn't fit in with my beliefs I started to look elsewhere. I tried Buddhism, Shintoism, Confucius, Lao Tsu, And different Pagan religions. While living in Arizona and living on Indian Reservations I began to learn the way of the Dine'.
In 1966 we moved back to our home town and I returned to my Methodist roots. I became active in my local church, the youth fellowship, laity, and choir. Within a year I was also starting seminary and working within the ecumenical movement, all while attending high school. It was my belief that if you called yourself a christian then you were christian and whatever church you attended you should be learning the same moral values and way of life. It didn't take me too long to realize that whatever people professed to be they didn't live up to my expectations.
I began to look at the people rather than the principles and I couldn't separate the two. I was becoming frustrated with other people and how they practiced their religion. I was beginning to believe that I was the chosen one who could change the world. I became an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. I thought that I was the only one who could do something and yet I felt so small. Then somewhere I had heard or read that when the true son of god would climb to the mountain top and shout "SHALOM", "PEACE", the world would change. A miracle would happen.
Since I believed that I was that person I took it upon myself to test it. I climbed a mountain and yelled Shalom. When I climbed back down and found that the world had not changed I lost my faith in God. The Vietnam war was still on. People were still dying and starving all over the world. Nothing had changed and so I blamed God. I thought that since nothing happened then there must be no God or that he had turned his back on me. Therefore I would turn my back on him. He was dead in my mond.
I began to live life as if there were no rules, no moral foundation, except what I beleived and I could make up my own rules as life went on. There was no God to me. I was my own God. The God that I had believed in and searched for had abandoned me. It never occured to me that I had already abandoned Him.
Thirty-seven years later I would ask for help, but for all that intervening time He was dead to me. I lived a godless life and abandoned all those principles that I had, for so many years, believed. For the first time in my life I was truly alone.
Dana Megyesi 7:44 AM