Losing Faith

It's Sunday and I am left thinking about the Methodist minister of my youth who accused me of losing faith. I was 14. Okay, maybe I was 13. Does it matter? It was a formidable time. My parents, both Unitarians, had lives of their own and I was busily working on cultivating my own "self" so I joined a Methodist Youth Group. I joined, not as a response to god's calling, but as a way to make more friends.

I had one good friend at the time. Randi. She was older by two years and an active member of the youth group and the Methodist Church. She encouraged me to join and so I did, enjoying the camaraderie, the weekly movie nights, and lying around in the youth room aglow with black lights and adolescent hormones. The minister, in his eagerness to expand his flock and the word of god, asked if I wanted to be confirmed and like any good teenager who hasn't a clue what confirmation meant, I said yes.

The next thing I knew, I was in a line of other confirmerees (yes, I know that's not a word) in the concrete basement of the church as the minister verbally rehearsed the scene that was about to take place. We were to walk, solemnly was his word, down the middle of the aisle of the congregation, up onto the raised platform where the altar stood, and take our alphabetized seats facing "god and our families."

I was in a dress and perhaps this, more than any other detail of the ceremony unnerved me the most. I was a tomboy and in many ways still am. I do not wear dresses and only in moments such as a religious confirmation would I don one in my youth. So now, almost 40 years later, when I look back an my defiant actions, I blame the dress more than I blame my lack of faith or belief in god.

I'm not sure who was more surprised, the minister or I, when I approached him moments before we were to ascend the stairs to the main place of worship where all our families and congregates were gathered to say, "I can't go through with this." He did not smile. He didn't really even give me any eye contact. Instead, he gentle grasped the puffy shoulders of my awkward dress and asked, "Have you lost faith?"

I had no real response. I was 14 and despite the weekly classes of the previous month, despite the color-coded bible I'd so diligently highlighted, I had no idea what faith meant. Was there a god and if there was, did I believe in him or better yet, did I even believe that this god WAS a him?

The actual details have been lost over the years, though I have a clear image of myself sitting behind the minister in his large pulpit watching my peers symbolically drink the blood of Christ and partake of his body. My mother was in the congregation that day having joined the Methodist Church as a way to support me, but also because I think she, too, was in search of a better understanding of faith. She was the age then that I am now and it makes sense to me that this is a time in adult life when you begin to question and perhaps seek out a deeper connection to faith.

But at 14 (or was it 13?) I was more interested in friendship than faith, more desperate to rip off the dress I was forced to wear than follow the rest of the flock to the holy sacrament, more uncertain and doubtful than committed to anyone or anything. While I may not have been aware of the reasons for my religious rebellion at the time, I distinctly remember ripping off that confirmation dress and hopping on my bicycle when I got home, setting out on a sweaty ride along the tree-lined streets of my neighborhood. In that respect, I have not changed too terribly much. While I couldn't articulate it then, I now know my faith is more grounded in trees and sky and mountains, in birds and water and open space than it is in anything defined by humanity as holy.