For the Love of God

By Lindsey Schroeder

My Grandma once confided on the car trip out to my horse riding lesson, “I practiced 27 different religions in my life time, but Christianity was what proved the most true for me. It’s where I’ve found peace.” We glide in her huge car through Cebada Canyon, wildflowers streaming on each side and a smooth blue sky gently beaming this peace into my heart. Blink my eyes and I am 17, shrinking away from her deathbed, her mind slipping around with no footing, her desperate voice pleading, “I’m not ready, I just want to get better! I just want to get up again, I don’t want to die!” Her fear split a canyon into the deepest part of myself, where that first seed of faith was planted in me as a child; that death was not something to fear because we were going to Heaven, and everyone you love on earth will be there in heaven. Forever. Childhood truths dissolved in my mouth like cotton candy, as if it had never been there at all, but for a sweet sick feeling. I left that pastel sickroom reeling; wilted and shocked.

These memories floated gently back to me as I began researching faith and comparing religious belief systems, now that my mind is quieter having finished college and finding some stability. I counted slowly to 27 in my mind, and the numbers seemed staggering. How could there be so many different belief structures for such a simple question, my little mind hummed, only able to count about five on my hand. When I left my hometown Trinity Church of the Nazarene that had nurtured me as a child, I left in a hot storm of questions and realizations, a conflict of what I had learned through new experience pushing up against the old truths, doled out of books and the mouths of authority figures. Art history college courses fed the fire as I was offered a wealth of knowledge about the evolution of religions, of governments using the people’s faith as a method of control, of the power of design by religious iconography: the evolution of Jesus’ image from century to century, culture to culture. With every civilization, every passing chapter, my safe harbor steadily crumbled, like so many basilica foundations.

Even so, something flickered, the peace I knew before that had nothing to do with the presented world of bible stories or Left Behind films. A connection to nature and life beyond spoken language that I couldn’t deny. The great fullness of God at the ocean and in the forest. In Notre Dame, overflowing stone pillars and arches. My mothers hand on my heart or cheek when I was flushed with fevers or flu. Music. I couldn’t deny God’s existence, but I couldn’t accept the version of God I’d been given. With two understandings, that of my inherited past faith and the new knowledge flooding me, I set out on my own. I dipped my hands in many different bowls, testing the waters of all who came before me, seeking a new answer. I went into nature, into books, into the lives and experiences of everyone I met, hungry for resolution, and suddenly, twenty-seven didn’t seem so great a number. I found myself still moved spiritually, purely, away from the traditional church, and it felt more truthful this time because I had asked questions to construct my faith. I found I couldn’t give this new understanding of the world a name, a body or print a set of fixed absolutes to seal it, as I find all life to be a shifting gray area, a contradiction I can always count on surprising me. Although I haven’t words yet to explain it, I hope my heart reflects it in all my practices, and I can now pray in peace again. Midnight panic attacks are now only memories; the weight of my own death lifted is from me again, and I’m so glad to have not lost God.