A Perfectly Normal Baby

I remember long ago, when I was 14 years old listening to the news on the radio with my mom.   The big news on this particular day was that some doctor in England had delivered a baby, since named Louise Brown.  Louise Brown was special.  She was the first baby ever conceived outside of the mother’s womb.  The popular press called her a ‘test-tube baby', I suspect as a way of denigrating the controversial procedure.  I was not exactly sure at the time quite what this news meant, but I do remember my mother’s shocked reaction.  “This is not right.  You have to wonder if that baby even has a soul!”  The future was already coming too fast for my young mother.

This morning, I learned of the death of the pioneer of in-vitro fertilization.  Dr Robert Edwards, along with his partner Dr Patrick Steptoe, were responsible for the conception of Louise Brown outside of her mother’s womb.  The concern of my mother, that the conception of a baby inside the womb is somehow the only means of imparting to that baby an immortal soul, was echoed by the pastor of our church.  Although I never heard the implication express aloud, I suspect that the logical conclusion was drawn that this child may not even be human.  Every human child in the history of the world, from the creation of Adam some 6000 years before until July 24, 1978 was conceived as God Almighty had designed, purposed and intended – inside the natural and fleshly womb of the mother.  The conception of every baby, without a single exception, was through this mysterious procedure, and the fecundity of the mother was viewed as a blessing and gift from God.  The reproduction of the child, especially as viewed by the Catholic Church, was only possible through the whim of God, and administered through the authority of the Church.

Suddenly, on July 25, 1978, this natural order of the world was changed forever.  Louise Brown, conceived in some cold, clinical and unnatural laboratory, was born surrounded by the curious press.  Denigrating terms like ‘test tube baby’ were used for their fearsome impact.  I imagined a near future in which women would never again be pregnant, and babies would be born in factories.  An army of fetuses, swimming in some kind of alkaline solution in labeled petri dishes and lined up on an automated production line was the image put in my mind.  The world was becoming more godless and soulless, more artificial and superficial, and this was just one more sign that Jesus would soon return to our lost and dying world.

Women, unable to conceive for whatever reason, are now able to transcend what was once the whim and will of the Almighty.  In-vitro fertilization, once the procedure begins, is never a certainty, and may come with certain risks to mother and child.  But there is now hope of conception where there would otherwise be none.  Before 1978, the woman was left in the hands of God as ‘barren’.  In-vitro fertilization is just one more piece of claimed territory by lustful and prideful humanity that was once the sole domain of the Almighty.

The fear of ‘test tube babies’ in 1978 did not last and the worry of soulless babies was quickly forgotten.  Now, 35 years and some 5 million ‘test tube babies’ later, it is almost impossible to imagine that in-vitro fertilization was once met with such fear and skepticism.  I have not heard a single sermon against the procedure since 1978.  In fact, I do not recall ever hearing a single word of condemnation from a single Christian since those early, fearful days.  I never heard my mom mention it again and today she would never think twice about it.  What was once a shattering of the natural order is now routine.

According to their catechism, the archaic dinosaur called the Catholic Church still considers in-vitro fertilization to be “morally unacceptable”.  What else is new?

2376 Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus), are gravely immoral. These techniques (heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization) infringe the child's right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage. They betray the spouses' "right to become a father and a mother only through each other."

2377 Techniques involving only the married couple (homologous artificial insemination and fertilization) are perhaps less reprehensible, yet remain morally unacceptable. They dissociate the sexual act from the procreative act. the act which brings the child into existence is no longer an act by which two persons give themselves to one another, but one that "entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person. Such a relationship of domination is in itself contrary to the dignity and equality that must be common to parents and children."  "Under the moral aspect procreation is deprived of its proper perfection when it is not willed as the fruit of the conjugal act, that is to say, of the specific act of the spouses' union .... Only respect for the link between the meanings of the conjugal act and respect for the unity of the human being make possible procreation in conformity with the dignity of the person."

I could comment on the questionable ethics of that bit of religious instruction, but that is going a bit off course of what I started writing about.  A rememberence of Dr Robert Edwards and the hope he helped give millions of women.  Well, not really much of a eulogy for Dr Edwards, and probably not one he would even approve of.  But these are the thoughts that ran through my head when I thought of his death.  We seem to quickly recover from our shock and hysteria, once we realize we can actually get away with reclaiming one more small piece of the Almighy’s turf.  It is almost as if He were not even looking.

Have you lost your mind?

I awoke this morning before the sunrise.  It was still dark in the house, and mindful not to wake Rosemary, I felt around for the clothes I had left out the night before.  I put on a ragged flannel shirt to protect me from the morning chill, and a wide athletic belt around my waist to carry a water bottle and a baggie full of peanut brittle.  I laced my favorite running shoes on, and left the house.  Still dark, I drove 15 miles north to the border of New Mexico where there is a stretch of road over a pass in the Franklin Mountains called Anthony Gap.  I parked my truck on the side of the road and looked ahead to where I intended to run.  A little less than 8 miles uphill and over the pass, then back down until the road meets with I-10.  The skies behind me in the east were slowly starting to brighten.  I figured the sun would be above the horizon in a half hour or so and warm me on my jog up.  I did not want to run on the shoulder of the road.  There was far too much traffic to make that a comfortable option.  Besides, I have always found jogging on the pavement to be boring and tedious.  There was a maintenance road of rock and dirt that ran parallel to the highway.  It was more of a trail really, since only the sturdiest 4-wheeler would be able to navigate through the numerous arroyos that were bridged by the main highway.  Even though it was rough and uneven, I figured I would run on that trail to avoid traffic and not allow the smooth pavement to make my run monotonous. 

I placed the bottle of water in my belt holster after taking a sip, and bit into a generous chunk of peanut brittle.  I looked at the trail ahead of me.  A few miles uphill before disappearing over the mountain pass.  My hands were freezing, and I could not wait for the sun to rise and warm me up.  I blew my nose, muttered to myself, “Have you lost your mind?” and headed uphill on the uneven, rock-strewn trail.

I started running almost 12 years ago, in July 2001.  Although I have always been an avid mountain and desert hiker, the extent of my athleticism ended there.  On the contrary, I did not feel that I was in very good health.  I had struggled more or less, mostly more, with cigarettes since Air Force Basic Training way back in 1982.  Cigarettes were part of Air Force culture.  Half my Basic Training squadron was composed of fresh-faced, innocent kids, first time out of mom’s house, and had never before touched tobacco.  While conducting drills or policing the grounds, our drill instructor set aside five minutes every hour or so for the smokers’ benefit.  “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!”  Half the squadron, myself included, started smoking just so we could take a break from the drudgery.

By 2001, a stressful and sedentary study environment in grad school gave me a two pack per day habit.  I was not picky.  I smoked whatever JB’s Smoke Shop had on sale.  That usually meant something called Premium Basic, which I could get for $1.15 per pack.  A lit Premium Basic was the perfect companion during countless all-nighters spent buried in school work, and I puffed constantly while struggling with insanely difficult physics problems.  But my breathing was getting more labored, and my throat burned more and more often.  I knew I had to quit.  I had managed to quit for over four years back in the early 1990s, but had started up again soon after enrolling in University.  Since then, I could never completely stay off the cigarettes.  I managed a day or two numerous times before finally caving in to the lure of nicotine.  The first puff after two days deprived of cigarettes always made my head spin.

In July 2001, I was walking in the marshlands by the Rio Grande with my dog Comet.  For some reason, on this particular day, I felt full of caged energy.  It must have been the coffee.  I walked along a dirt road atop a dammed up arroyo, and for no good reason just started running.  I ran with soaked water shoes as fast as I could, with Comet happily following close behind.  I managed maybe 100 meters before I stopped and keeled over out of breath, wondering what had just come over me!  The next day my legs, especially my inner thighs, were quite sore.  I had awakened muscles I had not used probably since the Air Force.  I ran again though, this time a little further.  Just a little.  I was a runner for only one day, and I was already hooked.  I would trade in one habit for another.  My last cigarette was in October 2001, and I have been running ever since.

I continued to run almost exclusively on dirt trails.  This was easy for me since I lived in a rural area.  Every powerline that crossed the desert was sure to have a rugged maintenance road running with it.  The desert was full of sandy arroyos that made for difficult but satisfying running.  And of course, the Rio Grande had dirt roads running parallel on both banks for as far as anybody could possibly run.  I was soon running over 10 kilometers every day.  Running was the perfect escape after a long day filling my head with theorems and equations.  If the day was too busy, if my emotions were running amok, if personal dramas were overwhelming, I could easily renew myself with a run in the open air.  Running in the desert felt nearly like a primal instinct.  I felt unleashed from the world when running around in the desert with nothing between me and the harsh environment but the thin cloth of shorts and T-shirt.  I loved the rush of adrenalin after a long run along some cattle trail.  Running to the top of the Chupaderra Hills and looking down from when I came was almost like spiritual epiphany.  Every time I hit the trials, I felt young, unencumbered and free!

I still get occasional surges of breathless emotion, even after 12 years of running.  I sometimes run several miles into the desert, maybe on the top of a ridge, far above the desert floor.  I have left the mundane city far behind, and as I climb in elevation, listening to nothing but my own footfalls and labored breathing, I can feel the air cool, I can see the desert flora change, and the horizon widen below me.  When I reach the top, spent from the exertion of miles of uphill running, I can turn back to look at the seemingly endless expanse of desert that I ran through to get to this spot.  I can see the tangled maze of arroyos and notch canyons that carve through the mountain’s alluvial fans.  The wind may pick up, and I see that a monsoon cumulonimbus has suddenly formed over the horizon.  Rain is threatening, and I have a long way to run to get back to my parked truck.  But for this moment, this special place where few people tread, a place deep in the desert and far above civilization, for this moment this place is almost Holy.  To think that I reached this place with nothing but the power of my own two feet, I sometimes feel a need to be grateful.  There may be nobody to be grateful to, but running to places where I am surrounded by the vastness of the desert wilderness leave me feeling joyous, humbled, even awed at my total insignificance in the midst of the whole.  I still cannot help feeling grateful at my ability to run into this momentarily sacred place under my own power, before I run back downhill, out of the desert and back into the more familiar, trivial, mundane world.

Yes, I do occasionally feel these moments of epiphany.  Can you tell that I love to run?  

The only time I stopped running for any length of time was when I had to nurse an injury.  I stopped for three weeks when my left knee hurt.  I stopped even longer when my calf muscle was strained.  I stopped for a couple of months when I was forced to rest my painful hip.  Deprived of running, but compelled to continue exercise of some kind, I decided to ride a bicycle instead.  I could never get used to the bicycle.  I crashed every time I tried off-road riding in the desert.  I found cycling on the highway with the traffic to be nerve wracking when I was not bored stiff with the monotony and tedium.  I was too used to my slow humping over the desert rocks and brush, with eyes glued to the ground lest I step on a camouflaged rattlesnake.  But cycling was better than nothing.  I found that if I did not run, or at least strain my breathing and heart rate once every few days, I would become cranky.  I had too much pent up energy.  I needed to move!

Running is a low maintenance activity.  It requires no special equipment.  It can be done nearly anywhere and at any time.  Along with eating, sleeping and sex, it is as basic, primal and natural an activity as I can imagine.  There is something about the simplicity of it that I find aesthetically attractive.  There is almost an elegance and ease to running.  There are no rules to follow, and the form seems to come naturally.  Unlike most athletic events, the runner is unencumbered with gear.  All that is required is to get up and propel oneself forward.  I have learned to keep the intense desert sun off my bare skin.  My sleeveless, bare-skinned days are long over.  On sunny days I will run with plaid cowboy shirt with long sleeves to cover my arms.  If it is not too windy, I will jog with my wide brimmed cowboy hat to keep the sun off my face.  I am the only person I know who regularly jogs with a cowboy hat and shirt on.  You can’t say I am not fashion forward!

I recently started wearing my stopwatch again after years of going without.  I found that I suffered as a result of going without – I was running much slower than I imagined I was.  As I get older my comfortable pace gets slower and slower, and without my stopwatch I never realized just how slow I was going.  I have not challenged myself in a long time.  I entered a half marathon at a friend’s request two years ago, but I loped along at such a slow pace I never even noticed I had jogged over 13 miles.  Besides that event, I have not been in a competitive race since 2005.  I say competitive, when the truth is I have no chance of ever winning any race I enter.  I can barely even place in my age group.  For me, if I enter a race, I can only truly compete with people who are going at roughly the same slow pace as me.  At the first 10k race I ever entered, I was 1 kilometer from the finish line and I was simply pushing myself to pass the two people just ahead of me.  Just ahead of me to my left was a kid no older than 12.  Just ahead to my right was a man no younger than 70.  C’mon!  Surely I can go faster than an old man and a little boy!  Nope.  They both passed the finish line just ahead of me.  That is about the extent of my ‘competition’.

Since I started wearing my stopwatch again, my times have improved.  I even started keeping a log again, and I found myself running more to meet my weekly goals.  I still do not find most races intriguing enough to enter, but I will be making a single exception next Sunday.  Throwing all reason aside, I signed up to run in the Bataan Memorial Death March, held annually at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.  It is not officially a race, but a commemorative march to remember and honor the veterans who endured a forced march at the hands of the Japanese during WWII.  I considered joining a team and marching the entire route with a heavy pack on my back.  But I decided instead to run the entire route, which runs mostly on sandy desert trails with very little pavement.  That is my kind of race.  I am a little nervous about the distance.  It is marathon distance, just over 26 miles, and well beyond my comfort zone.  I have entered two marathons in the past, and both ended in terrible knee pain.  What makes me think this will be any different?  Who was it that said repeating an action and expecting a different outcome was the definition of insanity?  I cannot remember, so whoever said that must have been wrong.  Of course he was wrong.  Obviously.

So I have been logging extra miles in preparation for the Death March.  That is why I woke up before dawn this morning, to hump over the Anthony Gap.  The first 4 miles was pretty easy, even though they were all uphill.  Anything less than 10 kilometers is a routine distance for me.  Suddenly the trail disappeared in a tangle of creosote and cactus, and I was forced to run downhill to I-10 on the shoulder of the highway.  Monotonous pavement running, and all downhill!  The pounding on my knees began.  Then I could feel my thighs start to chaff.  What?  My thighs have never chaffed before!  My mind raced to think of what I could wear in the Death March to avoid painful chaffing.  Assuming I could survive this one.

After running just shy of 8 miles, I reached the on-ramp of I-10.  I was half way finished, and now I would have to turn and go back the way I came.  I stopped and gave my legs a good stretch.  They still felt fine, even though I knew they would be stiff as rods by the time I reached my parked truck.   I placed the bottle of water in my belt holster after taking a sip, and bit into a generous chunk of peanut brittle.  I looked at the road ahead of me.  A few miles uphill before disappearing over the mountain pass.  My hands were warm but slightly swollen, as they tended to get during a long run.  The sun was well above the horizon, which brought warm weather along with a seasonal stiff wind.  I would be running into the wind for the remaining 8 miles until I reached my truck.  The chaffing on my thighs was beginning to burn.  Great.  I blew my nose, muttered to myself, “Have you lost your mind?” and headed uphill on the smooth shoulder of the highway.

middle age

I never got my PhD in physics.  I stopped at a M.S.  I do not mean this to complain.  It was my choice to leave grad school at the age of 39 and enter the job market.  I left my studies, knowing that academia, at least in physics, views an M.S. as an incomplete PhD.  But despite that,  I have had a fulfilling career ever since, and I have no regrets.  Until…

…until I found out that one of the 1^st year undergraduates that was enrolled in my university physics course 11 years ago, is soon to get his PhD in mathematical physics.   I remember him.  He was an unbelievably sharp kid.  I knew he would go far.

But my former student has now attained a level that I will, in all likelihood never attain.  He has reached a goal that I will never reach. 

I had a dream last night.  I rarely remember dreams anymore, but I remember this one.  I dreamt that I was back in my old University at a department pizza social.  All the young freshmen from my 11 years old class were there, and none had aged a single day.  They all asked if I was there as the new professor.  No, I replied, I was just there for pizza, and to cheer them on for their dissertation defenses.

I think it is no coincidence that today is my birthday.  I am 49 years old today.  Well into middle age.  I am not consciously thinking about aging, but it somehow snuck into my dreams last night.  

I realize how trite, immature and selfish this sounds.  I realize that I have a wonderful and fulfilling life.  I realize that I am rich beyond my wildest imagination.  I have no right to think such pitiful thoughts.  But there they are - I am a mere human weakling after all.  I think that this is a mood that will only last through today.  After all, I swore to myself a long time ago that I would never let myself sink into a mid-life crisis.

Lift a glass.  Here’s looking forward to tomorrow!

Conversions and De-Conversions - The final straw

When I review the nearly thirty chapters that I have written in this Conversions and De-Conversions series, I discover that my real de-conversion from Christianity began in 1993 when I left Calvary Chapel.  I remained a Christian for about 13 years after I made the decision to leave that church, but the single event of leaving Calvary Chapel was the first trigger that led to my eventual exit from Christianity.  It had been a slow accretion of assimilation into the worldly environment, a progressive education in the scientific method and critical analysis, and acquaintance and accommodation of people and cultures that were vastly different from my own.  It was a slow progression away from Christianity.  My ‘spiritual journey’, if I may call if that, may have stopped at any point since that time.  I might have received my education in Physics, and from there lived a perfectly happy life, ambivalently believing in God.  I might have gotten a career in private industry, with a vague belief in some kind of Heavenly reward for a life well lived, while privately chuckling at my naive days as a Fundamentalist.  I might have been content marrying a Catholic girl from the Philippines, nominally converting to her religion, and lived as a Sunday Morning Catholic.  I could have remained, as so many do, believing that God does not care what religion I follow, as long as I have Faith in something, and that is ultimately all that really matters.  This story could have ended at any one of those points.  In fact, I do believe that many, if not most, of the people who leave a Fundamentalist brand of Christianity usually do end at one of those points.  I do think that there are many refugees of Fundamentalist Christianity, who are now content as nominally Christian believers.  They managed to escape from their cultish environment of religious fanaticism, only to live with the vaguest idea that God does not care what they believe, as long as they gain their moral behavior from a belief in some nebulous something.

What turned it around for me?  Why did I not rest content with vague spiritual beliefs?  I can think of two primary reasons:

I have always taken my reliance on faith and belief very seriously.  If I am to believe in something, I want to know what it is.  I at least want to have a pretense of thinking I know what it is.  I could never understand how people could simply change their core religious beliefs and convictions, simply as a matter of personal taste or convention.  I did not understand that as a Fundamentalist Christian, and I do not understand it now as a de-converted Christian apostate.

I loved my wife, and I desperately wanted to be a good husband.  I had been led to believe by my religious indoctrination that religious beliefs were the only acceptable standard of morality.  The only way to be good was through belief in God.  Jesus set the standard in His many discourses, notably the Sermon on the Mount.  If I wanted the strength of the Holy Spirit, which was necessary to achieve a more Christ-like life, I had to return to my Christian roots.  I had no desire to ever become an ignorant Fundamentalist as I was in Calvary Chapel, but by starting a home Bible Study group and devoting more of my time to prayer, I was inevitably being drawn back into that brittle Fundamentalist mindset.  At the same time, I was being influenced by my wife’s Catholic beliefs.  I was being pulled in three separate directions, the Scientific method and secularism, Fundamentalism and Catholicism.  Nominal believers may be able to rest content in vague religious beliefs.  I could not rest content.  Something had to give.

I mentioned the initial trigger that occurred in 1993.  There was another trigger.  There was a single incident that pushed me from my comfortable but tense ledge of ambivalent Christian belief, into full apostasy.  In fact, that single trigger, that single incident, was actually something that I said.  The trigger that led me out of Christianity was a single sentence that I barked at Rosemary in anger and confusion.  It began with a conversation with Rosemary, my wife of a single year.

We were lying in bed.  She could not sleep.  She was forced awake by the riveting suspense of a popular best-seller.  I have never been one to keep up on the latest pop culture phenomena, so while I had seen plenty of people reading the novel The Da Vinci Code, I had no idea what it was about.  Just a popular thriller, I had thought.  Rosemary was up in bed, unable to break her attention from the gripping story, and its mind-bending revelations.

She sat up, eager to talk with me.  “This book is so interesting!  It is a thriller about a professor who is investigating the Bible and the family of Jesus.”

“Jesus?”  She had my attention.  So this was what the popular best-seller was about.  "It is a story, but it is one of those stories that is based on real facts.  So this professor of symbology is talking with his older friend, another professor, about the Bible. “

“Symbology?  What is that?”

“I guess he studies symbols.  Anyway, listen to what this book says about the Bible.”  Rosemary picked up her novel and read a fictional conversation between two professors:

"…More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John among them." 

"Who chose which gospels to include?" 

"Aha! The fundamental irony of Christianity!  The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great." 

"I thought Constantine was a Christian…" 

"…Hardly.  He was a lifelong pagan who was baptized on his deathbed, too weak to protest.  In Constantine's day, Rome's official religion was sun worship - the cult of Sol Invictus, or the Invincible Sun - and Constantine was its head priest.  Unfortunately for him, a growing religious turmoil was gripping Rome.  Three centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Christ's followers had multiplied exponentially.  Christians and pagans began warring, and the conflict grew to such proportions that it threatened to rend Rome in two.  Constantine decided something had to be done.  In 325 A.D., he decided to unify Rome under a single religion.  Christianity…" 

"…Constantine was a very good businessman.  He could see that Christianity was on the rise, and he simply backed the winning horse.  Historians still marvel at the brilliance with which Constantine converted the sun-worshipping pagans to Christianity.  By fusing pagan symbols, dates, and rituals into the growing Christian tradition, he created a kind of hybrid religion that was acceptable to both parties…" 

"…The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are undeniable.  Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints.  Pictograms of Isis nursing her miraculously conceived son Horus became the blueprint for our modern images of the Virgin Mary nursing Baby Jesus.  And virtually all the elements of the Catholic ritual - the miter, the altar, the doxology, and communion, the act of 'God-eating' - were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions." 

"…Don't get a symbologist started on Christian icons.  Nothing in Christianity is original.  The pre-Christian God Mithras - called the Son of God and the Light of the World - was born on December 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days.  By the way, December 25 is also the birthday of Osiris, Adonis, and Dionysus.  The newborn Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  Even Christianity's weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans…" 

"…During this fusion of religions, Constantine needed to strengthen the new Christian tradition, and held a famous ecumenical gathering known as the Council of Nicaea … At this gathering, many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon - the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration of sacraments, and, of course, the divinity of Jesus." 

"Until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet ... a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless.  A mortal" 

"…Jesus' establishment as 'the Son of God' was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea." 

"Hold on.  You're saying Jesus' divinity was the result of a vote?" 

"A relatively close vote at that … Nonetheless, establishing Christ's divinity was critical to the further unification of the Roman Empire and to the new Vatican power base.  By officially endorsing Jesus as the Son of God, Constantine turned Jesus into a deity who existed beyond the scope of the human world, an entity whose power was unchallengeable…" 

"…Because Constantine upgraded Jesus' status almost four centuries after Jesus' death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling His life as a mortal man.  To rewrite the history books, Constantine knew he would need a bold stroke.  Form this sprang the most profound moment in Christian history.  Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned."

     -P231 – 234

“Well, what do you think?”

“I don’t know.  It is fiction isn’t it?  Just a story?”

“Yes this is a story, but it says at the beginning of the book that the facts about the Bible and history are all true.”

I did not know what to make of all this new information.  It was obviously blasphemous nonsense.  But if this blockbuster novel was based on real facts about the origins of the Bible, as if claimed, then I had no answer for it.  The trouble was, I was 41 years old.  I had been a Christian with greater or less intensity, for almost my entire life.  I was taught to revere to the Bible.  The word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.  It was the foundational cornerstone of my Faith, and the only sure means of God’s revelation and communication to me.  And despite my shock at the blasphemy of that silly novel, the truth was, I had no idea where the Bible came from.  Sure, the apostles wrote the Gospels.  Paul wrote his epistles.  A few other apostles and close associates of Jesus wrote some other epistles.  But I had never even entertained the idea of how the various writings were assembled and collated into a unified Canon.  As I mentioned in a previous chapter to this series, I had never heard a single sermon or lesson that described exactly how the Biblical Canon was decided on and assembled.  I have repeatedly emphasized how Calvary Chapel viewed ignorance as a virtue, and if Pastor Skip knew this information, he never shared it with his congregation.  The only information that I had on this shocking information was a few short bullet points in my Thomson Chain Reference Study Bible, about how certain apocryphal books were left out of the Canon.  But I had never in my life heard of such shocking things such as some eighty extra gospels that were intentionally suppressed by a Roman emperor.  I could not believe that the divinity of Jesus was voted on in a political maneuver to unify the Roman Empire.  Where did our Christian Canon come from?  Who wrote our Christian Creeds?  I had no idea.  But it sure did not happen the way Dan Brown’s novel was presenting it.  That was certainly a lie. 

I would have brushed this off as just another pop culture attack on my Christian Faith except for one thing.  Rosemary, along with the rest of the book reading public, was finding this book irresistible.  I was fearful that the ideas of who Jesus was in that book would deceive her into a heretical version of Christ’s Divinity.  I privately expressed my concern to some of my friends in our home Bible Study group.  “It would not be so bad if it was just silly fiction,” I said.  “But Dan Brown is presenting the background history as fact!”

“Yes, yes.  It is a tragedy.  A lie from the pit of Hell,” my friend agreed with me.  “The World hates the truth of God’s Word, and they will always attack Jesus.”

In all the years that I attended Calvary Chapel, they may have never given a single sermon about origins of Christianity, but in anticipation of the upcoming Da Vinci Code movie starring Tom Hanks, refutations of The Da Vinci Code along with mini-lessons in early Christian history were suddenly coming out of the woodwork.  If I was shocked by what Rosemary read in the book, I am certain that there were plenty of other Christians who were just as shocked as I was.  We were isolated from any investigation of Church history by a tradition of simply accepting unquestioned dogma.  For all our church pastors were concerned, I could have believed that the Bible simply and miraculously appeared out of thin air 2000 years ago.  The laity of the Evangelical Church was uncorrupted and innocent from the taint of knowledge.  But The Da Vinci Code tantalized Christians with knowledge of a hidden past, suppressed Gospels and secret councils.  Pastors suddenly had to act fast.  For a couple of months adjacent to the release of The Da Vinci Code movie in 2006, it seemed every church marquee in my neighborhood boasted an upcoming sermon that would debunk Dan Brown and reveal the real history of Biblical origins.

Rosemary has always loved a good thriller.  She loved reading The Da Vinci Code and could not wait to watch her favorite actor Tom Hanks play the lead in the upcoming movie.  I was seriously concerned.  I had to show her the error in her thinking.  I had to demonstrate that reading such blasphemous trash would lead to errors in her Christian beliefs.

There was a Baptist Church near our house that I passed every day, but we had never as yet attended.  During this crucial time, their marquee was one of the throng that promised to debunk The Da Vinci Code during their next Sunday morning service.  In one of the most despicable and conniving tricks I pulled on Rosemary during our marriage together, I decided to trick her into attending that Sunday morning service, in a tiny, unknown Baptist Church near our house, and get her educated. 

“Rosemary, there is another Baptist Church I have been wanting to attend.  It is very close to our house, and it is also very small.  Let’s go there next Sunday and see what it is like.”  I never mentioned that I knew very well what the sermon would be dedicated to.  Nope.  I just randomly happened to want to go there.

We sat in the pews amongst the tiny congregation.  The elderly pastor was overjoyed to see a younger married couple visiting his church, and he warmly welcomed us.  I actually enjoyed singing from old hymnals the likes of which I had not seen since I was young.  Then the sermon began.  It was a terrible sermon, but its intent was to be a lecture and as such it was actually quite well done.  It contained information about Christian origins that I had never heard before.  Rosemary was used to homilies during her morning Mass, not history lectures.  But the Evangelical Church suddenly found these lectures necessary to face the emergency crisis that The Da Vinci Code was challenging the Church with and deceiving believers.  The pastor had an overhead projector to place his transparent slides on, and Rosemary got pummeled with names, dates and other details about the origin of her Faith.  She did not know what hit her.  She was not used to listening to lectures on Sunday morning and vowed to attend Mass afterwards to make up for lost time.  The Pastor, to my satisfaction, completely destroyed the specific claims made by Dan Brown in his blasphemous novel.  Rosemary might have hated the Sunday morning lecture that debunked her stupid novel, but at least she now knew the truth.  It was tough medicine that she needed to swallow. 

We never again attended that tiny Baptist Church.  As far as I was concerned, it had done its job.  I was too cowardly to tell Rosemary the truth of why I wanted to go there.  But I thought that I lied to her for her own good.  Rosemary challenged my Christian Faith with The Da Vinci Code, and rather than investigate those claims and learn something from the experience, I let religious instinct drive my reactions.  My Faith was being attacked, so despite my growing liberality, despite my years of education and lessons in critical thought, I circled the wagons and retreated to the safety of my long lost Fundamentalism.  I had once hated the Fundamentalism that I escaped from, but it was something that I at least understood.  I had no idea how to evaluate the challenges posed by The Da Vinci Code, but I knew I always had a home in the familiar territory of Fundamentalism.  I was still too easily offended when my beliefs were scrutinized.

Finally, the moment came that I teased at the beginning of this chapter.  The trigger that finally led me out of Christianity was a single sentence that I barked at Rosemary in anger and confusion.  The movie premiered.  Rosemary was excited to see it.  Despite all my warnings to her, despite taking her to a Sunday morning lecture about the lies in that story, she still wanted to see the movie.  What was I doing wrong?  Why wouldn’t she listen to me?

“Can we go see The Da Vinci Code today?”

“No.”

She knew what I thought of the book.  “But I want to see the movie.  Can’t we go?”  Yes, she asked for permission at that time.  On certain occasions, Filipino custom was still a habit with her.

“No Rosemary, we can not see that movie,” I said as forcefully as I dared.  Then the sentence that I will never forget.  A sentence that changed my life:

“Dan Brown will face God some day, and he will have to answer to Him what he has written.”

Rosemary’s eyes watered.  She was probably wondering what in the world was happening to her husband.  She replied very quietly, in an almost pleading tone, “It is just a story.”

End of argument.

I could not believe what I had just told my wife.  I was dishonest to her, and deceitful.  I had tried to trick her into making her think and believe exactly as I did.  I knew that my beliefs were the correct beliefs, and there was no longer any room for compromise.  There were all sorts of movies and books that I was not allowed to view when I was younger, and The Da Vinci Code would simply just have to be part of that long list.  But then I had to step back and reflect on what I had just told Rosemary.  I was falling right back into the Fundamentalism that I had so vehemently repudiated.  I had damned Dan Brown for writing a novel that I deemed blasphemous.  I had bullied my wife into not viewing things that I did not think were good for her.  My wife.  A woman who was a grown adult and who was capable of making her own decisions.  A woman who I had sworn to be honest and faithful to.  I knew at that moment that there was something drastically wrong.  I could not continue to have a marriage like this.  I could not be the Spiritual Leader of the household if it meant ordering Rosemary to honor my own personal banned items list, attempting to mould her spiritual thoughts and beliefs by subterfuge and trick and lie to her for the sake of believing in God as I saw fit. 

I was turning into the Fundamentalist asshole that I had hated so much when I was younger.  I thought Pastor Skip Heitzig was a disgusting liar for filtering and suppressing knowledge to make me believe as he saw fit, but I caught myself doing the exact same thing with Rosemary.

The words that I said to Rosemary repeated in my head.  Dan Brown will face God some day, and he will have to answer to Him what he has written.  As if I was God All-mighty, and could pass judgment with the same Divine authority.  But in those words, I also caught myself retreating to the Fundamentalism that I had repudiated.  I thought I had escaped the poisonous belief in Divine judgement and damnation.  I thought I had matured with more enlightened, Post-Fundamentalist beliefs.  But my new enlightened beliefs were just as unjustified as my more dogmatic beliefs, and when threatened with even the slightest of challenges, I became just as dogmatic, rigid and intolerant as I had ever been.  I knew that Dan Brown was a deceptive heathen, and I had the certainty that he would have to face God with his blasphemy.  But then I realized what an arrogant prick I really was.  I was so certain about what God thought of Dan Brown, that I was willing to railroad my own wife into believing exactly as I did.  I was disgusted with myself.  I was such a fool.

After several rounds of embarrassment and apologies, I agreed to watch the movie with Rosemary.  When the house lights went up and the end credits scrolled, I realized that she was right about one thing – it really was just a silly story.  But our marriage would not survive if I was to continue acting in this way.  My Faith could not survive either.  I did not know whether to be more liberal or conservative in my religious beliefs, and they seemed to change based on how I reacted to others, not to any deep conviction of religious Faith.  I no longer knew what to do, and my home Bible Studies and Rick Warren’s 40 Days of Purpose videos were no longer meeting my need.  I decided that if The Da Vinci Code, silly story that it was, was still able to force Evangelical churches to dispense otherwise suppressed history about its own historical foundations, then there had to be much more out there that I needed to learn.  Was my Faith correct?  Was Christianity really something worth believing in?  I had to get to the bottom of it.  I had to do it for the same reason I left Calvary Chapel 13 years before.  I had to do it for my own sanity.

Graduate school had taught me how to research topics, but astrophysics was so different from religious topics.  I had no idea where to start, but I had to start somewhere.  So I visited the La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church library and started browsing the books.

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Conversions and De-Conversions - Powerless

I knew of only a single way to be a good person.  As I have stressed several times in the last few chapters of this series, I returned to my religious beliefs out of my desire to be the best husband that I could be.  I had believed at that time, that there was only one path to living a morally virtuous life, and that was through the divine empowerment of the Holy Spirit.  The particular set of religious beliefs and spiritual gifts that the Holy Spirit chose to manifest Himself through was probably irrelevant, I figured, at least it was not for me to say.  I had come to think that God probably revealed Himself through any number of human contrivances that we chose to call religions.  I had become liberal enough in my beliefs not to any longer think that the exclusive path to Salvation was found in any single religion.  But I still had enough residual fundamentalist dogma that remained lodged in my brain, that I still believed adherence to one of those religions was necessary for moral behavior.  Christianity taught me that without God, I was naturally a wicked, deceitful, corrupt and sinful creature.  Any good that I did was not of myself, but was to be credited solely to God working through me.  That belief, which I now consider to be superstitious and poisonous, survived years of university physics education, and years of exposure to various cultures that were different from my own.  It survived my increasing liberality.  It even survived my proper understanding and application of rational and critical thought.  There were still some things in my life that I was not willing to hold up to scrutiny.  So in my desperate desire to be good, I had to believe that I was evil.

I don’t know what the motivations were for my new friends in our home Bible Study group.  They were all fervent believers in various stages of personal spiritual maturity.  Rick Warren constantly told us, in his 40 Days of Purpose video series, that as believers our main purpose in life was to serve others for the greater glory of God.  One way to serve, he told us, was to organize our small Bible Study group to minister at a homeless shelter, a retirement home, or even a soup kitchen.  We needed to serve those people who happened to be less fortunate than ourselves, and serve them in the name of Jesus Christ, if we were to understand true purpose and fulfillment.  Christianity was the path to be a good husband for my new wife.  Jesus showed us the way, and Rick Warren simplified the message for us.  We would serve others.

In our mission to serve others, I mostly enjoyed going to the retirement home.  I was very frustrated that none of my other Christian brothers and sisters ever showed up to minister to the elderly with Rosemary and me.  We spent quite a bit of time at our Bible Study making arrangements over where to go, and where we would like to minister, followed by a prayer circle, where we all held hands and asked for divine empowerment and blessing.  With this in mind, it was always discouraging for Rosemary and me to arrive at the retirement home, with plenty of gifts to dispense among the elderly, to be continually disappointed by my fellow believers.  They never showed up to help us.  We tried to be understanding.  We knew that they all had their own separate lives and busy schedules and obligations.  But it was still discouraging to spend all that time planning, making arrangements, praying for strength and guidance, only to be disappointed time and again by their absence.  What were they praying for if they were not going to participate?  Why did they squander the divine numinous power that they constantly prayed for?  I enjoyed visiting the retirement home, but I told Rosemary that I was tired of us carrying the burden ourselves.  I finally told our group that we needed to find a way of serving that everybody would be willing to support.

So our small group decided to solicit the help of our parent church, La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church.  The poverty stricken, of which there are many in the border regions of Texas, sometimes solicited help from the Church, so we were able to get several locations where help was needed.  We selected an area that we were told was in desperate need of help.  Their meager home needed some basic repairs, which the inhabitants were not able to afford.

In my youth, growing up in San Ysidro, I had seen desperate poverty, especially among the Pueblo Natives.  I knew what it looked like.  When I attended Calvary Chapel, I had made a habit of inviting homeless men into my apartment to sleep on my couch and share what food I could.  Rosemary had certainly seen much poverty during her frequent missions to the miserable and filthy slums of Pasay City.  The Catholic Church in the Philippines was no stranger to dealing with poverty.

Since Rosemary and I had seen such poverty we decided to prepare ourselves for the worst.  We had the address where we were to meet the rest of our team for the day’s work.  Rosemary and I wore our sturdiest work clothes, and prayed together, asking God for His strength for the struggles we would face that day.  I was a little nervous.  After so many years away from Calvary Chapel, I hoped that I could regain what it would take to be a servant for God. 

We found the address on a city map, and immediately found there was something wrong when we drove through a moderately affluent residential area.  “These houses look kind of nice for a poor area”, Rosemary told me.  I agreed.  I was expecting more of a border slum area, of which there are many in this part of Texas.  But instead, the address lead to a large brick home with an antique show car parked in front of the garage.  “This can’t be right”.

But it was.  We waited just in case, and we soon saw some of our friends arrive.  We all met in the front for group prayer, asking again for the strength of the Holy Spirit to be witnesses for Jesus Christ.  Then we knocked on the door.  Ana, an elderly Hispanic lady was waiting for us.  First she led us to her husband José, who was sick in bed with a huge neck brace.  We all gathered his bed, held hands and prayed for José’s health.  After our prayer duties were finished, we followed Ana out to her kitchen, leaving José alone on the bed, as sick as ever.

Ana, through an interpreter, told us what she needed done.  There was some backed up plumbing.  A hole in one of the interior walls.  Some bricks had wedged loose from her back yard wall.  Everybody immediately got to work.

Rosemary and I were simply astounded.  I wandered around the house and looked at some of the projects that we were going to be doing for Ana, who was obviously not as poverty stricken as we were led to believe.  “Rosemary, this house is nicer than ours!  What are we doing here?”  Rosemary looked for something meaningful to do, but found nothing.  Rosemary was used to feeding families who made their homes under bridges in Manila.  She could not bring herself to be a maid for the affluent in the name of Jesus Christ.  I was angered, not so much with Ana and José but at the fact that none of my Spirit empowered brethren were protesting.  Ana and José were plainly wealthy enough to afford the plumbers and carpenters necessary to do this kind of work, but they instead appealed to the Church, and we, in our obsequious weakness, became pusillanimous pushovers in the name of Jesus Christ.  They were taking advantage of our free labor, and we were complying by turning the other cheek.

I walked outside to the back yard, ready to minister to the poorest of the poor, and I laid eyes on one young lady in our Bible Study group trimming roses.  Trimming roses!  That was the limit.  “C’mon Rosemary, let’s get out of here.”

Later that week, we all met again in our house for the next session in Rick Warren’s 40 Days of Purpose video series.  People started making arrangements for a follow-up visit to José and Ana’s house.  One man was available later the next week to hang some sheetrock and plaster.  Somebody else purchased some plumbing supplies and could work on the pipes late after work...

“Those were the richest poor people I have ever seen,” I protested.  “I am not going back there.”

The wife of the group leader answered back, “well true, they we’re not exactly as poor as we expected.  But they did ask, and we are called to be servants and witnesses for the Gospel...”

She could excuse their timorous behavior all she wanted.  None of that mattered to me any more.  I suddenly found that all the virtuous rationale that they gave made no sense to me any more.  Christian or no Christian, these people clearly intended to take full advantage of us as willing Christians.  We were their tools.  They were not in any desperate need.  They just appealed to our church in the hope to get some free labor.  But this was nothing new.  I saw this as familiar behavior for the Christian who is desperate to share their Gospel of Jesus at any cost.  I had known many Christians with backbones and who would not be taken advantage of, but selling out for the Gospel was a behavior pattern that I was all too familiar with.  We were called to serve, but the ultimate goal was to share the Gospel and win souls for Jesus.  No price was too high to achieve that aim.  Jesus told us to turn the other cheek if we were struck, so we did free manual labor for a wealthy woman, all in the hope that she would somehow see our love of Jesus through our actions.  But I was cynical enough to know that she would not suddenly become convicted by our demonstrations of Jesus’ love.  She just wanted suckers to fix her leaky pipes.

This sort of thing had never bothered me before.  But for some reason, this otherwise trivial episode affected me deeply.  I was embarrassed because Rosemary and I had prepared for the worst, and we felt like we were wasting time ministering to those who were not in need.  I was exasperated with my friends because they seemed so weak that they could only follow our group leader’s decision to willingly be taken advantage of.

As long as I got a chance to share the Gospel, I was told, I was doing the will of The Lord.  Ana and José requested the services of the church, the pastors accepted their plea, and who were Rosemary and I to turn it down?  But Rosemary and I had not yet become members of La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church, and we felt no pressure from Church authority.  There was once such a time when I would have agreed that any rationale was justified if the end goal was to spread the Gospel.  I was finished with sharing the Gospel.  I wanted to serve people who were less fortunate than myself, and let the Gospel speak through my actions.  I was not going to be a doormat for Jesus.  

How could my fellow Christians let strangers take complete advantage of them in this weak and cowardly way?  I got a small insight into this question when Rosemary and I were invited by to our group leader’s house for a party.  Rosemary and I hosted the Bible studies in our house, but we were led by an assistant pastor at La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church named Dave Schultz.  I really liked the Schultz family.  Dave was a smart and educated ER physician and his wife Kate was always bright and lively.  Both were extremely devout in their Christian Faith.  Their 18 year old son Henry was a cause for concern.  He was mildly autistic, and would probably never be able to live an independent life.  Henry was also very large, and he worried his family when he would occasionally break into a confused fit.  He could easily overpower his mother Kate, and she sometimes expressed the fear that Henry would hurt her someday.  But they did love him.  Rosemary and I sometimes took Henry out for a day of miniature golf and pizza, and a chance to give Dave and Kate some much needed time to themselves.  He was a difficult but sweet kid.  I miss the Schultz family.

As bright and educated as they were, their house party gave me a small insight into their stifled world.  Every picture on the wall was either of family portraits or framed Bible quotes.  The sheet music on the piano consisted of nothing but hymns.  The only books that I saw on their shelves were Bibles and a few pious novels like CS Lewis’ Narnia series.  The only magazines in the living room were World and Creation, both news magazines published by Fundamentalists for Fundamentalists.  The party was for friends, but everybody I saw was from the church.  Were Dave and Kate’s only friends other Fundamentalist Christians?  Surely Dave would have known many people at the hospital where he worked.  Why were none of them invited?  I asked Dave if anybody from the hospital would be there.  “No, they are non-believers,” he told me frankly.  “I pray for their salvation, and talk with them, but they are so difficult.”  Red flags alarmed immediately.

With so many believers together in one house, and non-believers uninvited and safe from spoiling the piety, the Jesus lingo spewed thick and fluent.  The small talk was saturated with Jesus talk and Christianese.  There was no room for any mundane talk.  One and only one Person dominated the minds of every person there.  “Jesus is so good to me, we love Jesus, Jesus is lovely and worthy to be worshipped, Jesus answered this prayer, Jesus answered that prayer, I talked to Jesus this morning, I am trying to find God’s will for my life…” 

The El Paso sun was intense as usual as we stood out on the back patio.  A small cloud rolled over the sun and momentarily cooled us off.  A young, Spirit filled girl stood from her chair with sudden glorified inspiration, spread out her arms and enthusiastically declared, “Look!  Jesus put a cloud over the sun!  Jesus is giving us shade!  Isn’t Jesus wonderful?!?  I love you Jesus!”  I cringed inside.  This Christian girl struck me as unbelievably immature and childish!  To think that Jesus, the Creator of the Universe, looked upon us puny humans so favorably that He would smile down on us from the Heavens and generously place a cloud over the sun to shade our eyes!  That the All-Mighty would pass trivial favors upon us believers in the midst of countless prayers to relive untold suffering that went unanswered!  The boundaries of eternity were breached for the sake of momentarily cooling off our backyard party!  Never mind the countless victims of endless disasters who were at that very moment suffering in other parts of the world.  Jesus passes goodwill only on His favored!  The myopic arrogance of these Christians!  These Christian friends of mine were so presumptuous of God, and so confident and aware of their own favor in His eyes!  The more I thought about it, the more disgusted I felt.  I am still disgusted by it to this very day. 

Later that evening, Rosemary and I were discussing the party.  The overwhelming piety was too much for my Catholic wife, who still viewed God in a more traditional sense.  “I do not understand this ‘Personal Relationship with Jesus’ talk from these Baptists!  Jesus is my Holy Redeemer.  I do not want Him to be my friend!”  I was disturbed by the behavior of my friends, and even more disturbed that it was behavior that I had once found so normal for us Christians.  We thanked God for the most trivial of things that just happened to occur in our lives, but He never seemed to do anything about our most desperate requests.  He could momentarily place a cloud over the sun to shade our eyes, but He could never remove the autism that crippled young Henry’s brain.  Of all the things we prayed for during our prayer sessions, help on school tests, financial relief, common colds, sore backs, we never once bothered to pray for a healing for poor Henry.  Why was it that we born again Christians never asked this All-Powerful Deity for a healing of Henry’s autism?  We never prayed for something that would require an actual miracle from God.  We only prayed for things that had a chance of occurring without any prayer at all.  This refusal to request the miraculous from Jesus was a tacit admission that I and all my Spirit filled friends really secretly believed Jesus was completely, thoroughly powerless. 

This disturbing realization became most apparent to me when one of Rosemary’s friends got very sick.  Another teacher from Philippines, who had come to the United States with Rosemary, had suddenly developed stomach cancer.

The tumor in Irma’s stomach was discovered too late to save her.  She was very sick, and spent her last days languishing in the hospital room.  She was beyond hope.  All we could do was visit her and keep her company during her remaining time left.  If God could trouble himself to shade the eyes of His favored people on a sunny day, surely He could also remove cancer from a suffering friend.  Irma was not even asking for that much.  All she wanted from God was to get healthy enough to fly back to Philippines so she could die in her own home and with her family.  There were several times when I met with Rosemary’s Catholic friends before visiting Irma in the hospital.  I wanted to ask them all, together, to pray with me to God, the All-Mighty physician, to heal Irma and remove the deadly cancer from her body.  God could do that if we were Faithful.  All things are possible to him that believeth.   Jesus told us so!  We were told to expect miracles!  But I never did ask my Catholic friends to join me in prayer for Irma.  I wanted to shake them out of their stupor!  I wanted to ask them if they really believed the God of the Catholic Faith could perform real miracles.  Did they believe that Irma could be healed or not?

Apparently not.  Irma died in El Paso, painfully and alone, in a foreign land, over 8000 miles from her home.  God could not honor even her most basic request to die in her own home.  I became very angry with God at this point, and I was even angrier at His Faithful.  The death of this woman was senseless.    Like so many things during this troubled time of my life, I was torn between two opposing views of my faith.  Is God who He says He is?  And if He is, then why can’t we petition Him with our most urgent requests, as He says we should?  Worse yet, do we Christians really believe God could perform miracles?  We prayed to Him for everything but the truly miraculous.  It was almost as if we were intentionally setting the bar for His performance very low so we would not be disappointed when we never saw miraculous answers to our prayers. 

I asked Rosemary why we did not pray for a miraculous healing of cancer.  Why did we never expect instant recoveries and considered mere remissions to be miraculous?  Why did it seem that we never prayed for anything that actually took faith?  She replied, “As we say back home, nasa tao ang gawa, nasa Diyos ang awa.  We should not expect God to do everything.  We have to work hard ourselves before we can see God's mercy.”  Perhaps, but again, that leaves God powerless.  It is a tacit admission that the ones doing the actual work is - us.  God is a superfluous fifth wheel.  But if God is truly the All-Mighty, then breaking the bounds of time and space to perform the miraculous would be just as trivial as me lifting my foot to take a step.  If God has infinite power, the power to do absolutely anything then it would be no more difficult for Him to speak the universe into existence with the blast of His nostrils than it would be to soothe the pain in my sore back.  Why could we not expect the miraculous if His unbounded power made performing the miraculous to be trivial?

Why do we ask God to help us with our headaches but do not ask Him to cure autism?  Why do I believe a testimony that He cured a relieved an aching back, but I would never believe a testimony that he regenerated a severed limb, cured a child of cerebral palsy, fused the spinal cord of a quadriplegic.  Why do we pray as if the power of God is no better than a pair of aspirin?  Either God has infinite power, or He has none.  He is All-Mighty or He is Powerless.

It was only after hearing a sermon from Pastor Alvarez of La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church that I finally realized that even if God had all the power the universe could hold, the rules He played by made Him as good as powerless.  Pastor Alvarez’s sermon was one I had heard many times over the years.  Pastor Alvarez was comforting the Christians of his congregation who doubted a God who seemingly left their prayers unanswered.  “God hears your prayers,” he said, “and he answers every single one of them.  You may just not recognize the answer when you get it.  God answers each of your prayers in one of three ways.  God will sometimes say ‘Yes’.  God will sometimes say ‘No’.  And sometimes God will say ‘Wait’.  The answers that He gives to your prayers are always consistent with His most perfect will.”  I finally snapped.  After hearing that same sermon so many times over the previous 40 years, after years of believing that God would answer ‘Yes’ only to those things that were bound to happen by chance or my own effort, I finally figured out why my God was so powerless.  If God was allowed to answer ‘Yes’, ‘No’ or ‘Wait’ to every prayer made to Him, the effect was just as if He never heard a single one of those prayers.  There becomes no difference between a God who answers every request made to Him ‘No’ or ‘Wait’, and a God who does not hear or act to any prayer at all.  I could just as well make the same excuse over superstitious prayer to a stone idol and the effect would be the same.  The stone idol does not hear, but we can just convince ourselves that the idol is telling us, in its primal wisdom, to wait before our request is granted.  We are not really ready to receive what we are requesting of the stone idol, so it tells us to wait, because it knows what is better for us.  Nothing happens, and we worship the stone idol for its loving wisdom.  There is no difference between believing the stone idol answers our prayers with ‘No’ or ‘Wait’, and the stone idol having no power at all.  The God I was worshiping might as well be powerless.  If God had any power, he refused to show us.  And if He could not demonstrate His power with the miraculous, then I had no business believing that He would answer even the most trivial of my prayers.  I had been kidding myself for over 40 years.   I had never before understood how God’s own rules made Him a thoroughly impotent and unnecessary creature.  It was deceptive subterfuge to claim that God was answering every prayer, when the act of doing everything was indistinguishable from the act of doing nothing.

I brought this problem up to Christian friend of mine.  “Why do we never see God perform miracles when we ask?  Beneficial miracles, like a healing for poor Irma.  ‘Yes, No or Wait’ does not seem to answer the question “

She replied, “Perhaps the miracles we see today are the sanctified lives we see in believers in Jesus.  Remember what Jesus said, “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do”.  What work is greater than what Jesus did on while on Earth?  It must be the Comforter who came to the world in His absence, and it is through the Holy Spirit that Jesus performs the miracle of bringing us closer to His image.  Think of all the lives Jesus has changed!”

There was once a time when this answer would have satisfied me.  No more.  I blurted out the first objection that came to mind.  “But my Dad converted years ago.  He is a Mormon now.  Believe me, he was a monster when I was growing up, but he has become a much better man over the years.  And he is not a Christian!”

She gasped, “A Mormon?  If his life is changed because he became a Mormon, don’t you understand that he is being deceived by Satan?” 

My newly critical mind demanded to find problems with excuses that I was being given.  God always answers ‘Yes, No or Wait’.  Changed lives in the Christian were evidence of His miraculous power, but changed lives in non-Christians were evidence of Satan’s deceptive power.  The game was rigged.  With rules like these, it was impossible for God to ever lose.  It was impossible to know if and when He was doing anything.  It was impossible to falsify any claim made in His name, and therefore it was possible to justify any absurdity.

The spell was slowly breaking.  But I held on to my Faith for dear life.  Dear Jesus, give me the Faith to believe!

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