19/50: Testimony – birth to college
I love this song and it expresses some of what I feel when I go back into the places where I grew up. I have so much gratitude and affection for my childhood.
“I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me”
My first memory is being in my childhood backyard listening to Auntie Vi lead a Backyard Bible Club and deciding to accept Jesus into my heart. My family was so happy and everyone at church celebrated the good news. I honestly think beyond the joy of pleasing all the important people in my life, this was truly a spiritual experience. I remember the openness in my soul and the connection I experienced.
Although I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970’s, the cultural revolution happening twenty miles away from me only served to make my childhood church entrench further in fundamentalism. We spent New Years Eve at the church watching films like A Thief in the Night, a 1972 film about a woman whose husband is raptured and has a dream about the world falling into the tribulation. At church in Pioneer Girls (the Christian alternative to Girl Scouts) and in Sunday School in addition to the Baptist elementary and high schools I attended, I soaked in the spirituality and teachings. I memorized all the Bible verses and listened intently to my teachers. Eventually I chose to go to a Christian university because I wanted to study psychology but didn’t trust the “secular” colleges to teach such a sensitive subject in a way that would be safe for my faith.
While I can no longer affirm the faith statement of that Christian university, I am so thankful for the experience I had there. Turns out that psychology was a dangerous field of study even there. I learned that all truth is God’s truth whether it comes from the Apostle Paul or Sigmund Freud. The problem isn’t in the Biblical text or the scientific data, the problem is in our interpretation. I learned to not be afraid to explore and experience the world. God is truth and any truth I found would be a part of God. I added intercultural studies to my degree and learned about the varieties of cultural expressions of gender and began to hear the voice of the oppressed through my research in south central Los Angeles. One friend said that I came in as her most conservative friend and left as her most liberal.
(continued on part 2 tomorrow…)