Why I became a Christian.

Why I became a Christian.

I think at some time in our lives we have to deal with our relationships with others and a sense of acceptance, aloneness and rejection. Where do I stand in relationship to others? Am I in the “in”? Am I one of the popular people (or the pretty people)? One’s looks or status, one’s ability, intelligence or talent doesn’t necessarily determine this. Or, on the other hand, do I even fit in? Am I loner? Do I even have a social life? What do others really think of me? Where do I fit in? These are all questions we face whether we grow up as the hero on the block or that weird guy in the strange house with the odd parents. This is where I started. I had friends of some sort, mostly music friends. We had a common interest. We would hang together and listen to recordings and attend concerts but I was always conscious of how I fit in. I worked hard to be the best on my instrument, at least in my small pond of acquaintances. I felt good because I was almost always at the top. But when I went away to college and the pond turned into an ocean I got lost. This feeling of inadequacy was not only perpetuated in my guy friends but also in my girl friends (or rather absence of girl friends).

But, I don’t want to stop here because the truth is that these questions doesn’t just exist on a level between people, but between God and man. Where do we stand with God? Are we “in” or out? Are we accepted? Are we rejected? One of the most dreadful verses in the Bible comes from a passage in the Torah where the Israelites disobey God in the wilderness, at the very door to the promised land. God says to them, “and they shall know My rejection”. How horrible!!!

As an atheist, growing up in a Jewish family, the 2nd tier of questions (God and man) didn’t even exist in my mind. I dismissed them and those who spoke of them as silly, foolish, and naïve. I was trained well by my atheist professor father and sentimental agnostic mother. Well, you may be asking at this point what was it that caused me to go from a foundation in atheism to an embrace of the Christian faith. The answer is: I found the key to the 2nd tier questions, not even realizing that there was a door, never mind a lock on the door to these questions. When I opened the door, the 1st tier questions (my relationship to others) were answered. The answers had to do with the meaning of true love (not the Princess Bride type, sorry), true friendship.

How the key found me.

Growing up for me was always about gaining knowledge and learning. As a youngster my father took me to two main points of interest, the library and the bookstore. I loved these environments because of all of the books and all the opportunities to discover information. My father’s den gave me the same feeling. I guess I would have been happy to have had the Encyclopedia Britannica uploaded into my brain, though I’m not sure why. I’m not quite sure if it was the rush of having access to all of the info (kind of like having access to Google before Google existed, or being able to impress someone with it. Knowledge was just another way I tried to excel. In addition, my book-loving father was also an avid baseball fan. I have many fond memories of playing “pickle” in the backyard with him and my brother. Though I loved winning it wasn’t the ultimate goal for me. I wanted to see something graceful, something spectacular, something artistic. That was my mother’s influence on me. My father was the naturalist, my mother the metaphysical one, my father the realist, and my mother the impressionist. Remember the 1976 World Series Yankees 3rd baseman, Craig Nettles and the amazing horizontal leaps for the ball down the 3rd base line, ball in hand has he landed out-stretched upon the earth? Remember the 1972 Olympics and the then incredible seven-time gold medal swimmer Mark Spitz. Athletes like those were my heroes. They were remarkable not only in their success but also in their beauty.

But as I grew older I realized that knowledge and sports didn’t really satisfy, at least not longer than the game itself, and maybe a memory or two. What I was wanting (not really looking for) was true friendship, someone with whom I could share myself. Don’t get me wrong; I had plenty of people I used to hang out with. I had my different groups as I grew up. When I was younger it was the swimming crowd. I remember many an early morning swim before the day began and the steam rising from the heated pool to meet the cool crisp air. Later it became the math crowd. We had a competition between us to see who could score the highest. I usually came out near the top. We mainly competed in geometry and trigonometry. Lastly, it was the music crowd. I had a very close friend who loved music as I did. We used to play in a quartet together and listen to recordings of opera. What I learned next came from my dog, Tasha.

I received Tasha when I was 13. She was a Bar Mitzvah present. She was a collie with long tri colored hair. What I found in my first and only childhood dog was friendship. Though obviously (at least to most) she didn’t speak, we had a great childhood rapport. She was always so accepting and loving. She greeted me when I came home from school, she played with me in the backyard, and she listened to me as I practiced the violin for hours. It was a sort of unconditional acceptance and desire just to be with me. I had her picture with me many years later until it was finally taken from me at an ATM machine hold up. The odd thing about my relationship with my dog is that it wasn’t conditioned upon how smart I was, how good I was at an activity, how I looked or didn’t look, or how well I played the violin. She never upbraided me for not playing well, or scolded me for not doing my best in school. Animals are like that; they just want to be with you. However, this feeling of “acceptance” was shattered my last year of college when Tasha died. I was devastated and upset, one, because I thought her death was needless since it was premature, and two, my “friend” was gone, and with her, my acceptance, though I didn’t realize that at the time. A dog is a wonderful gift but can never be a friend like a person. Her absence raised these questions for me, however immature I was to their nagging presence.

Now to the substance of “why”.

I was attending the New School of Music, an orchestral training school in Philadelphia when my life became more of a struggle. Actually, it began a few years earlier. Young men and women are often joyful at the opportunity to be free from parental constraints. Though I was glad to be able to make my own decisions, I wasn’t prepared to face this reality. My parents had not taught me to let go and establish who I was. They kept a tight hold on me so that when it came time to explore and leave the nest, instead of flying off, I fell to the ground (though I did get up). My first year of college was filled with many tears of separation, many phone calls, and greyhound bus trips home to DC. Eventually though, I figured out what these funny things called wings were for. Mine were very small, maybe even ingrown. I began to enjoy my freedoms and discovered the many opportunities a true city afforded those who had artistic appreciation. I spent my first few months visiting the Philadelphia Art Museum. My years in DC and the many trips to the Smithsonian’s National Gallery of Art served me well. I also began attending concerts, especially the Philly orchestra weekend evening concerts. I often stood outside at 5:00 or 5:30pm in the Philly winter snow to get a chance at a cheap seat in the peanut gallery for $5, student price. I saw the Ormandy years come to a close and Muti established as a major global conductor (though conducting La Scala was a good gig, too!) Not only did I begin attending concerts but I also began seriously practicing, or should I say, worshiping music. I had a great college work-study job as an assistant librarian (right up my alley) where I spent countless hours listening to and recording (on tape, remember those days) artists such as Heifetz, Casals, and the Curtis String Quartet. I also started my routine of practicing nine hours a day. It became a point of pride for me to have accomplished such a discipline. I would spend two hours on scales, then etudes, lunch, then solo Bach, concerti, and finally some chamber music in the evening alongside recordings of the Guarneri String quartet. Of course, school fit in there somehow, don’t ask me how. You ask, when did I go out with friends? Well, the answer was I had no real friends for quite a while because my violin and other musical trinkets had now replaced my Tasha. Though I indeed was a small fish in this musical world, I was determined to make an impression on it. Eventually, this too crumbled, when I developed tendonitis and I could no longer play the violin. Those were very depressing days. I would hear my orchestra perform but from the audience side of the hall.

About this time I began to meet Christians. I didn’t know too much about them except that they were persistent and pretty cool headed people. I had seen the likes of Ernest Ansley (definitely not cool headed) growing up and thought he was very weird. (In fact, I just went to his website, yes, he’s still alive; I had déjà vu all over again.) One of the Christians at the school started talking with me about creation and of course I had to argue with her. Being the ardent evolutionist that I was I thought she was absolutely bizarre to believe that there was a God who created everything out of nothing in six days. I had been weaned on Scientific American and these concepts she spoke of were, not only incompatible, but ridiculous. We bantered back and forth for a while before she challenged me to read the gospel of John. She ended up giving me a Bible, which I had never studied, except for my Hebrew School/Bar Mitzvah days, if you could call it “study”. It was more like endure. Those days were consumed with learning Hebrew and listening to the Rabbi jabber about “I don’t know what” while the Cantor helped me learn to chant my portion of Scripture. At least, there was a musical aspect to this. Though I was Jewish and identified with my heritage, the appeal to Jewish religious life was just as ridiculous to me as this appeal to Christian life. The one redeeming, if you could call it that, aspect of my Bar Mitzvah was that I got to talk about what I thought was important (and I got a lot of money). To let a 13 year old preach can be a dangerous thing. My passion at the moment was the death penalty and my text (portion), “an eye for an eye”. How apropos!!! Of course, I took the side of its advocate. My short life reading through the New Testament reaped a respect for the person of Jesus in the gospel of John, and a “wierded” out feeling about the book of Revelation. Jesus seemed to be not a Savior but a wonder worker. I spent a summer floundering before my senior year began and I decided to reconsider Christ. Initially, what drew me to the Bible and Jesus was just curiosity. This was something I had never really heard about, though I had played many times in churches, mostly for my high school French teacher who doubled as a Church organist and a kind of philosopher-mentor to me. There really was nothing religious in what he said and so I really never heard much about Jesus and what He had done or taught, or most importantly why He came, hence, the novelty. These Christians at conservatory were people who had a certain conviction of Jesus the Christ, the Jewish Messiah. I want to make it clear that I had no religious interest or conviction or draw to a spiritual conversation. I was a confirmed atheist and was not coming to examine Jesus for any reason other than to understand what this new concept was (just as I had done earlier in my college years with Buddha, TM, and Hinduism at UCRiverside). Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that I love to ask questions. This is my medium of learning. Yes, I’ll read something, but when I’m finished, I want a flesh and blood person to discuss it with. I guess this is why I hate automated phone services so much. (Push zero, zero, zero. Why isn’t it working? Drat, they’ve changed the representative option!!) When I returned to college from a summer music festival in Ohio, everything changed for me. The catalyst was the death of my dog and an injury which could have challenged my future profession. My paradigm of thought shifted dimensionally. Having lost two significant points of stability in my life, something opened up to me. It wasn’t a concept but a person, a Person. Here I was an atheist and I was confronted with the Person of Jesus, not by the Christians at school but by the Unseen in my conscience. If you can imagine what this must have been like for me, considering that I didn’t believe in God nor was particularly open to this possibility! But beyond what I perceived, what persuaded me to further investigate with a more open and less prejudiced mind the reality of the truth of the Person of Jesus was how the Bible began to fit together like a puzzle and reveal this Man, Jesus. When I was first confronted, I had taken up the gauntlet that had thrown down before me. I wasn’t going to be “narrow minded” as she was, I thought. I purposed to read the entire New Testament and then read the entire Old Testament. As I mentioned, John was fascinating but Revelation was just plain strange. After Revelation, I decided to read through the Old Testament but got bogged down in Leviticus somewhere, not a hard thing to do. At that point, I lost my intention and put the Bible aside. When Tasha died, I returned to the Bible but not with the mind of skeptical scrutiny I had before, but one of inquiry, sincere inquiry. I was not ready to accept what it said but I was ready to examine what it said. At that point, it was if some hidden key to a magnificently complicated treasure box appeared, was inserted, and turned within my heart. The box opened and I was confronted with Divine Love, strange as that may sound. I began reading where I had begun the year before, in John. The Scriptures jumped off the page. They began to make some sort of sense to me, whereas only a year before they seemed like random stories with no clear message, other than to do good and follow the example of this Do-gooder. I had failed to see the central message of salvation from my sin-laden heart through faith in the act of His death and resurrection. Forgiveness, reconciliation, acceptance, nay, embrace, the embrace of God, the Father for His Son, was to be mine if I would but trust His work for me in Jesus. This addressed those very issues of aloneness, isolation, rejection, and acceptance. This boggled my mind (and to be honest, still boggles my mind). To think that He would suffer His righteous, holy, and pure Son, to experience His wrath for me, that I might have His righteousness was and is beyond me. As 1 John 3:1 says, “Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us in that we should be called children of God”. God had spoken to me through His Word and had given me unconditional and intimate love and friendship, which could not be broken or changed.

Though the struggles of youth cannot be compared with the serious trials one endures in life, both in family, in health, and in career, my next post will address “why I am still a Christian”.