If only I had become an evangelical Protestant,of the "once saved, always saved" variety, then I could simply describe my punctiliar conversion experience and be done with it. For better or for worse, it's going to take a bit more time than that.

It would be appropriate, I think, to begin at the beginning. When I was born, my mother was a Roman Catholic (of a moderately liberal persuasion and from Irish Catholic stock on both sides of her family), while my father was a secular humanist/agnostic from a fundamentalist Protestant background (Church of Christ). (Both are now committed Episcopalians, but I was already in my late teens when they converted.) Though I was baptized a Roman Catholic at the age of eight, I was intensely interested in "world religions," even at that age. I can remember little books by Huston Smith and larger books with colorful pictures of religious ceremonies that I found in local libraries. By the age of 11, I had read a great deal (for an 11 year old) in religions as diverse as Zen and Islam, Mormonism and Hinduism. Then, one day, I happened to find a book called The Baha'i Faith: Emerging Global Religion.

Here I found a description of a religion which actually teaches that all of the diverse religions of the world are in essence one. A very nice sentiment, and one that is quite believable to a child of 11 who knows about none of them in any depth, but rather a little about all of them. However much more I knew about all these religions than your average 11 year old, or even your average American, I didn't really know very much, and in any case, my approach to religion was an essentially childish one (as one might expect, given that I was a child!). By the time I finally convinced my parents to let me attend a Baha'i meeting, I was thirteen, and I signed a card declaring my belief in Baha'u'llah only two or three days later (this was late in 1994).

What do I mean when I say that I had a "essentially childish" approach to religion? I mean that I chose my religious beliefs primarily on the basis of what seemed right or "felt good" to me. Now that would be well in good, if it weren't for one little annoying aspect of human nature: we are sinful creatures- predisposed it seems to repeatedly "miss the mark." By making our my own (not very well thought out) opinions the standard by which I judged a religion, I ran the risk of denying (and, in fact, did deny) an important truth simply because I didn't like the truth, or of accepting a grave falsehood because that's what I wanted to believe.

I'm not saying that our reason and our emotions should not play some role in our spiritual paths. On the other hand, the tendency to think of oneself as an infallible "little Pope" is an arrogance of the most childish kind. For instance, I used to argue with friends at school, when I was only about 7 or 8, about whether or not Jesus Christ was perfect. I claimed (having received very little real instruction in the basics of orthodox Christian doctrine, at home or at church) that He was not, because in the Bible He gets angry and seemingly impatient. Little did I realize that it was not Jesus Christ who was in some way imperfect or flawed; the flaw lay only in my understanding of perfection. Again, the temptation to think that something is false simply because one doesn't like it can blind one to some very important truths, and the temptation to think that something is true simply because one wants it to be so can make one believe all manner of falsehoods.

I sometimes wonder what I would have done if someone had directly and explicitly made this point to me. Very likely, in my sin and stubbornness, I would have just gotten angry with them. In any case, I joined the Baha'is, very hastily, as I have already indicated. And everything seemed pretty good for a while. I met many kind people, and got to talk about interesting issues with friends that cared for me very much. I was introduced to the spiritual disciplines of daily prayer, meditation, and, periodically, fasting (disciplines that never seem to be emphasized in most modern Catholic churches).

But, slowly, over a few years, certain things began to bother me. I found that this religion which markets itself as being so liberal and modern is, in reality, controlled by rather conservative religious leaders, the Universal House of Justice, and the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States of America. I have friends who have been forced out of the Baha'i Faith because of their more liberal take.

This was, of course, disturbing to me, a young liberal Baha'i who had hopes of being a scholar in the Faith. However, were it merely for the somewhat pinheaded actions of a few Baha'is, I probably would have stayed, because my belief in Baha'u'llah would have been stronger than my dissatisfaction with the likes of them.

I was beginning to realize some other things, however, more troublesome to my faith as a Baha'i. One of these is that the Baha'i position on the unity of all religions, which had probably drawn me to the Faith more than any other single thing, is simply false. All religions do not teach the same thing. It wasn't a fundamentalist Christian who made me realize this; it was a Buddhist, a former monk, by the name of Bruce Burrill.

I have never met Bruce in person, nor have I even spoken with him on the telephone, but I have corresponded with via private email and on online discussion lists. While he is sometimes a bit abrasive, he is a brilliant man, and a person who is genuinely, I think, interested in helping the Baha'is to think about the problems with a lot of their traditions and doctrines.

How are the Baha'is able to claim that religions as diverse, for instance, as Buddhism (which teaches the irrelevancy of God or gods to the enlightment of man) and Christianity (which claims that salvation, "enlightenment," comes from believing in and following a Truth that is a Who, a personal God) are simply different faces of one Universal Truth? They do so, Bruce and others have rightly pointed out, by effacing all that makes these religions what they are, and then forcing what little is left into a distinctly Baha'i form. For instance, most Baha'is will just claim that we don't really know much about what Buddha taught, and that the traditions of real Buddhists concerning what the Buddha taught are basically irrelevant (except insofar as they can be twisted to confirm Baha'i presuppositions). Thus the Buddha, despite everything that historians of Buddhism and Buddhists themselves will tell you, believed in and thought that a personal, absolute God was important.

More liberal/"intellectual" Baha'is will take a somewhat different position, one that seems a bit more sophisticated, but is in reality just as violent to the beliefs of actual Buddhists. They will postulate that there is some kind of vague Absolute out there, and that the Baha'i, Christian, and Buddhist teachings just show us different aspects of this Absolute, apparently contradictory, but in reality One. Of course, this fails to take into account that very similar ideas about an impersonal Absolute were current even in the time of the Buddha, and he firmly rejected them. Actually, it would probably be true to argue that one of the very things that makes Buddhism so distinctive is that it rejects any kind of Absolute Existence- the very goal of nirvana is the existential realization that everything, the world, gods, even the "big god," Brahma, is "empty."

Bruce had made a good case for his point of view, but were it only for Bruce, I probably just would have said, "Well, Buddhism, it is true, doesn't fit the Baha'i model very well, but Baha'u'llah and his teachings still speak to me deeply, and I can still find spiritual fulfillment in Baha'i mysticism." Actually, this was what I said for a while, but there was just one problem: I was lying to myself.

By this time, I was in the first semester of my sophomore year of college. I was pretty happy in a lot of respects. I no longer hated going to the University of Kentucky (financial difficulties prevented me from going to the University of Chicago). I was finally coming out of the deep depression of my freshman year. I had just had a wonderful time during the summer as a counselor at a camp I had attended as a child. I was enjoying my classes. But inside, in those times when there wasn't so much noise and activity to dull my spiritual senses, I realized that I was suffering from a very real kind of hunger.

You see, I wasn't really finding spiritual fulfillment in Baha'i mysticism and prayer. In fact, after the initial enthusiasm of conversion had died down, I never really felt that I was very close to God as a Baha'i. Oh, sure, I was very "religious," and I could argue the Baha'i position pretty well, but none of that has much to do with your relationship with God. In my own heart, I knew there was something of a void, and I didn't really know how to fill it. I just had the vague sense that prayer was the answer.

It was at this point that I went up to the fourth floor of the W. T. Young Library here at UK and picked out a book called Contemplative Prayer by a Roman Catholic monk by the name of Thomas Merton. I had heard of Merton before (there was a very famous prayer of Merton's on a wall in the house of a high-school girlfriend), but I had never read him myself. I checked out the book and began to read. What I found was a spiritual insight that I had never encountered in any Baha'i author I had ever read, and a way of prayer that made me understand the true depth of the Catholicism, the Christianity, I had left behind.

I should say now that I have some serious problems with certain aspects of Merton's thought. Nevertheless, I think that it is probably safe to say that the seed of my reconversion to Christ was planted as I read what Merton had to say about the Christian Life. He spoke about a false self that most of us carry around and which we have the tendency to think is the "real me," but which actually leads us away from that which we truly are. At one point I even had the vague sense that my own true self was a follower of Christ.

But I had yet to fully break my ties with the Baha'is.

"She moves in mysterious ways," says the U2 song, with reference to the Holy Spirit. And it's true. Two semesters later, I was signed up for a class entitled "Classical Mysticism," which, because of the qualifier "classical," I assumed would be a course in Greek and Roman mystery religions. Not so. Our teacher, Dr. Don Nugent, was a retired history professor and a devout Catholic who spends a lot of his free time with the monks at the Abbey of Gethsemane here in Kentucky, where Merton lived. In his class, we read Salinger's Franny and Zooey (a story about a young woman who begins to practice the Orthodox Christian "Prayer of Jesus"), some of Merton's writings, a book of sayings by Chuang Tzu, and other spiritual classics. We heard presentations from Lance Brunner, a Tibetan Buddhist and a meditation instructer, by Brother Paul Quenon, choirmaster at Gethsemane, and by Dr. Dan Rowland, who introduced us to Orthodox Christian icons. The more that I began to understand how truly profound were the spiritual teachings of the older world religions, particularly Christianity and Buddhism, the more that the Baha'i Faith seemed like a group of very nice people practicing a very weak imitation. I say this with all charity- I still have a number of Baha'i friends who I love dearly, and who are very wise people in many respects. However, I knew that I could no longer call myself a Baha'i. I wasn't thinking of becoming a Christian at this point, however. For one reason or another, I thought that I would be better as a Buddhist.

I wrote a kind of "spiritual autobiography" for that class that ends with my decision to become a Buddhist, actually. Looking back on it, it's hard to explain exactly why I thought I should be a Buddhist. On one hand, the practice of Buddhist meditation, I found, helped me to appreciate my experiences much more richly, not to let them pass by unnoticed. Perhaps more importantly, however, in losing my faith in the Baha'i Faith, I for a time lost my faith in any theistic religion. Weren't they all just authoritarian? Wasn't belief in God merely a creation of a mind which is unwilling to see the world as it really is, in all of its hellish meaninglessness? The questions of theodicy were a big problem for me- how can a good God allow the world to be the way that it is?

Yes, it is probably in those last two points that the answer to my question lies, i.e. (1) in the feeling that God is somehow a creation of a mind unwilling to face reality as it really is and (2) theodicy. Many Western atheists deny God on account of precisely these things, and though often from a rather different perspective, these are also the reasons that most Buddhist thinkers from the time of the Buddha have also rejected theism. For this reason, Buddhism appeals greatly to those Westerners who no longer want to rely on "faith," but just on "direct experience." It is from this perspective that books such as Buddhism Without Beliefs can be written. But of course, Buddhism requires a certain kind of faith as well, at least until the point at which one is actually "enlightened"- faith that the teachings of the Buddha actually lead to something called Nirvana, and not simply to increasingly effective methods of self-deception and denial of the reality of God. And though some Western Buddhists have tried to argue otherwise with me, without belief in rebirth (something which for the new Buddhist must also be taken on "faith"- as the aforementioned book points out), putting a bullet through ones brain would be a far more effective way of ending ones personal dukkha (suffering/uncomfortableness/anxiety/etc.), a far more effective way of "extinguishing the flame," than spending hours a day sitting zazen.

As far as theodicy is concerned, I can't claim that I have an answer to that complex of questions which would satisfy the atheist or the skeptic. I have come to believe that part of the answer lies in the redemptive quality of suffering and in the fact that the Incarnate Lord knows what it is to suffer and die as a human. In any case, almost inexplicably, after the newness of Buddhist meditation had worn off, and I began to realize that in my daily life I still spoke to a God I claimed to no longer believe in, I found myself drawn back to Christ.

Perhaps at first, I just admired Jesus as very holy prophet or teacher. I admired his radical stand on nonviolence, and I admired his followers who stood firmly against what I believed (and still believe) to be one of the greatest tragedies of our times, the murder of 30,000,000 unborn children since Roe v. Wade. Before I ever began to call myself Christian, I came to feel that a commitment to nonviolence, must be complete and consistent, and must reject killing human life, and especially innocent life, however clever our justifications may sound, or whatever our very corrupt society may tell us is okay. I found that there were others who felt the same way, and of course they weren't the stereotypical pro-lifers who bomb abortion clinics. Some were truly saintly human beings, and most of them were committed followers of Jesus Christ. (At this point, I do not necessarily consider complete pacifism to be the only legitimate Christian position, Orthodox or otherwise, with regard to war. On the other hand, I think it is a position strongly supported by both the Bible and Church tradition. I do, however, consider an pro-life position the only truly legitimate Christian position with regard to the issue of abortion.)

All the seeds that had been planted in my heart, in my childhood, in reading Merton, in encountering true Christians in my life, had just begun to poke through in the freshly watered soil of my heart. However, becoming truly Christian, becoming a sincere follower of Christ, did not occur in a simple conversion experience in which I knelt down on the pavement and "accepted Jesus as my personal Savior." For me, it was a bit more difficult than that. I had a lot to unlearn from my Baha'i experience. I mean, here was a guy who wrote a 17 page paper when he was fourteen about why the Trinity was both logically untenable and scripturally indefensible. Somewhere along the way I had also become a good religious liberal (radically liberal). I was the kind of person who looked those who believed in real miracles and the power of prayer as being rather backward fundamentalists. I was, to put it bluntly, a kind of intellectual snob, the sort of person who gets a kick out of books by John Dominic Crossan and Robert Funk, but fails to see that they don't understand even as much as the Ethiopian convert in the Book of Acts who, answering the Apostle Phillip's question, "Do you understand what you are reading?" replies, "How can I, unless someone guides me?"

Now that I wanted to believe, I found that I couldn't. I prayed to God to guide me, and He did, but I wasn't always very quick to respond. I was still of the mind that it was up to me to find God, when it is really God who finds and guides the sincere. I decided that the church for me was the Episcopal Church. It was liturgical, and the liturgy was similar in "shape" to the Mass of the Catholicism of my childhood. Besides, I had actually already been attending the local Episcopal Church for some time with a close friend of mine, so it seemed like the perfect choice.

Honesty compels me to admit that I also liked the "comprehensiveness" of the Episcopal/Anglican Church. That's a polite way to say that you can believe anything you please and still participate in the sacramental life of the Church. You can deny the physical resurrection and be a bishop, so they certainly aren't concerned with whether the average parishioner believes in the articles of the Nicene Creed. The Episcopal Church is said to be the roomiest church in Christendom, and that's exactly the kind of place I felt would be good for me (you can see how I struggled, and continue to struggle, with the childish mentality I described above).

Had I not moved beyond the kind of pseudo-Christianity I had begun to embrace, my "Christian stage" would no doubt have been as fleeting as the Buddhist one. It was while I was still a Christian in embryonic form that I began to feel that perhaps I had a priestly calling. This is when I unfortunately jumped to the conclusion that I should be an Episcopalian priest. I think my motives were (somewhat) good, but the call may have been coming more from me than from God. I was still struggling with some pretty important things, things to which a Christian should probably be pretty firmly commited before deciding to enter the clergy, things like the purpose of Christ's sacrifice, for instance (a doctrine which I understood only on a purely intellectual level, but against which my heart and mind rebelled). Thankfully, when I prayed that I might be helped to believe, God did in fact answer my prayers.

First, and most importantly, God granted me the grace of understanding that I am a sinner. I don't think that it is truly possible to be a follower of Christ unless one has an understanding of what Christ died for. He was no mere prophet or "good man;" Jesus Christ is truly the Lamb of God who came unto the world to save sinners, and that means me. But realizing what it means to be a sinner is not easy for people in our society. We pay lip service to the idea that "no one is perfect" but do we really believe it? Christianity teaches that even if we truly want to be good, something is holding us back, and that we need the salvation that only Christ could bring to bridge the unbridgeable chasm that our sins have created between us and God. But the problem is (except by the grace of God), you never really understand how sinful you are until you actually try to stop sinning and see how hard it is. And many have never even really tried, both those outside of the churches and those who call themselves Christians.

God opening my eyes to the reality of my own sin is really the miracle that transformed a pseudo-Christian into someone who is at least trying to be a true follower of Christ. (It is in this respect that, despite my little remark about the evangelicals and their punctiliar conversion experiences, I feel a certain closeness to evangelical Protestants, despite their misunderstandings of traditional Christian soteriology and their false ecclesiologies.) It is also what made me able to understand what Christian salvation truly means. And all the Christian dogmas, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation and the two natures of Christ, the bodily resurrection, even the Virgin Birth, are intimately connected to our salvation; these are Truths that make it possible to truly be "little Christs" (the meaning of the word "Christians"). Thus I began to see that the Trinity was not just some kind of illogical doctrine cooked up by some bishops back in the 4th century, it is an eternal Truth revealed to us by God through His Son our Lord Jesus Christ. I began to understand that Jesus had to be consubstantial with God and consubstantial with man for the salvation that Christianity teaches to be possible. In short, my eyes were opening to things to which they had been formerly blind.

Having this change of heart and mind made it necessary to rethink having rather hastily joined the Episcopal Church (and even more hastily beginning the process of discerning a call to the Episcopal priesthood). It is true, there are those within the Episcopal Church who would defend to their own deaths many of the truths I had begun to see, but, sadly, there are many for whom these truths are at best "useful myths" and, at worst, oppressive beliefs of a patriarchal culture which must be wholly reformed to be of any use. Sadly, the portion of the Anglican/Episcopal Church which holds firmly to the enduring truths of orthodox and catholic Christianity (the "Anglo-Catholics") is, as a very wise friend of mine has put it, "shrinking like an iceberg in the Caribbean." In fact, those Christians of a traditional or conservative mindset, those who believe that you can't simply change Christian doctrine or the practices of the Church to stay "up to date" or "relevant" are in many cases as unwelcome in the Episcopal Church as my liberal friends were among the Baha'is.

I knew at this point that I would have to go back to the root, so to speak, to a Christian body that had more of a claim to be the true Church than the Anglicans/Episcopalians were proving themselves to be, to a Church where the bishops and priests actually had to be Christian to be bishops or priests. Sadly, in my opinion, even many American Catholics are beginning to head down the same road the Episcopalians have already walked. This is when (this past summer) I called Father Tom Gallaway, a local Orthodox priest who I met a few years ago when he and I were taking a class in Middle Eastern history at the University. I knew him to be a kind and intelligent man who had been helpful with some of my research in the past. I think I may have somewhat surprised him when I told him that I wanted to come to a Divine Liturgy (the central Orthodox liturgical service, analogous to what Roman Catholics call the Mass). He thought I was still a Baha'i.

I can't say that my conversion to Orthodoxy has been easy, and it certainly isn't over (but then, in a sense, it won't be until I am perfect as my Father in Heaven is perfect, and am sharing fully in the life of the Holy Trinity for all Eternity). Coming to accept the Church's position on such things as the all-male clergy and the prohibition of homosexuality have been especially difficult (even though I am male and my sexual orientation is of the statistically more common variety). My approach to things like this has changed rather drastically however, since I have become a follower of Christ. Now, I want to understand what God is telling us through Christian Tradition (both passed down orally and in the Bible), and I do not suppose that, I, a sinful creature, necessarily know better than my perfect Creator, or that God's word is subject to revision to make it conform to prevailing beliefs. Were that the case, then Christians wouldn't have died at the hands of Romans, and it wouldn't have been possible for those righteous Christians who did stand to up to Nazis to have done so.

Even if I still do not understand everything about the Church, I do know that since I have begun to live as a Christian under the protection and guidance of the Holy Orthodox Tradition, I have felt closer to Christ, to God, than I have ever felt in my life. For the first time in my life, I can honestly say that I feel that I have come home.

But my decision to enter the Church has not been merely on the basis of these feelings, important though they are. Briefly, I firmly believe that the Orthodox ecclesiological position of one, visible Church on earth, which is not different from the Bride of Christ spoken of in the Bible, is the ecclesiological position with firm scriptural and historical support. From my studies I firmly believe that the Orthodox Church has the strongest claim to be that one Church, despite the great sinfulness of the humans within the Church, now and in the past. I also firmly believe that the conciliar and episcopal methods of Church governance are the methods with the strongest scriptural support.

If there is no God, if there is no heaven, if there is no hell, then none of this, of course, really matters. It would not matter if I had stayed Catholic, had remained a Baha'i, was still agnostic, had become an Episcopalian priest, had decided to join the Hare Krishnas, was now speaking to you about the wonderful Mormon church, etc., etc., etc. As Dostoyevsky so rightly pointed out, "If there is no God, then everything is permissible..." It would perfectly okay to "church shop" to find a religious community which "fits my needs (read: wants)," to be a "cafeteria religionist" picking and choosing whom and what I wanted to believe in. If God is just some kind of abstract principle or metaphor or vague kind of "higher power" then the same is probably also true. If it doesn't really matter, then you can attend Episcopal Church services because you find the service "moving," and then spend you weekends with the Buddhists at the Shambhala center, and in your "normal life" sleep around and party. Because if God doesn't exist, or is just a nice metaphor, then what feels good or just "seems right" is what one will most likely choose to do.

However, if God, in addition to being the First Cause, Supreme Being, Higher Power, is also a Person, or rather, three Persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), a living God who has created us all in His image, because of His love, then we have a responsibility. If there is a God, a living God of the prophets, a living God seen in the face of Jesus Christ, no mere thin, pale "God of the philosophers," then the choices we make with regard to our spiritual lives matter a great deal. I pray to God that I am following Him in a way that is pleasing to Him, though of course I know I am a wretched sinner who is going to continue to wander and stumble.

Jeremiah S. Davis is a layman in the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.