About this time last year, a friend of mine and I were talking about my recent switch away from Messianic Judaism. I had spent the past month or two trying out a few of the more liberal Christian denominations before discarding it altogether and heading towards Unitarian Universalism. My friend (a fellow student born several decades older than me who had been born in the Methodist church and never left it) laughed at me. "Aren't you supposed to figure out what you believe before you come to seminary?"
I get where he's coming from. From a perspective very focused on tradition and stability, my search probably didn't make much sense and wouldn't inspire much confidence in anyone looking for a leader. But I've never been one of those people. I value the journey and the questions, and I think that if you are so set in your tradition that no matter what answers you find, you know you will not be swayed, then you can't really learn. As far as I'm concerned, life and religion should never be about finding answers. It should be about building relationships, working with the rest of the world, finding out what questions and what values are important to you. Form my perspective, I have never "switched religions" - I have always moved forward in questioning and living out my beliefs, and while sometimes I might do that with different religious groups and take on a different label, the core hasn't changed. Rather, every step and every new group and label has enabled me to move forward and further define the faith I already had.
I was raised a Baptist, and had to stay in that tradition until I went to college. Even after I got to college, it took me awhile to spread my wings and realized no one was looking over my shoulder telling me I couldn't do this or study that, so I spent my first year going to a church much like the ones I had known as a child. Then I spent two years looking into Paganism but basically just being a lapsed Christian - I didn't go to church, but I talked to some of my friends about God and I still believed. I was just equally interested in learning about other religions as well. My last year of college, I got to know a minister who showed me Christianity didn't have to be the way I knew it. She was a lesbian, she had Taoist leanings, she introduced me to something called process theology, and she listened to my theological ramblings inspired by books and movies. Eventually (several months after graduation) I decided to go to seminary and applied to the school she had attended, and then things got weird. biggrin
Another person who had changed my view on religion that year at college was, oddly enough, a very conservative Christian and absolute Biblical literalist. He was a Messianic Jew, and he led a Bible study on the Jewish roots of Christianity, re-interpreting New Testament passages in light of Jewish thought and tradition. Things that had never made sense to me started to come together, and I learned that, contrary to what I had been taught as a child in church, it was good to ask questions and have doubts, that if I did I could better understand and follow the Bible. Messianic Judaism gave me a respect for study and literary/historical criticism of the Bible, it showed me the importance of knowing the culture that produced our various texts. I did not stay a Biblical literalist for long. I've always had Universalist leanings, and with my new understanding of the importance of cultural context, I couldn't come to any other conclusion than that humans produced the Bible and therefore the texts in it were not perfect and could (should) be reinterpreted.
(Will edit and add more later. Work time.)
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