Baptized
About two months ago, I was baptized. That’s right…Baptized. I’m talking the traditional, Christian sacrament kind of baptized — as in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit baptized. I can just hear my cringing self from 2017 saying, “Really? What happened here Matt?!”
Even now I find it odd to talk about with others, which I have rarely done. Whenever I hear myself say “I believe in Jesus” or if I even imagine myself saying “I take Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior,” it feels like someone else is saying it and to be honest it feels downright weird and almost disingenuous. And yet, in recent months I have had moments of being moved to tears reading the stories and sayings of Jesus. And yet, seeing the word “Jesus” on a page can appear as though a hand is reaching out to me and drawing me home. And yet when I visualize the image of Jesus, I sometimes feel a physical warmth in my heart. And yet after years, decades of reading spiritual and philosophical texts from many traditions East and West, the foundational teachings of the bible feel like they perfectly fit the gap I’ve been trying to fill all along.
Over 30 years ago I sat in chapel at a Southern California bible college and had a sort of epiphany. I wondered, “what if we are all wrong here.” Who are we to say that we have a monopoly on the truth and everyone else — all other cultures and beliefs and even different factions of Christianity — is wrong, not to mention destined for eternal damnation? There are billions outside of our small circle who feel just as strongly convicted of their beliefs as we do of ours. They love their children and many of them have had profound and transformational spiritual experiences. This American Evangelical worldview represents such a small fraction of the world’s population. The statistics are not in our favor. And I’m suffocating here.
During the few years prior to enrolling in this school, I attended a state University for a few semesters majoring in religious studies. There I took courses on other religions and was exposed to biblical textual criticism. I loved these courses. When I transferred to the conservative Christian university, I just assumed that the same academic rigor would be involved but from a different (correct) perspective. It wasn’t. Also, I had been involved in some soul crushing relationships that applied Christian teachings in extremely toxic and destructive ways. That chapel service was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, and I was done.
Done…done…done. I’d spent a lifetime living within the bounds of a conservative Christian way of perceiving the world. And now, no more church, no more bible, no more faith in any cosmic code dictating right and wrong of any sort. Good and evil? We all just make that shit up.
Over the thirty years between then and now a lot has happened to shape a new worldview. There was night after night of reading eastern scriptures, western existential philosophy and Jungian psychology. There was a brief New Age stint involving crystals and spirit guides. There were three years of practicing Zen Buddhism in a formal Zen Center setting. There was work and starting a family. There was Ultra-running (50Ks, 50-mile and 100-mile events) that I treated as a religious pursuit. Finally, there was workaholism and depression.
About five years ago I realized that I was simply working for the sake of work, losing my ability to feel, and acquired a strong conviction that whatever it was I was doing was not working in my favor or for the wellbeing of those around me and that I needed to do something different and focus on making a better life for myself. First thing was to start heeding my intuition for guidance. I began to awaken to a voice that was trying to get through to me. First it wanted me to stop drinking wine every night, going to sleep while still working with my laptop on my pillow, and start eating better and exercising again. I don’t think many would argue that this is good advice, but I just had a deep sense that that was what I needed to do first thing — like the universe was shouting in my ear, “this is what you need to do right now this instant!”
I heeded that voice and it felt great. Very quickly I began to feel things turn around. Nothing real dramatic…I mainly felt like I was just moving in the right direction. Eventually I felt compelled to meditate daily again and listen to any book that talked about self-improvement during my workouts. I read all sorts of stuff and it was very helpful. Around this same time, we got a new dog that I would take on 30–45 minute walks twice a day which I used as a sort of walking meditation. In these walks, I sensed a presence that would speak to me. Not a verbal voice by any means. A quiet voice in the heart that made a deep impression. It spoke mainly in feelings and images rather than words. It was permeated in love and grace and was here to help me. I’d never felt like this before. Even when I was a Christian during my youth, I felt like I was on my own and had better make the right decisions to realize the life God wanted for me. Now I felt this voice had my back and I just needed to surrender my effort and allow it to guide me.
One night finishing up a walk, this voice impressed upon me a desire to read the bible again. I did.
When I read the bible starting with the new testament, I decided to read it the same as I would any spiritual text from Hinduism, Taoism or Buddhism that I had read over the past few decades. There was no obligation to assume it is “true” and no need to take everything literally. Just approach it with curiosity and an open mind and let it wash over me. I did.
As I read the gospels, I felt something in my heart — a sort of peace for which I could form no logical description. A feeling rather than a coherent thought. Now I had gone years cutting myself off from my feelings, but in this new season I was developing a craving for feeling. I was attracted to anything that evoked emotion. I began playing the piano again and reading fiction during this time because these activities moved me. With the bible I was often perplexed with the content. What exactly did Jesus mean when he said believe in me? He hadn’t even died yet. The gospels and even the epistles don’t really lay out in a rational western outline what we must do to “get saved.” Maybe I spaced out, but I did not catch the “sinner’s prayer” anywhere in the gospels. There was a lot of miracles and demonstrating love and mercy and some talking about “the good news” without giving a clear definition of what it is and talk of the “kingdom of God” which seemed not the same as heaven. As I read, I was opening to an experience. I wanted to participate with whatever this was that I was reading in the bible. I wanted to go deeper — whatever that meant.
I remember googling during this time, “Christians that don’t believe in the resurrection.” Because I didn’t, couldn’t and wouldn’t. I mean I had to draw the line somewhere! However, I wanted to interact with this image of Christ forming in my mind. I wanted to dive experientially into what Jesus was saying and doing. At the same time, the idea that Jesus was just a “wise teacher” seemed completely unappealing and anti-climactic. What I was feeling was way deeper than moral platitudes from a good person. What was this Jesus? This figure that countless people have sacrificed their lives for. If he was more than some wise dude but not God or didn’t rise from the dead, then who was he?
A couple years went by and I read the bible in its totality. I also read the Koran and A Course in Miracles just to balance things out. I discovered contemplative prayer and modern authors who seemed to share in a vision of Christianity as experience over mere beliefs. I began to transition my Zen Buddhist meditation practice to sitting in silent prayer before the present moment of God. This really wasn’t much of a “transition” since the practice was nearly identical!
I just wasn’t sure what to make of the historical Jesus. I believed in Jesus more as a sort of elemental cosmic force of nature. To me there was something to be said about a story that survives over 2000 years and continues to profoundly transform lives. Maybe humanity just couldn’t help but to create the Jesus story. Perhaps it never happened historically but the deeper truths have always existed: that we are not separated from God, his laws are written in our hearts, we are forgiven from sin, love is the most important thing and the only thing holding us back is belief. I wasn’t adamant about the fact that the resurrection did not happen, I just did not feel compelled to believe it literally as a sort of secret handshake to get me into the kingdom of God club.
For a few months I attended a local United Church of Christ. The basic beliefs of the church did not make me feel unwelcome or uncomfortable. While likely most who attended did believe in the resurrection of the historical Jesus, they were all super friendly and shared an appreciation for social justice issues which I liked. However, in the end I just did not feel spiritually energized and eventually stopped attending.
I continued to read the bible regularly because when I did, I could feel “the word of God” penetrating me. This was a totally non-logical sense of truth. Its not that I believed in every fact I read, and I didn’t, but I felt I could deeply relate with almost everything I read on a spiritual, non-verbal level. Concepts like atonement, ransom, blood sacrifice made no literal sense to me and were even somewhat offensive if I imagined them to be literal. However, I do know what it feels like to think oneself a failure, to see my mistakes as a husband, father and friend as permanent blemishes with unforgivable consequences. I’m certain that the concept of Christ’s death as sacrificial atonement could be incredibly freeing to a first century Jew and obviously it continues to be for many modern humans steeped in biblical tradition. As I pondered the spirit of these teachings in the light of grace and existential forgiveness, it made poetic sense to me. Its all just love. God just loves us. The crucified Christ is God meeting us in our deepest suffering. Freedom from the misconceptions of ourselves comes simply by believing and being receptive to this message.
I was also really surprised by how much I liked the old testament. Yeah, those Israelites did some horrible, horrible things and some of them were honestly difficult to read (try the last few chapters of Judges), yet as they wandered through the wilderness, complained to God and eventually entered the promised land, I felt like that journey echoed my own in many ways.
Then about a year ago my dad gave me a book written by Ed Piorek, the pastor of the church we attended during my Jr. High and high school years. It wasn’t a spiritual book. It was just a collection of stories from his childhood and youth about living in San Clemente, a local beach town just south of where I live, during the 50s and 60s. I had always liked Ed and I wondered what he was up to after all these years. I stumbled upon a podcast where he was interviewed about his relationship with John Wimber, the leader of the Vineyard movement throughout the 80s and 90s. He also mentioned how he had developed an affinity for contemplative authors and practices of Christianity. This gave me pause because he was mentioning some of my favorite Christian authors and sharing a perspective that I could identify with. As I listened to the interview it was like my conservative evangelical past was reconciling itself with the new perspective on Christianity growing within me over the past few years.
I then read several of Ed’s books. Ed’s message was super simple and beautiful. God loves us and wants to have a personal relationship with us. His books were full of stories from his pastor days at the Vineyard, ministering to various individuals who were experiencing psychological and emotional healing through prayer and a receptivity to the Holy Spirit. I deeply wanted this. As I mentioned before I had felt isolated from my ability to feel. This was slowly being restored but I wondered if Ed had some insight that could help me take the next step.
One of his books was a sort of history of the Vineyard during the 80s and 90s. This book had a chapter devoted to this guy named Lonnie Frisbee. If there is one thing I will never ever forget during my family’s time in Ed’s church, it was the evening when Lonnie came to preach, but I’m not so sure “preach” is the right word. I was probably 13 years old and there were people falling off their chairs and put into some sort of cathartic trance like state. These were people who I saw every week and appeared like very normal non-crazy folk. I remember being so jealous. I wanted to fall to the floor and cry too. I wanted to feel the presence of God and his love. At that time, Jesus and the teachings of the church were purely a conceptual fact that stirred no emotion inside me. I was even conscious of this then as a kid and felt kind of ignored by God. Why wasn’t I feeling anything?
I didn’t know this then, but I learned as I was reading Ed’s book that Lonnie was one of the key leaders of the Jesus People movement in the late 60s and early 70s. I consumed Lonnie’s three volume biography, and the biographies of several others that were either leaders or just caught up in that movement. These were mostly hippie types who were being transformed by a relationship with Jesus. Their hearts were being opened by what they saw as the love of God. That sounded like something I wanted big time. I felt like I had a lock over my hear and if this could help me to break it then I’ll take it.
So eventually I sent Ed Piorek an email and asked if we could meet to talk. I am pretty introverted, and this is something so unlike me to do. We did meet a couple weeks later. We talked for a good while, but his basic “message” to me was: “all this [spiritual] stuff can get rather ephemeral. You have to believe in something. I believe in Jesus Christ.” Maybe if anyone else said this to me I would have just smiled but not taken it to heart. However, I had this super strong sense that I was talking to Ed for a reason, that I had read his books and the other books they inspired me to read for a reason. I felt like something was leading me to this encounter and that Ed had a message I needed to hear and take to heart. We agreed to get back together in a month.
Man oh man how I wrestled with this over that month. Part of me felt like I had worked so hard over the last 30 years to get rid of the Christian baggage that I felt limited my view of myself and the world and ultimately just made me feel shame and “not good enough.” Yet somehow hearing this invitation from Ed Piorek’s low key, no-pressure, no-judgement voice, “believe in Jesus Christ,” being repeated time and again in my mind was opening something up. While my intellect was shouting how backwards this all was, my heart was saying “yes.” I read and watched tons of content about Jesus. I cried through Jesus Christ Superstar. I thought constantly about Jesus and was doing a lot of gospel reading. I felt very tender and more emotional than I think I had ever felt. Unlike my childhood years in the church, I felt incredibly moved by who Jesus was revealing himself to me to be.
I felt like this invitation was calling me to jump in the water, so to speak. I live near the ocean and spend a fair amount of time at the beach. I’d say most beach goers do not go in the water. The beach is still great on the sand. The sound of the waves, the smell of the ocean, and the view of a dramatic sunset can all be amazing. Almost two years ago I started swimming in the ocean about seven miles a week. When I am in the ocean, I feel a strong visceral intimacy with nature. The ocean is so alive with fish and currents. I’ve swam with dolphins and seals. I have ridden waves which have lead to moments of fear, respect, and joy. The perspective from inside the ocean is like seeing in color what was black and white on the shore. Moving from Jesus as abstract concept to personal, loving savior was akin to stepping into the water. At first the water feels cold and my body wants to resist it, but instead I become curious, receptive and open to what the ocean wants to give and my fears are forgotten and the reward is immense.
Up until now, my view of Jesus as heroic architype was very easy for me to embrace intellectually. Jesus as resurrected divinity was a substantial step into what I feared might be “crazy town.” However, I felt this was the next step. I needed to dive in and submerge myself in faith. I really do not, nor have I ever had a problem believing that miracles occur or that reality goes deeper than what we experience through our bodily senses. I think the biggest hurdle for me was reconciling the “exclusivity” of Jesus as Savior from my childhood Christian upbringing with my adult encounters with other belief systems. If I believe that Jesus is resurrected and that this historical person of Jesus is the doorway to salvation, what does this mean for other beliefs that do not have a Jesus? Hinduism and Buddhism just to name two. Are they all following a lie?
I’ll admit that there was a part of me that wanted to fall back into the evangelical beliefs of my youth: to see the bible as the inerrant word of God and to have a solid purpose to save the non-believers. When I first jettisoned my Christian beliefs, I felt like I was living in an empty vacuum of no-belief. Although I certainly felt a freedom from needing to be good and correct, I lost all my signposts that showed me how to navigate reality. Having these signposts back would be pretty nice in many ways. Who doesn’t enjoy the solid conviction of being right? To walk the world with certainty. Yet I just couldn’t do it. I could not bring myself to invalidate the wisdom of other traditions and cultures. I could not alter my views on gender equality or the validity of the lifestyles chosen by members of the LGBTQ community. I just couldn’t buy that God had set apart the Jewish culture to be the sole recipient of his grace. It made zero sense to me.
What ended up being so tough was not so much acknowledging the act of resurrection but embracing Jesus as the same evangelical “package deal” I bought into 30 years ago. I just couldn’t go back and resume from where I had left off. My life was different, and I had experiences that could not be unexperienced. I think I was reading Brian McLaren’s Faith After Doubt at the time, and it helped me to entertain the possibility that accepting Jesus and following him could be something fresh and new and integrated with who I have become and how I see the world. At some level I needed to take the box filled with all the beliefs I had assumed were required for a Christian life and bury it — respectfully. Could it be enough for now just to believe in Jesus?
I think part of me was responding, “well if all these other beliefs are legitimate, why bother? I mean Zen was super cool, why not just stick with that?” Yes, Zen was cool. Zen is cool. Zen and the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita and so many other teachings both ancient and modern became a solid pillar of wisdom for me to lean against, but right now I feel Jesus knocking at my heart pointing out a new path that just felt right. I’m not going to say “and that, friend, is how I know that Christianity is right and superior to all other traditions.” As a product of western civilization given to dualistic notions of good and bad, best and inferior, it is tempting to come to that conclusion. All I can do is walk in the direction where I feel my heart pulling. The person and message of Jesus just feels right to me. Also, this doesn’t mean that I stop listening to other traditions. However, I am committing myself to Christ as my personal guide and focus of worship. Having buried that evangelical box of beliefs, jumping into the ocean of Christ and committing myself to his message, it became easier to release my doubts — not deny them or even condemn them, but to acknowledge their presence all the while choosing faith.
Intellectually I’ve mostly come to peace with the resurrected Christ as divine giver of life — some days more so than others. When I read back this sentence, it just looks so weird. “Resurrected Christ?!” “Divine giver of life?!” Do people really believe that?! Well, I guess I do. Basically, I tell myself that Paul, who clearly believed in Jesus’ bodily resurrection, spent a fair amount of time with Jesus’ apostles. This visit is mentioned in Galatians and even the most liberal biblical scholars who believe many of the epistles attributed to Paul were not actually written by him do believe that Galatians is authentically authored by Paul. Anyways, you’d think that Paul and the apostles would have talked with one another about the life of Christ and about the apostles’ experiences with Jesus after his death. There were also very negative consequences of holding this belief for all of them. This doesn’t seem like the thing one would believe and proclaim to gain prosperity and certainly not security. And yet somehow this story has had the power to transform countless lives throughout history. OK I realize this still is not even close to a rock-solid case. Certainly, others think it is. I have read a fair amount of popular Christian apologists who seem to think the resurrection of Jesus can be proven in a court of law. Some of this literature I have found interesting and some I have found farfetched and narrow sighted. In the end my faith is based on what I feel in my heart. Yeah I know that can also be super dissatisfying and I totally think feelings should be scrutinized. I could examine these feelings and just write them off to some subconscious uprising from my religious memories of the past trying to satisfy some unresolved longing of my middle-aged present. Sure, I could just do that and walk away, or I could follow this bursting in my heart and see where that takes me. I think I’ll do that!
Fast forward about five months after that first meeting with Ed last Spring and baptism just seemed like the next logical step. As I said, I felt a calling to jump in the water…so jump in the water! This would be a sort of ratification of my faith. A threshold to cross and commit to following the mystery of Jesus Christ. Baptism was a way of transforming intent to believe and follow into bodily action. On November 10, 2021, Ed Piorek baptized me and my wife (I know…right?) in the ocean in the presence of my family and his super awesome wife Janet Piorek.
