I Guess It's Time to Tell You That I Love Jesus Now

That New Age to Christian pipeline

Thomas Cole, The Pilgrim of the Cross at the End of His Journey, 1846

Life is so funny. Part of me can’t believe that I am typing this post.

I actually didn’t want to share it yet, but as I’ve been writing and podcasting it has felt almost impossible to cut out the role God has played in my shifting beliefs. He is now part of the lens through which I view everything; something integral is missing when I try to separate my logical thoughts from the underlying question of: what are we living for?

So I prayed. Since that’s what I do now. And here we are.

For the past couple years I had been what a friend called “Christian-curious.” I was more open to Christianity than I had been in the past (when I openly mocked and ridiculed it), but I felt like I just didn’t “get it” — how could people fully believe in this “man in the sky,” these mythological stories?

I would come to realize that this is actually an essential question, when asked genuinely. In the past I used to ask it while laughing, how could someone? ha ha, even smart people can be so dumb. Then my question changed to me really meaning it, true curiosity. How do these otherwise smart and practical people believe in Christianity, if my idea of Christianity is in fact what they believe?

I made Christian friends and I felt myself wanting what they had. This sense of peace, of faith, trust, calm — I envied it. I said to multiple people, I want to be a God person, but I just can’t quite get there.

What I meant was, how do you believe in this thing that is so obviously made up?

I thought that maybe it was too late for me, somehow. I had been through too much, seen too much to be able to limit it all to being Christian. Maybe if I was more naive, if I didn’t know how cults work, if I hadn’t had such a wide range of spiritual experiences that had left me blown open but ultimately empty... I felt jaded.

People described their relationship with God and I said “well I feel like I have that, I just call it Life and Nature.” It was easier to tell myself I did already have it, even though I could still tell that I didn’t.

When it finally happened, I was struck by how everything I had been searching for… was always right here.

___

When I was born, I was baptized in a Greek Orthodox church.

We went to church when I was little. Not to the Greek church, but to a closer one that was Episcopalian. The facts don’t matter so much as my memory — I have few memories of being in church, but I remember playing an angel in the nativity play and my parents being friends with the priest. I had books at home on virtues and children’s stories of the Bible. At some point maybe when I was 8 or so, we stopped going regularly and we just went on Christmas and Easter, and then we stopped going altogether.

Neither of my parents were particularly religious. Like, it was a thing we did for a time, and they both wore gold crosses around their necks, but I don’t remember seeing either of them praying or speaking about God. My mom’s family was Orthodox and my dad had been a badly-behaved Catholic, secretly skipping his classes and never getting confirmed.

All religion was respected and treated as equally possible or not possible. My dad often contemplated the universe with me, open to every question I had, telling me I would get to decide for myself what I believed.

I vividly remember sitting on my bedroom floor around age 12. Kids at school had been teasing me because of my unwillingness to curse. I learned what the middle finger meant. I stared at my carpet and unfurled my middle finger; I wanted to know what it looked like, when I did the forbidden thing.

“Sorry, God,” I said as I put it back down.

And that was the last moment that I cared, and then I went and joined the middle school world of hormones, cursing, and generally doing everything that was forbidden.

At 16, since I had been baptized by the Greek church, I had the opportunity to go to Greece for a 3-week summer camp held through the church. I was excited by the idea of traveling, and since my second cousin (whose family was very involved with the church) was also going, my parents felt comfortable sending me along.

The trip was wonderful in every aspect, but the main thing I remember was the peace, beauty, and presence in each moment of the day. In the morning the bell would ring and we would walk all together to the chapel, where we would pray in Greek and the incense would swirl around us. The sounds were unfamiliar but felt like home at the same time. Before each meal we prayed.

I had my first-ever confession, where I told the priest about all the alcohol I drank, the bad things I had done. It felt cleansing. The entire trip, I felt so happy.

At the end of my confession I asked the priest, wanting to believe but still unsure: “There are so many religions, even so many versions of Christianity. How do you know this is the right one?”

He was young. He mumbled through an answer about how he had tried them all and found that this was the best one, and I looked at him and felt that he didn’t believe it. So I didn’t believe him.

While the experience deeply impacted me and I longed for God, the trip still ended with me stealing alcohol from a hotel mini fridge in Athens, resulting in the priest calling my mother (a story for another day!)

Religion just wasn’t something that was modeled to me in my day-to-day, normal life. I didn’t know if my parents really believed in God, I didn’t think they did. The society around me certainly wasn’t religious, and neither were my friends. My beautiful experiences with God kind of .. fell away, never having been rooted in anything around me.

And then when I had just turned 19, and I was in my first semester of college, my 17-year-old brother was in his accident.

He had a severe TBI (traumatic brain injury), was supposed to die and didn’t, and was in a coma in the ICU, no one knowing if he’d ever wake up again. When I chose not to go back to school but to stay at home for my family, I didn’t know what to do with myself.

There was a New Year’s special at the yoga studio. I had tried yoga before but never been to the real studio. I thought, maybe that can be my life — I’ll go to yoga and then I’ll go to the hospital. I went to yoga and found the first sense of peace I had felt since the accident had happened.

Thus began my New Age spiritual journey. Over the coming years I immersed myself in everything. Meditation, juice cleanses, chakras, reiki, yoga teacher training, shamanism, anything you could imagine, I was in. I experienced being fully present and felt this taste of enlightenment for two days straight, like I was on drugs but not. I did drugs, of course, LSD and weed and molly. I hung up tapestries of peace signs and Ganesha in my room; I pulled runes and tarot cards and called out to Kali.

Oh, I won’t go into all the detail but I could for a long time. Becoming a social justice warrior and leaving my beloved yoga behind because “it was cultural appropriation.” Deciding I was a witch instead, doing spells and praying to planets and nature. Learning tantra, sexual energy, sex magic. I even considered atheism, reading materialism ideas for a hot minute.

Eventually, this all led to me falling into a spiritual cult in 2020, a combination of much of the above. My open, trusting mind was completely hijacked, manipulated by a narcissist in ways I didn’t know were possible. The entire time I told myself I was healing. I believed that I was all-powerful, that we were all God. I believed that Jesus was a witch.

I believed that there was no such thing as good and evil, that instead we should be in approval of everything and stop being such victims. I believed that we are all one. I believed morals were made-up human ideas. Of course, the entire time I became more narcissistic myself.

And then in 2022 it all came to a crashing halt.

This is Part 1 of a multi-piece series — make sure you’re subscribed to receive the rest