An Unlikely Convert, or How I Became a Christian - Part One

I was raised in a secular agnostic family in Santa Barbara, California. My parents were married in the USC Library by an actor, in a service my mother wrote herself. My mother, who was four months pregnant with me at their wedding, would say she is spiritual but not religious. My father's religion is the secular cult of the Asian immigrant son: academic excellence, capitalism, filial piety. The intellectual climate in our house was brilliant and lively and fun, and although my siblings and I had the odd encounter with Jesus via nativity creche or Vacation Bible School, the only time belief became part of the conversation in our house was when my parents rolled their eyes at the hyprocrisies of Christians.  The only Christians I knew personally were my Baptist aunt and uncle. 

This aunt and uncle were favorites of mine, partly because they were kind and I loved to hear my uncle say grace in his quiet, humbly eloquent way and wondered at how he could talk to God right in front of everybody like that, and partly because I loved the Bibles they gifted me with every year or two as I grew: The Good News Bible, then the Youth Study Bible, and so on. I pored over the stories and the sidebars that related the doings of David or Esther to something going on in the readers' lives right now. The sidebars seemed written for gentle, youth group types, not for heathens like my peers and I. After all, what could these slick Bibles have to say about the warring urges of wanting to hang out with the cool girls and yet feeling a deep sense of wrongness through the fuggy, intense pressure to fellate near-unknown ninth graders following your middle school's audience with the Dalai Lama?

I hoarded them and read them anyway. Sometimes I sneaked off to the Mission gift shop to ogle and buy bits of Jesus paraphernalia; a rosary, a wallet card with the Lord's Prayer printed on it. I felt a charge even through those distant glimpses of him, and as the years went by, I found more and more ways to spy on him. My high school offered a Bible as Literature elective. I took it. When I studied abroad in Italy my sophomore year at college, I immersed myself in the story of Christianity through Renaissance art. I spent hours at the feet of Michelangelo's Pieta, sitting in front of Caravaggio's blinded Saul, and hunched in the pews of the Medicis. I came back to the States and took classes in theology and the early church at Cal.

In my dorm room, when I had finished with Augustine and Origen, I wept over Mere Christianity. I was starting to get what the Jesus thing was all about. Aesthetically, I totally appreciated how beautiful, how perfect the whole story was. But I never once considered that following him was could be for a cigarette-smoking, lawyer's daughter, La Dolce Vita-loving heartbreaker like me.