Conversion stories

[Quintessence]

I'll add mine to the pile. It's pretty boring unless I'm feeling bardic and dress it up a bit.

I'm a nerd. In college, a required reading had a sentence with the word "pagan" in it (lowe case). I was suddenly struck by the fact that while I'd seen that word many times, I really didn't know what it meant. So, being a nerd, I looked it up. One thing led to another, and I realized that a way of being religious that actually appealed to me existed. My experience wasn't so much a conversion as a recognition. In all the ways that mattered, I've wprshiped the gods since I was a kid, but nobody told me these things were gods. I was told there was only one god and that this god had particular characteristics Basically, cultural indoctrination blinded me to my own gods. When that blindness was cured, I never looked back.

That's not to say it was easy. It definitely wasn't. Theology was my biggest struggle after discovering contemporary Paganism was a thing. Overcoming such pervasive cultural indoctrination was really hard. I had to learn things like "hey, god can be a woman" and "by the way, god can be nature" and "yeah, god can be gods (plural), and no, polytheism isn't defunct and outdated superstition." Things that should be stupidly basic, but aren't. I blame zero substantive education about religion in our K-12 system for that.

 

[Sundance]

Like many others who have shared their own very interesting stories of belief and non-belief, my coming to my religion begins with my childhood upbringing.


I was brought up in a household with a strong-willed Christian mother and a sometimes absent, non-religious father who believed in God. Christianity was inextricably part of my life. Every morning, my brothers and sister, my mother and I would all get together and pray, thanking God for His Blessings and Mercy. She would be watching some Christian television and reading from The Bible, always teaching me about Jesus Christ. All throughout the day and in the night, Gospel music would be playing in our house. Sunday morning, we would all go to church. Christianity was everything.


Then, around 11 or 12 years old, I was in my World Cultures class. There, I learned about different cultures and religions I had never before encountered: Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shinto, Confucianism, and Zoroastrianism. I was mesmerized, so I began my years of learning about them. All of the various beliefs about the Divine, the Afterlife, sacred Scriptures, etc. just overwhelmed me. Though, as the highly inquisitive person I am, I embraced what I was learning. Unfortunately, my mother (in whose home I was raised) didn't exactly approve, approaching other religions negatively, whereas my father was more positive in his reaction saying, “No matter what you call God, whether Jehovah, Allah, Jah, or whatever, they are all just different names for the same God.”


A few more years passed, and I went my father's route regarding religion (i.e. open-minded), whilst maintaining a very strong belief in God, in Jesus Christ, The Bible, all that. I was in ninth grade in high school thinking about how everything I was learning could harmonize with the knowledge that I carried from my childhood. So, I did a search on the computer of “unity of all religions”, thinking I was going to discover some sort of odd mixture of different religions. I ended up discovering something completely different than that: a new religion – The Bahá’í Faith, although, I had initially dismissed it, as (again) it wasn't was I was searching for.


Two, three years later, deep in my journey of seeking, I was in my school’s library reading about various different religions: the same Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and others. I was introduced to Neopaganism and Wicca, as well as to Sikhism. Lo and behold, I stumbled upon it: a book about that “odd” religion from years back. As I reading that book, it truly opened my eyes to the Bahá’í Faith in a very awe-inspiring and compelling way. So, I spoke to my mother about it who said to me, “Devin, I'll have that talk with you when you turn eighteen.”


Eighteen rolled around, and she sat me down. My mother in the talk cautioned me on one fundamentally important thing: “Any religion you decide to join, make sure to always believe in the Creator.” I promised her that I would. I continued to study the Faith for about a year, officially declaring my faith in Bahá’u’lláh on the 11th of February in 2015. Anxious about embarking on the life-changing journey of having a new religion, I became nervous and left it for about another year and some change. On July 27th, 2016, with the support and encouragement from some friends (who became my Bahá’í family) and after reading the seminal book by Hand of the Cause of God William Sears The Wine of Astonishment, I decided to rejoin the Faith. It's become my most humbling blessing ever since.