Born again, again: how YA literature affirmed my faith and the Bible killed it

My life in Sacramento was boxed up and put away long before my mother died in 2002, but it wasn’t until 10 years after she passed that I unearthed any of it. When the metal gate of the storage unit rolled up and revealed my childhood under Gormanghast levels of dust, I found hundreds of ribbons from countless horseshows, journals and stuffed animals. But more than anything, I found books.

One book in particular was on the verge of falling apart because it had nearly been loved to death. Its spine was cracked from reading and re-reading. Its pages were swollen after having been dropped in the bath. It was highlighted and dog-eared to high heaven.

It was A Time to Cherish by Robin Jones Gunn: the tenth book in series of 12 telling the story of a young transplant to southern California who welcomes Jesus into her heart as her “personal Lord and Savior” and begins her life as a born-again Christian. When I was 13, “Christy” did things that seemed impossibly grown-up to me: she curled her hair with a curling iron, she drove around with missionary surfer boys, and she lived a chaste life in order to obey God.

My own journey as a born again Christian began with my troubled mother, who had converted as part of her struggle for sobriety. Where she went, I followed, whether it was to Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous or into the bosom of the Holy Spirit. As a 10-year-old, A Time to Cherish spoke to me deeply as about the struggle of trying to lead a “Christ First” life in a “Satan Based” world. I wanted to be Christy, and I wanted a boyfriend like hers, the dreamy Todd.

To be born again is not the same thing as just being Christian: it is a binding contract in which you take Jesus as your “personal Lord and Savior”, a vague term that means that you ask Jesus for guidance in the most mundane of matters. If it’s God’s will, Jesus will grant your prayer – big or small – and each prayer granted is a miracle; divine proof of God’s majesty and truth.

Christy sees the Lord’s hand in small things, too – like when a perky helper on a jet ski arrives to help when Todd, Christy and her disbelieving aunt are stranded on a boat with an empty gas tank. The two believers thank the Lord for her arrival, to which their good Samaritan responds that she is also Born Again and adds, “I actually came to this part of the lake because something inside of me kept nudging me to go this way!” Christy sees the hand of the Holy Spirit because, when you’re born again, you witness miracles every day.

It was reading the Bible that killed off my faith. When I was 13, I decided that I was done being a dilettante – I read my own pink, dog-eared Bible cover-to-cover instead of sticking to the sections suggested by children’s guides to the Gospels. Rather than finding the Good Book a useful, affirming guide, it only raised frustrating questions. I was horrified by the violence and jealousy of the God of the Old Testament, but my mother assured me that our God, the God of the New Testament, was generous, loving and forgiving.

All I could think was: “God changes?”

As a 32-year-old atheist who today is more interested in transcendence than transubstantiation, it’s strange to remember that I once happily handed out pamphlets urging other children to wash themselves with “the Blood of the Lamb” along with candy on Halloween or that my favorite book in the world was published by Focus on the Family, one of the staunchest, and most popular, voices in ultra-conservative American Evangelical Christianity. The traditional roles between men and women, as evidenced in the relationship between Todd and Christy, are mainstays of the Focus on the Family party line – as well as maintaining that homosexuality is a choice, and that gay marriage is an abomination. (I am lucky enough to have recently officiated the wedding of two wonderful men, so suffice to say I find the majority of the Focus on the Family platform to be pure anathema today.)

I am no longer the girl with A Time to Cherish and my Bible on my night stand, searching for all the answers that my mother couldn’t give me. In fact, when I sat down the other day to re-read “A Time to Cherish,” I was so perplexed and troubled by it, I wrote the author herself to ask her some questions. One was her advice to me, a reader who had not only lost her faith, but in the parlance of Born Agains, her testimony – her love for God and desire to share the good Word. “Turn to God,” she replied. “Every life is redeemable. ... Shame off you, grace on you.

Her answer made me ineffably sad.

How could I explain? I don’t feel that I need redemption. I don’t feel ashamed. I don’t feel lost, or scared or worried about my eternal soul. I don’t even think I have an eternal soul.

I no longer even value faith; I value doubt.

I do know why, as a young girl, I wanted answers: I was angry, like a lot of teens, and I was learning that growing up doesn’t give anyone solutions, only more complicated questions. I loved Gunn’s book so much because, even as Christy struggles with faith, with being a young woman, having crushes and maintaining friendships, her faith allows her to know that everything happens for a reason, and that everything will be OK.

Somewhere along the way I lost interest in everything being OK.

There’s a moment in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet in which the German writer urges a young and struggling author, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love questions themselves, like locked rooms and like book that are written in a very foreign languages.” More than my politics changing (which they did) or my mother passing (which she did), what separates me from the girl who looked to A Time to Cherish for direction is that I became vastly more interested in questions rather than answers.

Which is not to say that I don’t still try to find meaning in my life, or that I begrudge anyone else their own search. A Time to Cherish is still on my shelf, next to my pink Bible, my Quran, Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, Leon Lederman’s tomes on particle physics and collections of Keats. Reading them all gave me more questions than anyone could ever answer.

I used to live in a world of miracles. Now I live in a world of wonder.