A Missouri Girl Goes Sacred & Strange
It was a beautiful springtime Sunday morning, like so many others in my childhood. Our little country church hummed with life. The polished pine pews with their mauve cushions held family, friends, and neighbors dressed in their Easter best, and the pianist thumped out familiar hymns from the burgundy hymnals that were older than I was. A light-skinned Jesus with flowing light brown hair, carrying the one sheep that strayed from the fold, stared at us kindly from the painting hanging behind the pulpit. Little did I know at that tender young age that my faith journey would one day diverge from this comfortable Midwestern scene and take a sacred and strange path.
I grew up on the edge of the Missouri Ozarks in a typical two-parent blue-collar family. From a young age, Mom took us to church. Dad wasn’t with us much as work kept him away. Youth groups weren’t a thing yet back then, but there were Sunday School, Sunday morning and evening services, and Wednesday services. I still have my string of perfect attendance badges for Sunday School. As I grew, I added the annual Christmas play and youth trips, and eventually came to teach Sunday School, play the piano, direct the choir, write and direct church plays, establish and lead a youth group, and host numerous other church events. Church was my only life outside of work.
It was a beautiful, connected existence with deep ties and sincere faith. It was also a simple black-and-white world where I was confident that I grasped God’s will. We were in a battle of good vs evil, and the Bible was the full and final verdict on God’s word and will. Over time, as I matured and became increasingly embedded in my faith and community, I began to notice discrepancies between words and actions, and I started to wonder about certain things.
I wondered why the Bible sometimes seemed to contradict itself. I pondered how we could be so sure the King James Version of the Bible was guaranteed to be God’s word when it was compiled thousands of years after Christ lived and by a king many considered corrupt. I wondered why, when Jesus called for unity, Christianity itself had fragmented into a thousand pieces. Most troubling, though, I asked why all these Christians I knew and loved couldn’t get along. Why must they fight and devour one another, which our beloved Bible explicitly taught against?
After one particularly ugly conflict, I decided to take a break. Not a break from God or my faith, but a break from organized religion. I desired to worship God in “spirit and in truth, " but I wasn’t sure that included “church” anymore. My passion was for God, not church.
That break would begin a period of “wilderness” years, where I roamed and searched for the truth. What I found was more sacred and strange than I could have imagined! In an attempt to learn what the earliest Christians believed and practiced, so I could discern better which church I should belong to, I found saints with supernatural abilities, a generation of unknown (at least to me and most of my Protestant friends) church fathers and mothers who connected Christ’s disciples to the generations that followed, and volumes of forgotten sacred history and strangeness, both modern and ancient!
At about the same time, I rekindled an old passion of mine – reading about the paranormal. As a kid, I’d devoured books on witches, Native American legend and lore, hauntings, strange creatures (cryptids, we call them now), and all places bizarre. To my delight, podcasts had been born in the interim years between my youth and the rekindling. Now, I had a thousand new sources of escape from the mundane, and my imagination took flight!
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that my two passions were unexpectedly entwined. My search for ancient Christian teachings and practices led me to Catholicism, which in turn led me to Eastern Orthodoxy. Both traditions surprised me with a range of spiritual practices and wonderworking abilities I’d never encountered in my Protestant Evangelical upbringing. To my dismay, those I’d once worshipped with poo pooed this new information. Some actually dared to say, flat out, that our Protestant traditions were correct while the ancient Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions were wrong. Pretty strong words for those “last to the party”.
My fascination with the paranormal led me to eyewitnesses, experiencers, and incidents that could not be explained through normal, materialistic experience – thousands of stories, mysteries, and experiencers that could not all be discounted. In the paranormal community, I found researchers, investigators, and eyewitnesses exploring ancient spirituality, seeking an understanding and explanation of what they had seen, encountered, or endured.
So, where is this Midwestern Evangelical girl today? She’s on a path that’s both sacred and strange. She has learned that the ancient branches of Christianity, such as Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, have preserved spiritual truths lost to Protestantism. She has learned that non-Christian belief systems and religions, New Age teachings, and the paranormal often reflect ancient truths, especially when it comes to spiritual laws of the universe. And, she’s on a mission to discover everything she can about truth and, now more than ever, longing to worship in spirit and truth.
If you feel that same soul-deep, ancient pull, this blog is for you. I’ll be blogging about the forgotten wisdom of saints, mystics, and ancient teachers. I will explore strange phenomena and creature reports through a spiritual lens to examine how they relate to the ancients’ teachings and experiences. And, I hope most of all, to offer solace to those who, like me, are longing for true spirituality but who feel trapped in our flat, secular world where religion more often hurts than helps.
If you’ve ever wondered if the sacred might be stranger than we ever imagined, join me in this journey! Sending love and light to you all.