Something Found - Part XIII

I was an atheist for a long time. during that time I went to church with my friend. The pastor yelled a lot and his face turned red like he was going to explode. It was scary for an ex Catholic atheist. I was 24. I had been going back to school to get my BS. It was a business degree but I loaded up on the religion and philosophy classes. Pre-socratics were my favorites. Oh what we can think of when we live a life of luxury and have nothing else to do but sit around and think about why we are here. Seriously, I love dead greek guys, and really, they dont even have to be greek, but that helps. Some. I took some modern philosophy. I took copious relious classes, after all, it was a Catholic college. My teacher, Dr Cox was a strange enigma. He was a presbytarian minister or some flavor of protestant. He was amazing. The class where I found out I believed in a higher power was called "Sex and Sexuality of the Bible". What? Sex? in the bible? uhm ok, it will probably be about dont have sex blah blah blah, because even after being a Christian and going to a million churchs I still hadnt actually read any of the bible. So needless to say, I was surprised to find out there was an entire book of soft core porn in the bible, well, really its beautifully wriiten love/lust stuff that would make some Christians catch on fire if they actually cracked thier bibles open and read what was in there. We had to write this massive paper for our final. Mine was on Why God wants you to be a Vegetarian and how the presence of meat proclaimed the disempowering of women. It was tongue in cheek. I drew an awesome picture of a women marked up like a cattle that was going to be cut into pieces for steak (which my grandpa was fascinated with and kept until he died...lol) I admit, I ripped off the picture from a book, but it was for class, and I made the girl look a bit different. I played a consolidated song called "the sexual politcs of meat" and schocked the hell out of all my right wing engineering type class mates. It was good fun.

Dr Cox said several things that struck me. He basically said that God was about love and really had a way of putting things into the best terms so I could relate and understand them. Considering i have only met 2 people in my life that could do that regarding Christianity, he was a instrumental in me finding a higher power to belive in.

It was in that class I had an experience like Ann Lamott did in her book "Traveling Mercies" where she talks about taking a class and she felt like she believed in God and it was like a puzzle. She had the border down, but she didnt know what to put in the inside of the puzzle. (paraphrasing here, her work is much better than I can paraphrase).