My cousin Kevin is getting baptized

Some nice family news: my cousin Kevin, the second-youngest of my first cousins in my mega-large family (my father is one of eight), has decided to get baptized, which I think is very positive. I was not too surprised when I got news of this today since we had had a long discussion earlier this year about Christianity.
   It’s not so much whether one supports Christianity or not, it’s more that Kevin has made a decision about his spirituality that he believes will enrich his life.
   I was around Kevin’s age when I made the decision to be baptized. I probably started off stricter than I am now in terms of my beliefs. I still live by the idea that I am against forces that ‘rebel against God’, a commitment I made.
   Our family has had plenty of reasons to put our faith in Jesus Christ: from getting us out of Red China before the peasants revolted on our land, to the recent news that my second cousin Harold survived the NIU shooting.
   As those who watched the video clips of Harold earlier this year know, he puts his survival firmly on his faith in Christ and recently was behind the Bamboo Curtain to spread the Good Word. Being a US citizen, I am sure he was better protected than a local trying to practise Christianity within the occupied part of China.
   Atheists will argue that these are simply events that happen and some luck played a part; they are perfectly free to believe that. I can’t attack them and say that their belief lacks merit. If it works for them and they aren’t harming others by their views, and they aren’t dissing alternative viewpoints, then I can live with that. Personally, I prefer to believe there is some guiding force behind it all, whether it’s the traditional view of God or a more liberal view of co-creation. It would be boring to just have “shit happen” without something grander behind the scenes.
   I can’t fathom not having a spiritual element in my life. I do have a problem with religiosity or those who use the name of any religion to hurt others. It was actually interesting to note that at our reunion, quite a few of us, who went to a church school for the formative years of our lives, are no longer Christians.
   One reason I imagine my fellow classmates turned from Christianity and now consider themselves atheists, or “spiritual” at best (one friend, not a classmate, notes ‘SBNR’—Spiritual But Not Religious) is that religion was promoted too seriously for their liking. I probably had some mild form of ADD as a child (it did not prevent me from coming first in my year each year from 1981 to 1985) coupled with having to deal with English as a second language, so maybe it never seemed to come forth with as great an authority. I had the freedom to search for my own spirituality and included what I knew from Divinity classes at school with traditional Chinese beliefs and what I learned for myself.
   Like Timothy on Vox, I have used the ‘liberal Christian’ term for myself: less Ned Flanders, more someone who has combined elements of different beliefs in line with my personal history but ultimately accepting Jesus Christ as my personal saviour. On my Facebook profile, I list ‘spiritual’ as my belief, principally because my “version” of Christianity jars with some of what is said in the weekly eucharist. While I don’t subscribe to the Da Vinci Code version of events, I do believe the Bible has been modified by people over the centuries, but I do not believe that translation errors and the like weaken its spiritual purpose. I also don’t think God is a guy who talks like Orson Welles and has a beard. Therefore, some Christians might see me as just slightly better than an atheist on some continuum!
   I once attended church weekly and ceased doing so in the 1990s. Part of it was that I came to feel that the energy was not right. My final regular church, which was actually my first church at St Mark’s where I attended school, was fine. But I had attended many over the years to discover the hypocrisy behind some Christians, enough to leave a sour taste in my mouth that they were not willing to live the life they claimed.
   Unlike those schoolmates who turned totally from Christ, I didn’t see any reason to, but I also felt that God could hear me anywhere and it didn’t need to be at a prescribed time at a prescribed place. God didn’t hang up an ‘opening hours’ sign. Religion, in my private definition, implies some level of getting together and supporting an institution, while spirituality is personal. With my evolving view on Christianity it was better to take a personal path to figure out my dharma, and that has been an adventure in itself.
   I prefer to respect that everyone is different and that we all follow different paths.
   Kevin will have his path and I will be interested to see how he follows it. I really admire this personal choice because it’s not a commitment you see every day from someone.
   Kevin: I congratulate you on taking this step and it will be my pleasure to attend your baptism.