My Faith Journey: A Look At What's Changed

Hey friends! It’s been a minute. Welcome to the post that has kept me from writing another blog post in the last few months because I knew it needed to happen before I could post on here about any other thoughts. It is also a more specific and clarifying sister post to my last blog post ("A Summer of Unknowing") with the more truthful explanation that the so-called "spiritual awakening" I experienced was actually an unexpected religious conversion.

In simple terms the news is: I became Christian over the summer. My last post was a bit of an I-converted-to-Christianity soft launch, if you will; only those who knew, knew.

A little bit about my religious background (or more fittingly, lack thereof): I grew up in a secular household. I had a number of friends growing up who had fallen out of their faiths (typically out of Christianity) because they had felt condemned for their sexuality or found their Asian immigrant church communities to be toxic in other ways. I used to tell people I'd never be able to believe in God because I didn't grow up believing.

And, as I mentioned in some previous blog posts, I have in the past few years nurtured and grown a deep intellectual and spiritual interest in Buddhism. Teachings about impermanence resonated with me spiritually and always proved true empirically, so long as I didn't believe in supernatural occurrences or beings. It made sense to me that everything that originates must also cease, and so on. I watched flowers come out of the earth and fall back into it, watched people enter my life and leave.

My very wise scholars of a grandfather and great-grandfather on my mother's side were also Buddhists. My great-grandfather used his political prowess in Taiwan to quietly protect Buddhist circles from persecution. He also edited The Great Chinese Buddhist Canon 《中华大藏经》which is still available in Taiwanese temples today. Both he and my grandfather published many writings on Buddhism, dedicating their lives and careers to it, so I felt almost a cultural and spiritual responsibility to resonate with Buddhism. And, as their only great/great-great grandkid who can speak and read both Chinese and English, I convinced myself for a period of time that I was placed on this earth to translate their writings. That I was fated to carry on their legacies.

That being said, I never got to a point of proudly calling myself Buddhist. I could affirm impermanence—that just felt like a fact of lived experience. I liked the no-self teaching—it helped me see the universality of human experiences and stop saying things like "this is just how I am." I also had periods where I meditated daily and learned to understand my own mind better through that practice, lessening attachments to feelings, and learning to watch them come and go in my body instead of judging them and telling stories about what they all meant.

Where I got caught up, however, was the more "religious," or supernatural elements of Buddhism. I couldn't really buy into the stuff about hungry ghosts or chanting the Buddha's name to send someone to a particular stage of the afterlife. I liked things that I could prove and see, like my own breath passing through my body in a thirty minute sit.

So how, when, why did things change?

The way I see it now is that God placed particular people in my life at a time in my life in which I was far more open to experience than I had ever been. Grief does that to you: it perforates the borders you draw around yourself that you thought defined who you were and have to be. It allowed me to ask questions to the Christians in my life with a little more genuine curiosity and to field their questions with a little less defensiveness and pride.

At first, it was slow. The biases I had against Christianity that kept me from reading the Bible or even saying the word God started to chip away little by little through conversations with Christians in my life I knew and loved.

Then it was fast. In mid-late summer, while solo traveling in central Taiwan, I was kept up late by utter existential bewilderment. My heart would race and body would tremble at night with fear and possibility. Could it really be true that life wasn't just a series of random coincidences? That there was actually a supernatural logic to it—that our souls and hearts were created for much more than this world, which could explain why I exist in a continual state of yearning?

In places where for me personally, Buddhism didn't quite do it for me, Christianity was hopeful and invigorating. Christianity would agree with Buddhism that the earthly body rises from the dirt only momentarily before it falls back to the ground. But it would also argue that there is purpose in its life and its death, given by its eternal Creator. The body doesn't just fall back into the earth to become part of the giant unsentimental universe of matter. With Buddhism, in moments of deep pain, I still struggled with a feeling of purposelessness. (Forgive my simplification of Buddhism here; take this as my personal experiences and understandings as I am not a theologian.)

I realized at some point during my solo travels that something had changed irreversibly. The image I had in my head was of myself walking from one end to another on a seesaw. I had ventured far enough past the center point that I had tipped into an entirely new definition of truth. Except unlike a seesaw, I don't think I'll ever be able to truly go back to the position I was in before.

I don't by any means intend to suggest a static Christianity or a static worldview either. As anyone religious knows, religion is the furthest thing from static. It's a constant negotiation between truths of the material world and Truths of the spirit. It's an ongoing conviction of the self, where in Christianity's case the Word of God challenges you to be better even on your off-days. Excuses for bad behavior like "I didn't sleep at all last night" or "I'm just really stressed" that might make a co-worker or friend marginally more forgiving of your irritability are nothing to God, who sees through to every pocket of selfishness in your heart and challenges you to do better.

One of the hardest things to accept for me in my walk in faith so far has been that there will always be things I don't know for sure. Questions without clean answers. Contradictions that bother me because I with my human capacities can't untangle them. That's where the faith comes in. If you believe in a God so good, you must also rest your heart in the knowledge that His ways will most often be beyond our simple human understanding.

Anyways... that's the life update. I wanted to wait until I was at least a little further along in my Christian journey before writing this because I know this might come as a surprise to some, even family and friends who've known me very well. And I am very much still learning how to talk about this new part of my life, let alone write about it and share it on the Internet.

But if I know anything about myself it's that I do not like writing if I'm not writing with an honest heart. So this is the real, albeit slightly drowsy Michelle of this chilly late-November moment, who's finally collecting her thoughts on a plane ride back to California after another three crazy months of Princeton. Which, by the way, have been my happiest three months at Princeton yet—I'm living with my best friends, working part-time, ran a half marathon, became a matcha snob. It's been quite a different look from the disaster of junior spring.

Speaking of junior spring, this week marks seven months after Lauren's death. On my train to the airport, I sat near a tall, lanky boy with a leather bag and a Virginia Woolf book, and I just don't believe anymore that the world works by coincidence. Somehow, Lauren, I know that was you.

There never will be true respite from or remedy for the grief I still feel in the random moments when it bubbles back up in my throat. Yet in the meaning-making and contemplative conversations and searching of a place to land my heart that have followed, I have somehow found beauty, a kind that would've been unreachable without having known such depth of pain. And in this all along, has been God.

I thank you always, with all my heart, for reading.