My earliest memories that involve religion are from my father taking me to Jewish synagogue’s. I can remember him holding me up as the Torah scroll passes by so I can reach out and touch it. I can remember digging through the boxes of kippah (head coverings) to find the one I wanted to wear and I can remember being disappointed that I didn’t get to wear the tallit (prayer shawl) like all the men did. Both of my parents were converts to Judaism, my father from an Episcopal background, my mother from a Fundamentalist background; however, by the time I was ten or eleven, religion ceased to be a thing in my family. So I grew up with this vague notion of being Jewish, but not in any sense of practicing Judaism.
Despite that, it is my maternal grandparents who were the important religious influences in my life, looking back I know that I would not be where I am today without their prayer and examples. Both of them were staunch Fundamentalist Christians (in the Jerry Falwell camp). It is their example of praying and being in the Word every day, it was their occasionally taking my siblings and I to church, to evangelical outreaches like the Billy Graham Crusades, and to simply being examples of living the Gospel, that set the foundation for my becoming a Christian.
In the spring of 1989 I enlisted in the U.S. Army and was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma for my basic training. It was there that I first encountered the Gospel and the saving grace of Jesus Christ. I had a really hard time when i first went into the military. I had never been away from home for any extended period of time before that, had never been in that type of disciplined environment, and I really struggled with it. My one escape on a weekly basis, was the chance to go to church on Sunday mornings.
Sunday morning church was either a Catholic service or a Protestant service. Sadly, my choice to attend the Catholic service was due to the better snacks that they offered afterwords. But the priest was also a very evangelical preacher, something that seems rather rare in the Roman Catholic church these days. But it was there that I first read the Bible for myself, it was through those sermons and services that I first began to seriously contemplate God and Christianity – so I am eternally grateful to the priest.
The Catholic Church, in many ways, carried me through the military. I ended up studying with a Franciscan priest while I was stationed in Louisiana at Fort Polk and entered the Catholic Church in 1991. When I was discharged in 1993, I entered seminary studies but quickly decided that a life of celibacy was never going to work for me, and I left the Roman Catholic Church for the Old Catholic Church under Utrecht that did allow for marriage among the priesthood. I was eventually ordained and would lead two small church plants in Southern California. However, while doing advanced studies that were to lead me into the episcopate, I began to question some of the historical evidences that the Catholic Church claims to hold to.
This would lead me back to studying the early Church and eventually to Orthodox theology and spirituality.
I went through a period during this time where questioning Catholicism led me to fall back to my Jewish roots and seriously explore that. I think there will always be a part of me that identifies with the Jewish people, but in a cultural context not a religious one. Unfortunately, it took me a while to understand that difference- that I could acknowledge my own Jewish roots, those childhood memories that I cherish, but not actually have to practice Judaism as a religion to honor that part of my past. I think there was some degree of legalism, both from those Jewish roots, and from my time in Catholicism, that I would struggle with for a while before really breaking free of those particular chains.
I guess my own testimony isn’t as exciting, or filled with those sudden ‘aha’ moments that so many testimonies are. I don’t recall any sudden life-changing moments, rather as I look back I see a long gradual process. But one filled with lessons, and mistakes, and more lessons. But I now stand in a place of eternal security through my relationship with Jesus Christ and all the meandering paths that led me to where I am now were worth it. I just pray that my own experiences can help me to better serve others through sharing the Good News that I get to live every day. My testimony is a tribute to that which the prophet wrote in Jeremiah 29, “You will seek Me and find me if you search for Me with all of your heart.”