My friend Bill Tammeus (locate his excellent blog on the list to the right) recently published his latest book, The Value of Doubt: Why Unanswered Questions, Not Unquestioned Answers, Build Faith. One chapter is titled “Does it help to compare religions?” He presents several possible views, including the oft-heard opinion that goes something like this: “All religions boil down to the Golden Rule.” Check out the rest of Bill’s discussion when you purchase his book Here.

My mind leaps immediately to the personal. Am I a Christian because I carefully researched a number of pretty good religions and picked the one I thought was the best? I’ve probably had more opportunity than most people to do just that.

As the daughter of a preacher’s kid, I was literally grandfathered into the Christian faith right from the cradle. Growing up in a military family, I lived in cultures as diverse as Japan, Libya, Spain, and Long Island. We worshiped in a number of churches of the Protestant persuasion, including Dutch Reformed, Methodist, non-denominational, and Presbyterian. We rubbed shoulders with Roman Catholics, Southern Baptists, Episcopalians, and Pentecostals. I didn’t know many Jewish people until I became an adult, but I made up for lost time by falling in love with a Jewish man. I scrambled to learn how I could embrace both his Jewishness and his professed atheism. I couldn’t. And that ended that. However, the excursion into atheism was possibly the richest religious learning experience of all. But that’s another story. For more than fifty years, I have worshiped, studied, served, and doubted as a Presbyterian.

As a docent at the art museum, I’ve added Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Islam to the list of religions or traditions about which I know a little. I respect and value the practice of religion as a path to beauty, meaning, and goodness.

With so many possibilities, it would take more than one lifetime to dabble around in religions until you settled on the best one. So I have arrived at this opinion: You don’t pick your religion. Your religion picks you. Or not.

When your religion, your true faith, comes along, it grabs you and doesn’t let you go. It’s irresistible. Maybe it’s like falling in love. You make a commitment and live ever after with the surprises that follow–doubt, disappointment, ecstasy, enlightenment all rolling along together.

Some people don’t find love. Some people don’t find religion. I don’t know why. What you expect, what you seek, what you yearn for–these things matter. What you got born into probably has something to do with it, too.

Here’s a hymn that says it all for me.
 

O LOVE THAT WILT NOT LET ME GO
 
O Love that wilt not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
that in thine ocean depths its flow
may richer, fuller be.
 
O Light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to thee;
my heart restores its borrowed ray,
that in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
may brighter, fairer be.
 
O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow thru the rain,
and feel the promise is not vain
that morn shall tearless be.
 
O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
and from the ground there blossoms red
life that shall endless be.
 
 
George Matheson, 1842-1906