Thursday, February 7, 2019

The Gospel According to Doug


I grew up in the Congregational church, in an IBM (aka I Been Moved) and alcoholic family.  I was born in Cheyenne, Wy, the oldest of five, but we moved a lot and I would remember where we lived by where my siblings were born: LaGrange Park, Il; Kingston, NY; Kansas City, MO; Madison, WI.  We stayed a year or so in each place, as far as I remember.  After my baby sis was born, we moved to Bethesda, MD and stayed there for about seven years.  Then we moved to NY and I started high school.  The song playing on the radio was “People Are Strange”, by The Doors.

I have friends who grew up in the military, moving a lot also, but they expressed positive experiences.  I suspect they had a strong family to get the kids through the upheaval.

With an alcoholic father and an enabling mother, I had very little in the way of positive role models.  People Are Strange was the way I felt entering high school.  Disconnected, I knew no one, and most of my schoolmates had been through the school system together.

I just existed.  I had no feeling that I had any control over my life.  I saw my brother and sisters fighting with Dad when he was drunk; I did a few times also, and all I saw was the futility of it.  Nothing ever changed.

I went to school because that is what kids did.  When I could work, I worked as a custodian at our church.  I often stayed overnight there, sleeping on the sofa in the library.  It was nicer than going home.

I was president of the church youth group, but don’t ask me how I got there.  It was not a goal I had, and I was anything but a leader.

I drifted into atheism, where I stayed for 18 years.  I was a devout atheist, funny as that sounds.

I attended college for a year and a third, and then took a year off, never went back.

I progressed through a series of jobs, learning more about computers and programming.  Each new position fell in my lap, it seems.  (Now I can see it was God leading me.)

I loved programming, it was something I could get my arms around.

I wrote code.  If it broke, I could figure out where it was broken, and I fixed it.  It was wonderful to turn specs into working lines of code.

I married a woman I met in high school during an exchange concert with another high school.  When my wife wanted to have our first child baptized, I was adamant against it.  (Later, I found out she did it anyway.)  I do not remember resisting baptizing the other two.

I existed.  We existed.  We moved from an apartment, bought a house, then built a larger house. We didn’t talk about plans or goals or anything.  After all, it was all I knew growing up.  Her parents were divorced.  I figured two people coming from dysfunctional, broken homes would be able to cope.  Wrong.

After about 12 years of marriage, my wife told me she wanted a divorce.  She was seeing her boss, and they had a baby before we were divorced.  Somehow around that time I also got into an ACOA group (Adult Children of Alcoholics).  I think it was there that I started daring to think that there might be a God.

I went on a Tres Dias Weekend and for the first time in my life I felt love and acceptance.  I met a God who didn’t seem to be part of my life up to then.  (But again, looking back, I can see times that He had to have been there with me.)

But it was hard to hold onto.  I dropped away again for about 4 years.

Then I was invited to church, an ELCA Lutheran church, by the same friend who got me on that Tres Dias Weekend years before.  I immediately felt accepted.

Singing hymns brought back my love of singing from high school.

I didn’t take Communion right away, as I didn’t understand it, but Pastor told me not to worry about that, I was welcome to anyway.

So I “faked it till I made it.”  By going to the table week after week, I was able to not worry about understanding it and just enjoy it.  (I believe it was John Calvin who described Communion as something that he would rather experience than understand.)

I started reading the Bible, and I enjoyed it. I decided to read it through in a year.  Took me three years.  The next time it was about a year and seven months.  Then about seven months for the next one.  To date, I have read it through about a dozen times.

But the old tapes kept playing.  All my proofs that God didn’t exist were difficult to get away from.  Like a reflex, when I thought about God, I remembered how He could not exist.  But I was on the path, and though I might stray from it and not walk too quickly along it, I was on it.

It was a slow process.  Not only was I realizing and accepting that there was indeed a God, and that He was with me, cared for me, cried with me, I was understanding that I had some control over my life.  I could make decisions about my future, and not just exist.  I got more and more involved with my church.

I remarried, this time to an enabling woman with a son with anger issues and later drug addiction.  His father left them when he was two months old.  I was trying to be a father to my three children, while married to a woman who really did not care about anyone but her son.  I did push back enough on his behavior and her enabling that he finally entered a rehab program and got scared by some stories he heard from other residents.  I truly feel that he would have been dead without my pushing.

I kept going to church.  Taught Sunday School, attended Bible Studies, got involved with the youth group, read scripture during services, became a communion assistant.

I served on Team on many Tres Dias Weekends, and the Holy Spirit beat me upside the head numerous times, showing me something more to learn, places to grow.

My wife and I divorced after about 12 years, and I went through a real “dark night of the soul.”  That is truly how I felt.  It was a real dry time, I felt lost.

But what I found remarkable was that I never left God, never left the Church.

I was tempted, but hard as things were, how dark it all felt, I held onto my faith, and the assurance that God was there with me.  I didn’t understand why things were happening, but my faith told me it was okay if I didn’t know right now.  1 Corinthians 13 says that “we see through a glass darkly, later we will fully understand.”

God never promised a rose garden, never said life would be easy.  He just said He would stay by my side.  And more and more I saw that was true.

I lost my brother when he was a month past 21, camping accident.  This was in the early part of my atheism period.  I struggled for years whether it was truly an accident.  What happened to the plans he had for the days and weeks ahead?  It didn’t make sense.  I don’t think I truly came to terms with not knowing until after I had come back to the church and struggled with it some more.  I was able to let it go, knowing that at some point I would understand.

As hard as that was, and it was horrible, after coming back to the church, I lost three mothers-in-law, a sister-in-law to ovarian cancer, my baby sister to brain cancer, my mother to a car accident, my father to a heart attack.  And somehow it was not as horrible as dealing with my brother’s death.  I had a loving God, and the support of my ecumenical church community.  Without that, I would never have been able to deal it.

A little over four years ago I found First UCCSL.  I had been in SL since 2006.  I had attended a few churches, but never found any satisfying.  They seemed inconsistent and were usually very conservative.  Then one day I happened to see a notice in one of the Christian groups for a Psalter service at First UCC SL and started attending regularly.

I found a second home there, and find it remarkable that it was a UCC church like what I grew up in.

And as pastors are wont to do, I was asked to lead Psalters, later to be a Guide, then lead and preach occasionally in the traditional services.  I became a staff member and began to manage attendance, lector scheduling, our email and inworld notecard prayer list, etc.

I love my ELCA Lutheran church as well and have been doing more and more there.  Eucharistic ministry, our church email prayer list, Assisting Minister.  I have been assisting in a twice-a-month Christian service at a local nursing home, and often lead it when our deacon could not make it.

After I retired I had the opportunity to attend Diakonia, a two-year course of study, a pre-req for anyone interested in becoming a deacon.  I had no desire to become a deacon, I was just interested in the study.

Want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans…

On the first night of the last unit of the two years of study, Visitation, I was overwhelmed with a sense of call.  I never experienced that before, but it was unmistakable.  I wanted to continue the process and become a deacon.  I had to wait a year or so before I could continue, as our pastor retired and we had an interim pastor, but that time of waiting was good for me.  It allowed my desire to ebb and flow, so that I could discern that I did want to continue.  As of January 1, I am in the internship program to be a Synodical Deacon, serving in my church, focusing on Visitation, and Technology.  Visitation was what moved me to continue the journey to become a Deacon, and my new Pastor asked me as well to pursue the use of technology to bring the church to those who cannot make it to church due to vacation, sickness, etc.  It is going to be, and already is, fun.  I have changed our email process and am in the process of rebuilding our website.  Looking into live-streaming, smartphone apps, etc., is coming as well.

At First UCC SL, I was recently elected to the position of President of our Board.  We are planning for a presence again at General Synod this coming summer, as well as looking into webinars, classes, etc., as ways of spreading the word about our church and our ministry.

At Grace Lutheran, I am going to be a delegate at our annual Synod Convention this Spring as well as manning a table for the Diakonia program.

I have come a long way from that kid who grew up not thinking he could be an influence for anybody or control any aspect of his life, huh?

This is not any false modesty, proud humility, quiet horn-tooting, no, none of that.

I truly know that none of this would have happened if I had not come back to the Church.  I cannot point to any epiphany, any “aha!” moment when I changed from that devout atheist to who I am now.  I have heard of people who can state the date and situation when they gave their heart to God.  Not me.  My faith journey has been slow, ebb and flow, digressions and returns, sometimes speeding along, sometimes shuffling.

It has been a long journey, a wonderful journey, a hard journey, and a journey I joyfully look forward to continuing.

I am surrounded by wonderful folks, some flesh-and-blood, some avatars in the virtual space.  There have also been some not-so-wonderful folks in both realms, and I am grateful for them as well.  I am constantly amazed at how God brought them into my life, and the lessons I learned from them.  And I am more and more amazed that I am amazed.

I am grateful for real life friends who brought me back to God and to a wonderful church.  I am grateful for my “virtual” friends, for the friendships that are as strong.  And I have been blessed to meet several of them in real life and look forward to meeting more as time goes on.

I do not know when it was I saw God as an integral part of my life, but I suspect that is simply because he has been there the whole time anyway.

Grace and Peace,

Doug Bagration