For Susan

This post is for Susan, my coworker in California who expressed interest in my conversion to Mormonism. It occurred to me that I could share the text of an article I wrote on this topic for one of my college's monthly magazines in 2002. Susan's a brilliant writer(!), which made me want to clean this up a little bit. So here's truncated and slightly edited version of the original piece:

Diverging from a Catholic Upbringing
How an Amherst student found redemption in converting to Mormonism

I grew up in a family of seasonal Catholics. That meant that Mass was compulsory for me and my siblings every Sunday morning in fall, winter, and spring, and that our church was too old to have air-conditioning in the summer. Ever year we had a season's vacation from God, to sleep in on Sundays and recuperate from nine months of religious devotion.

My father was a seasonal Catholic, and my mother wasn't Catholic at all; she'd grown up in a family of year-round Congregationalists and was shopping for a new church when I was a kid. If you've never done it, shopping for a church is like shopping for a car: you choose a dealership, take a short test drive, and then let yourself be courted by the dealer. In this fashion, my mother tried out several churches of the Protestant persuasion, occasionally with me or the other children in tow. Her only lasting flirtation was with an Episcopal church, because the paster there often quoted T.S. Eliot and my mother liked that. I also grew fond of this church, principally on the strength of upbeat songs like "I've got the joy joy joy joy down in my heart" and a fantastic nativity play. But when Mr. T.S. Eliot packed up and moved to Virginia, no amount of pleading could prevent her from returning to her church shopping.

Despite my mother's waverings, my siblings and I were cultivated into casual Catholics, with a routine that was generally the same: we went to mass with our father, knelt when we were supposed to kneel, stood when we were supposed to stand, and put quarters into the collection basket when dollars would have been preferred.
By the time I was eight, my mother had found the town's mormon church, which she considered joining, and which we occasionally attended with her. To a young critic of religions, the choice of Mormonism was a terrible error in judgment. Not only did the church service last two hours longer than the Catholic one, it also didn't have coffee and doughnuts afterward. To me, such considerations were the chief selling points of any church; the doctrinal differences often ran together in a haze. In the religion of my childhood, I believed in Santa Claus, but Jesus was a vague, contradictory figure.

By my sophomore year of high school, when I was supposed to be confirmed into the Catholic church, I knew that I lived in a house where the Gods of my parents were irreconcilably different. I grew up in a house of many religions, and it was paradoxical to me that somehow my parents expected that I would become Catholic. When I told my father that I couldn't be confirmed, I hid behind my parents' religious difference, feigning confusion when what I really wanted was to step back from religion entirely.

I'm not sure why, but that year, as I doubted the existence of God, I began to pray. That's one thing you learn to do when you visit all kinds of churches as a kid: you learn to pray kneeling, sitting, sitting; hands folded or clutching a rosary; eyes open or closed; extempore or memorized. I was an expert in prayer without having ever prayed myself in any genuine sense. I obediently and emptily joined in the recited prayers that were required in Catholic CCD, but in private and of my own volition, I never prayed. Prayers sounded unnatural and insincere in my voice. My father told me he prayed all the time, but I doubted the truth of that without ever inquiring quite what he meant. I had never heard my father pray, except standing beside him in mass.

On the other hand, as I entered high school I began to hear my mother pray at least once a day. She'd pray that we would be safe driving in the snow, that my brother's sniffles would get better, that I would be able to remember everything I sudied when I took my Latin test the next day. She prayed about everything, and no matter how trivial the thoughts expressed, the prayers sounded reverent and genuine. As an experiment, I started to pray the way my mother prayed. I prayed, and I asked for things: grades, babysitting jobs, college admissions offers.

My prayers soon became more complex. I prayed about things I was thankful for and discovered that I really appreciated my family, my piano, my teachers. I prayed that I would know if there was a God, and if there was a church I should go to.

I found my faith that year, accidentally, even unwillingly; I decided to become Mormon, knowing that for myself no more church shopping was needed. A religious conversion is an elusive process, and for me it happened in glimmers. It was the summation of many individual moments over several months -- moments in prayer, in study, and in talking with people about faith -- that made Mormonism feel right. The sensation in these moments is like the one I get now when I'm struggling with a paper at two in the morning and all of a sudden a great idea comes to me: a sensation of excitement, relief, peace. I got this feeling sometimes when I prayed, when I read the Bible or the Book of Mormon, when I went to church. I think of these moments as musical: they evoke the feeling that runs through my body when I play my favorite Chopin nocturnes on the piano. Perhaps something resonates within you when you perceive truth -- in music, in literature, in religion -- a kind of emotional and physiological response. I followed my instinct and joined a church that I had once regarded as strange, but that had become a powerful source of guidance for how to live my life most happily.

Right before leaving for college, I was baptized a Mormon. It was a turbulent decision that meant I wouldn't be like my father, and that I would no longer stand next to him in Mass and listen to him recite prayers. I regret my father's disappointment, but I've come to appreciate the lessons learned from growing up in a house of many religions. My home was a gentle preparation for the world, with its religious discord and many Gods.