When Keely Met Jesus

A month or so ago, the gentleman who pronounced a curse on me asked -- rhetorically, I'm sure, and with obvious anger -- why I don't just write about things like what my church is doing, or how I came to Jesus. I'm afraid that in the ensuing flap, the question of how I became a Christian got lost, and so I'd like to offer that story now.

First, though, some definitions. I know that many of my readers are devotees of Doug Wilson, Steve Wilkins, and their Federal Vision theology, through which, basically, "election" -- God's decree of who will be saved and who won't, sometimes referred to as "predestination" -- is viewed through the covenant, the relational agreement between God and His people. This is in opposition to the typical evangelical, or, as the FV'ers would derisively say, "revivalistic," viewing of "covenant" through the framework of individual election or regeneration. It may seem like a petty difference, or one merely of semantics, but one of the many objections I have to the Federal Vision is its unbalanced emphasis on covenant membership and its unbiblical reliance on the salvific benefits of baptism, a doctrine called "baptismal regeneration." I do not believe in baptismal regeneration, nor do I believe that one "becomes" a Christian through baptism, upon which his or her membership in the covenant is his or hers to lose through apostasy. I was baptized as an infant in the Roman Catholic church, and it means as much to me now as it did then -- which is to say, absolutely nothing, apart from the sentimental value I see at 48 that I couldn't, obviously, see at four months.

So, in contrast to those FV'ers who would say that I became a Christian, a member of the covenant, at my baptism, I will say that I was simply born into a nominally Catholic, largely secular, Jesus-as-most-liberal-Democrat family, and was not a Christian at all until 1981. I wasn't a member of the covenant family of God, and I wasn't transformed at my baptism or at my confirmation, at age 12, when I smacked Susan Mary Wittkowski for picking the saint name, Veronica, that I had wanted. (I ended up with St. Angela of Merici, Saint Day June 22, and she didn't have the stigmata, die a martyr, or have visions like St. Veronica, although I later found out that Veronica was very sickly, which means Angela probably could've taken her easily). I was vaguely christian-ish, in the same way that most Anglo Americans are, which often becomes, to them and to others, a default designation of faith arrived at simply by not being Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, or anything else. Undeniably, the patient grace of the Lord Jesus accompanied me throughout my life, but the rituals of my childhood had much more of an effect on those around me than they did on me.

Having, then, grown up in a household wherein I learned basic civic virtues and a fair dose of Catholic doctrine, I was a pretty good girl even through high school. I even wanted, at one point, before I met the altar boy who would become my first boyfriend, to be a nun -- that was when all nuns, it seemed, were guitar-playing, pantsuit-wearing, basketball-playing social activists with free housing. Given that my family's religious expression was nearly identical to that of Liberal Democratic politics, growing up Catholic in the post-Vatican II 70s proved remarkably free of any kind of moral restrictions I was likely to push against, with more opportunities for engaging in social activism than my friend Becky's stuffy, conservative Baptist Church.

But living in such a heavily political, largely secular household swirling with get-out-the-vote activities every year around my November 2 birthday, spending many Christmases protesting the Vietnam War at the Air Force Base, and boycotting grapes, lettuce, and Gallo wine, while a blessing of consciousness-raising, had its drawbacks. It would not be too far off, I think, to suggest that conservatives and Republicans were demonized in my family, and religious conservatism treated with the kind of wan patience you demonstrate in the second hour of someone's vacation pictures slideshow. We were not allowed to be rude, but it was clear that "that sort of thing" wasn't for us, and when those "Bible types" got involved in politics, the gloves came off. This was during the war, Watergate, the civil rights era, and the dawning of feminism, and I thank God for my parents' involvement in working for civil rights and against discrimination and corruption. My neighborhood was about one-third Black, one-third Anglo, and one-third Mexican-American; there was no need to study civil rights somewhere else, because people in our own area, my parents' friends, were regularly subject to the kind of treatment and oppression most evangelicals, finally, have objected to but tolerated, even practiced, earlier. That was the case in the 60s and 70s in Southern Arizona, and I appreciate my folks' passion for social justice, even when that passion turned into derision for those religious "Bible" people who, frankly, deserved every bit of it. I saw enormous need for righteousness and action, and I didn't see any Christian participation in bringing it about. Too often, I saw believers enjoying the benefits of the very things my parents and I fought against.

I came to believe, then, that all discrimination, injustice, oppression, violence, and bigotry came from the dreaded state of being more conservative than I was. I truly believed that Republicans were the cause of the social evils that kept my parents so busy at meetings and kept their friends so profoundly affected every day of their lives. I loathed "born-again" types who told racist jokes about my friends, or played "Smear the Queer" on the playground after pressing some hideous Jack Chick tract into my hand as recess started. And when the "born-agains" joined forces with the GOP, the evil of social apathy turned into the roar of conscious, cultural, legislative bigotry, fed by faith in a God who, I thought, must not be aware of how His followers were acting. Or, for that matter, treating me.

By college I was angry. I was angry about things other people called "politics," but to me were intensely and personally intolerable. I hated those people who legislated injustice, and I hated those people who, in the name of Christ, gave them comfort and support. I saw too many of my friends die early from violence, too many ensnared in drugs, and too many women walking in fear, ravaged by abuse and rape. I hated people who were mean, and I really hated people who were mean to me. They were usually people who called themselves Christians, and they objected, and objected unlovingly and enthusiastically, to my hippie clothes, my liberal beliefs, and my offbeat friends. Reverend Jed, the roving maniacal campus evangelist, was only the most blatant -- he once, on the University of Arizona mall, screamed that I and my friends were "sluts of Satan" -- but other, more respectable, Christians were mean-spirited, hard-hearted, and terribly, obsessively concerned with leading lives free of sin. Which, of course, meant leading lives free of contact with sinners, of whom I was a prime and prolific example.

Mary, a rock-ribbed Republican involved in the Navigators, one of the more conservative Christian ministries on campus, was God's unlikely choice to bring me to Him. During one of my periodic harangues, she looked me in the eye and said, "OK, let's grant that everyone 'out there,' everyone who's too conservative and who's hurt you and who's polluted society with injustice, really is deserving of your contempt. But tell me -- now -- what you think you have against Jesus."

I fell apart. Or, rather, I came together.

I realized that "they" weren't Him. I realized, too, that I not only had "nothing against" Jesus Christ, but that He had everything against me -- and loved me anyway. I knew that I was looking Him in the eye, broken, bitter, and hateful, and that if I didn't respond to Him right then, if I tried to blame Him for all of the evils I had suffered and all of the horror others around me had seen, I would die. Not just physically, and not immediately, but that I would miss life, and lose it. I fell to my knees and asked Him to love me and to show me love and to heal all of the broken things, and I knew I had found my home in Him.

I was angry at everything; I might have even had reason to. But He had never hurt me, and only He could show me anything different. It's been 27 1/2 years. In that time, I've both sinned and been sanctified. I've been hurt, healed, hurt again, and I've hurt others. My Lord is sufficient in it all, and stripping it all away -- the bigotry of others, the violence I'd encountered, the losses I'd seen around me -- brought me to the One who loved me, and it made all the difference.

That's why I love, and that's why I preach, and that's why the harm we Christians often do matters so very much. I nearly perished. May I never give anyone, anywhere, reason to feel driven away from her Savior, and may I fight 'til my death those who make my Savior to be anything less than perfect love and perfect life.