Conversions of a spiritual orphan: a young woman winds her way down a path to faith and understanding.

Because my mother and I nearly died during my birth, everything goes back to this beginning. While middle-aged men and women might wake up one day to cancer or heart disease and are shaken out of their self-centered worlds to rethink the meaning of life, I was given this gift at an early age. Out of near-death came great life, and I had no choice but to believe in something sacred beyond my own experience.

Despite our medical miracle, my parents chose not to baptize me and to let me find my own way. I became a naturally curious questioner. Some of my earliest memories are of trying to figure out faith because I felt such a spiritual sense within. Childhood brought Baptist Bible camp, Lutheran religious classes, and several Sunday schools.

Later I set out on a spiritual search of sorts--studying various traditions despite my undeveloped intellect, striking up conversations with church leaders, and attending worship with anyone kind enough to offer. Religion was rarely discussed in my family, and yet I inherited an insatiable longing to make meaning out of everything I encountered.

I often felt like a spiritual orphan, left alone to answer life's great questions, wandering the world in search of something, not knowing where I was headed or whether I'd ever get there. Fortunately, at 17, I began to find my answers in Baptism and Confirmation into the Roman Catholic Church and through studying theology as an undergraduate.

So I write as a woman who was given an almost unfathomable gift of life over death and who seeks to make sense of that gift. I write as a woman who was raised without religion and who studies theology in the hope of creating companionship throughout her journey. And I write as a woman who converted to Catholicism five years ago, but who now questions that conversion.

I question it because I often wonder whether I was so tired of being alone, of being a spiritual orphan, that I simply leaped at the easiest opportunity to belong. But then again, why does anyone join a faith tradition? Why does anyone seek to make sense of the senseless? Why does anyone want to become a part of something greater than themselves?

We all find solace in the spirit of community, and when we are welcomed, we will keep coming back. We all long to play a part in some story, and in so doing, we are drawn out of ourselves in a life-sustaining way that reveals hidden humanity. This discovery is what we live for.

Madeleine L'Engle writes: "Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith, faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically."

I also question my conversion because sometimes the doctrines feel overwhelming and faith seems far away. Like other young believers/seekers, I struggle in having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, in understanding the seven sacraments, and in finding my way in such a pluralistic society. But I have attempted to continue the conversation of conversion through traditional spiritual disciplines practiced in a somewhat nontraditional way--through prayer, study, service, and people.

Prayer: I can't help myself

Maybe I have been left out of some secret that all spiritual people share, but I have absolutely no idea how to pray. I do not want to offer self-absorbed requests and requirements, but I cannot focus only on others at all times.

I do not know whether I am to utter lines from famous saints or succumb to whatever words arise in me. I do not know how to be present, how to praise the Lord, or how to keep communion. Can you be taught such things? Is there any one way to pray? I doubt there is.

But I will never forget the inspiring words of the great Christian writer C. S. Lewis: "If I stopped praying, I think I'd stop living. I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God. It changes me."

The first time I read this, I was not sure whether there was anything that I felt so strongly about. But then I realized that the way Lewis felt about prayer is the way I feel about writing. I write because I can't help myself, because the need flows out of me, and because I do not think I would be alive in the fullest sense if I did not do that which I so love.

When I write, I catch glimpses of self, other, and something sacred. Such glimpses are not just a gift from God but also a gift back to God in the only way I know how to pray.

Annie Dillard asks, "Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?"

Because writing is about making meaning, it is essential to my spirituality. My writing, my practice of prayer, is an attempt to create what Dillard deems "beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed."

Study: Seeking questions

In her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God (Perennial Classics), Zora Neale Hurston writes: "There are years that ask questions and years that answer." Like most lives mine has been filled with age-old, yet ever-present, tensions and questions. And like Hurston and her heroine, Janie Mae Crawford, I am a young woman on a search for self and God, asking cathartic questions and believing wholeheartedly in eschatological answers.

When I came to college, I chose theology as my major for two reasons. First, because it best fit an interest sparked long ago. If theology, as Saint Anselm claimed, is "faith seeking understanding," then I have been at it my entire life, for I have always had some spirituality-seeking sense. Second, and perhaps most importantly, because theology is all about questions it is therefore instrumental to cultivating spirituality.

I have studied so much within this discipline--from the history of Christianity to Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. I have entered into dialogue to the best of my ability with Saint Augustine, Thomas Merton, Oscar Romero, and Dorothy Day. I have scrutinized scripture, struggled with Christology, and fallen in love with the Kingdom of God. And I am completing a master's degree in the hope of one day teaching theology to anxious young students. The study of theology has been a wonderful way for me to integrate questions of spirituality in my life. I have learned so much--and yet there is so much more to learn.

I believe that we are called to live these years that ask questions in anticipation of a year that has not yet answered. The answers will come at some other time in some other way. Life is obviously too short a time to give us all the answers to all the questions, but it is long enough to let us try. And it's in the trying that I truly live.

Service: Something more

I have discovered through several service projects that I am deeply interested in the way "God talk" enters "street work." Writing and theology are not enough for me, and I long to do something more. That something more has come through work with the homeless and through other activities. I have come to believe that the time to work toward the realm of God is now. That is what I am trying to do.

In my first encounters with homelessness, unemployment, addiction, abuse, and environmental degradation, I was overwhelmed by the world in which we live, and I didn't know where to begin. I have found, however, that there is a mutual relationship between spirituality and service. You can't have one without the other.

While a sense of spirituality is often the reason we want to work toward a better world, our spiritual roots and resources also sustain us in such work. If we and God work together in this world for peace and justice, perhaps there is hope for humanity. In my own life, I like to think that God needs me, but I also know that I need God.

People: My own sacraments

Catholicism is a religion of sacraments. As I questioned my own Baptism and Confirmation, I also have many questions about the other sacraments.

For example, I don't understand the exclusive sacrament of Holy Orders in my tradition. Also, my studies about early Christianity and the historical Jesus have left me sometimes skeptical about the role of Reconciliation and the centrality of the Eucharist in Catholic life. And I must admit I have never thought much about the sacraments of Matrimony or Anointing of the Sick.

I hope to believe deeply in all the sacraments someday, but until I do, I must turn to those signs of this world that resonate with me the most. There are sacraments in my life, but they are often offered through ordinary and extraordinary human beings.

When I said that my parents raised me without religion, abandoning me to my modest musings, making me an orphan of spirituality, this was not entirely true.

When I watch my father walk in the woods, when my mother embraces me, when I listen to my sister sing, and when I am surrounded by the people who know and love me the most, my spirituality is suddenly sacramentalized. I find God in the midst of my world, and I am no longer alone.

Spiritual sacraments are at our disposal at all times--through those with whom we are close and those we have never known. We must learn to take an honest and heart-felt look at the world through the eyes of the suffering homeless stranger on the street, and we must also notice the grace of our own immediate families for the first time. After all, it is these revelations that alter our lives, the way all good sacraments should.

So, what does all of this mean? We live in a world where consumerism controls, where power is privileged more than service, where weapons seem more sacred than words. It is no wonder today that many young people are skeptical about religion, faith, and spirituality. As Douglas Coupland points out in his novel Life After God (Pocket Books), many people have the modern mentality that they are beyond God. Lots of us don't even want to accept help from our next-door neighbor, let alone from an ethereal existence that lives in another world.

We are orphans of spirituality because none of the old illusions will work for us anymore. Our world is too technologically advanced for us to believe that we cannot control our own destinies, and we continue to stagger on an eschatological edge between hope and heartbreak.

How are we to foster faith when reason rules? How are we to imagine the other when we can't get beyond ourselves? And how are we to seek the way the world ought to be in the midst of the way the world is? After asking these questions, I think that I am an awfully lucky individual.

I am lucky because I have managed to find some meaning in a seemingly meaningless world. I am lucky because the memory of my beginning propels me in my search for spirituality. I am lucky because I have at last found some spiritual family--through mothers and mentors, fathers and friends, sisters and strangers.

I am sure some people would shudder at hearing me recount my conversion to Catholicism, and I wonder as well whether it is authentic. But whether my adherence to tradition is unconditional and complete, whether my interpretation of the faith is absolutely accurate, whether my spiritual disciplines follow a previous path, I am being converted. For conversion is not just a one-time test; it is a constant and continual creation of a way to be in the world.

In the postscript to her spiritual autobiography The Long Loneliness (Harper SanFrancisco), Dorothy Day writes that the Catholic Worker movement "just sort of happened." Dorothy and her friends "were just sitting there talking" when people asked for bread or clothing or shelter or, in a greater sense, for a new humanity. She concluded that while it "just happened," it is still going on. This is what conversion means to me.

People often ask me to describe my conversion to Catholicism, and I really can't articulate it as well as I would like. For far too long I had wondered about the world of religion, and maybe I sort of fell into Catholicism the way some people fall into their lifelong careers.

My conversion was not some great awakening or all-encompassing epiphany. Instead, it just sort of happened. It happened through falling away from faith and finding the way back again and again. It happened through encountering the evidence in a seemingly sad way and re-envisioning it in hopes of balance, not burnout. It happened by entering into the place of my pain (disappointment and despair at the world) and turning toward the hope of my heart--my spiritual practices of prayer, study, service, and sacraments through people.

And despite all that has happened, it is still going on.

This article is excerpted with permission from God Within: Our Spiritual Future--As Told by Today's New Adults ([c] 2001 Skylight Paths Publishing, Woodstock, VT). To order, call 800-962-4544 or visit www.skylightpaths.com.

By ARLENE HELDERMAN, who is completing a master's degree in theological studies at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.