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Jung at heart: when I no longer believed in the fundamentalist God of my childhood, the spiritualism of a Swiss psychiatrist helped me rediscover my faith. (on Faith).

Article Excerpt
FOR SOME PEOPLE, RELIGION SATISFIES THEIR SEARCH for faith. For others, religion is only the beginning of the search. I discovered this distinction ten years ago, when I lost faith in the fundamentalist religion that I grew up with. Of all the losses that I have experienced, the loss of my faith in the God of my childhood caused the most pain. I was born into religious fundamentalism, and for a long time, it was the lens through which I viewed the world. To people who have never experienced the certainty of fundamentalism, that may sound hard to believe, even silly. But try to imagine waking up day after day knowing that no matter what happens--no matter how bad things get--you have the promise that God is on your side.

I carry that promise in my DNA. It was my inheritance--my father was a Southern Baptist minister of music in several small churches in the Piney Woods north of Houston--but fundamentalism was never my choice. As a child, I was religious by nature and temperament; I played church the way other gifts played dolls. When I was seven, during a revival in Pasadena, I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior and was baptized. For years my imagination was fired by the same image of God that Alice Walker described in the novel The Color Purple, the God who was "big and old and tall and graybearded and white." To me, the Bible was sheer poetry. I loved its stories and images and was consoled by the...

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