In order to give a detailed account of my conversion
I think I should write first about my family. My parents come from two
different religious backgrounds: my father is a nominal Roman Catholic,
and my mother comes from a family with an Evangelical tradition that
goes back 4 generations now. The story goes that one time my mother
asked my father what kind of religious education they would give their
children, and his answer was that they would worry about that later...
until it was too late.
When we were little kids our parents used to take us
to either the nearest Roman Catholic Church, or the Evangelical
(Presbyterian) Church my mother's family attended. Even at that age we
sensed something different about both places: the buildings, the
rituals performed, the music we heard and sang, the strange rites, and
probably to some extent, the words we heard. I remember we had the
Bible at home (a gift from my mother's family) and when I was probably
12 or 13 years old I began reading some parts of it. There I learned
why some of the things they did in the Catholic Church were not quite
right, and so we grew up more attached to my mother's faith, although
we never received any formal religious education at home. I remember
one of my mother's sisters was specially worried about this, and she
gave me my first Bible when I was in 8th grade. I used to read the
Proverbs and Ecclesiastes more than any other book because it seemed I
could apply the things I learned there for my everyday life, but that
was it. I honestly cannot remember having heard about Jesus, not even
at Bible school in the summer, so I grew up with a faint idea of who He
was (but then again, my memory fails).
When I was in junior high, I already had a mind of
my own, shaped after all the formal education I received at school,
plus the books I used to read at home, mostly science-fiction. Then I
began to conceptualize God in my own terms. I did not even want to call
Him "God" because I did not know for certain who He was. Probably He
was just a higher intelligence or even a machine of some kind, but the
idea of a omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent spiritual being was
far away from my "scientific" knowledge at that time. Then came the day
when I refused to go to church anymore. Of course both my parents were
upset at my sudden change of mind, and they probably thought this could
be just one of those "phases" teenagers go through, and that it would
pass soon. When they realized I was serious about this, they began
struggling to take me to some other church I might find more appealing,
even if that meant tricking me into thinking we were going somewhere
else. They took me to a small Baptist congregation the first time,
which I did not like at all, but the second time I did not fall into
the trap. The moment I saw dad parking the car in front of a big white
building bearing all the signs of a temple, I refused to step out of
the car and I stood my ground. I said I would never go into a church
again, and so I managed to stay away from those places from then on. Of
course when we were invited to celebrate some sort of ritual like a
wedding or baptism of a new member of the family I had to yield, and
for a couple of hours I tried to please everybody.
The fact that I seldom stepped into a church did not
mean I had stopped believing in that superior intelligence out there,
in a certain being that had something to do with this world but
probably just as creator, not someone directly involved in the lives of
human beings. My memory fails at this point, but I could affirm I never
reached the point of declaring myself as an atheist, not even in my
most rebellious days. It seems almost comical that sometimes when
people talked about religion and rituals from the Roman Catholic
Church, I used to take pride in the fact that I was not part of that. I
felt like I had been educated in a different world, and probably a
couple of times I proudly declared myself to be a "protestant", just to
shock those around me.
As a teenager I used to question everything, and the
answers should be provided in terms of scientific facts. I needed
scientific proof to believe something was true. This was a direct
result of my formal education and the science-fiction books I read at
the time. I cannot remember how this position was in agreement with the
fact that I still believed in that superior being that lived outside
our universe. Probably I had to deny or at least doubt the existence of
God on certain occasions just to make some scientific statement that
otherwise would not appeal to reason and logic.
