I was not raised in a home where God was absent. I was raised in a home where God was present in all the wrong ways.
The movement my parents followed taught that you could access the divine through ritual, through certain teachers, through the right alignment of inner states. It was not nihilism — it was sincere. That sincerity is what made it effective.
By the time I was in my twenties I had walked out of that world and into a harder one: genuine atheism. Not the performative kind, the kind you wear at parties. The kind where you have actually thought it through and concluded there is no one there.
Seventeen years ago that changed. I will not try to summarize it here. What I want to describe is what came after.
Learning to pray with borrowed words
When you come to faith out of a background like mine, prayer is not obvious. The habits of the New Age still attach to the act — the sense that the words you choose carry some intrinsic power, that sincerity of feeling is the point, that the interior state is the real thing.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism helped break that. Not by teaching me the right words, exactly. By teaching me that the words exist to point somewhere. That the act of prayer is not the manipulation of a system but the address of a person.
I still forget this. But now I have words to return to when I do.