My faith journey

For my practicum class, we were asked to write a "faith timeline" which chronicled the way our spiritual faith developed. Here is what I shared:

"I was born in Houston Texas in 1988 while Ronald Reagan was still President, just before George H.W. Bush was elected.

"Although I have very little memory of my life during that time period, I know that there were two things that were very important to me: one was my dance career, which began when I was three years old; the other was church, which my mother and I attended every Sunday. I started my life as a Baptist, attending Nassau Bay Baptist Church in Houston Texas. What I really remember most about that church was that my Sunday School teachers were horrified to discover that I could not color within the lines. Interestingly, this habit has turned into quite the metaphor for my own life of faith: I still refuse to color inside the lines.

"My life changed abruptly in 1992 when the company my father worked for was forced to go out of business. PoFolks restaurants across the country closed down, and my father was forced to look for new work. At the same time, the neighborhood my family lived in was declared an unsafe place to live thanks to illegal toxic dumping, so my family was left with no choice but to move.

"My father found work in what I consider to be one of the most beautiful places in America, which also turned out to be a very unique place to grow up. We moved across the state of Texas to Big Bend National Park, which is situated right on the border of Mexico, about 300 miles South by Southeast of El Paso, and 120 miles away from the closest grocery store. My father worked as an Assistant Manager at the resort and restaurant situated in the middle of the Chisos Mountains, and eventually my mother became an Interpretative Ranger. My neighborhood there was very small, and I was the only child in the particular subdivision where I lived. My school was 10 miles away, and during my entire time living in Big Bend, its maximum enrollment was 22 students in kindergarten through 8th grade.

"What did this new and unique location mean for spiritual life? Well, for one thing, the closest church was approximately 36 miles away, too far to drive on a Sunday morning. For my first few years in the park, a unique ministry organization called Christian Ministry in the National Parks sent seminary students and volunteers to run church services on Sundays for park visitors, and I managed to attend them until the organization stopped sending volunteers. Church services were held in an outdoor amphitheatre, so our altar was a mountain face. In my mind, God became indelibly linked to the eternal forces of nature. God was in the mountains and the wind and the trees, and God was in the river that slowly and patiently cut its path across the dry desert landscape. This idea of God that I developed while I lived in Big Bend is probably the strongest influence on my current faith.

"In 1998, my father was diagnosed with a type of skin cancer that affected his lymph nodes. A great tumor swelled on the side of his neck, and we were offered the opportunity to take unconditional sick leave until his cancer was under control. This was during my 5th-grade year, and we spent the second half of my second semester staying with my grandmother in Atlanta Georgia while my father sought oncological care. I transferred to an elementary school in Atlanta, and started attending my grandmother's church there. It was during my time there that I chose to be baptized, although it wasn't until a year later that I finally was. Then I was baptized in a good old Baptist fashion, dunked fully under water to the point that it felt like I was drowning, and when I was lifted up again my life was changed.

"Water became important to my understanding of God as well. Baptism is understood in many traditions as life-giving, but in the desert landscape where I grew up, water really WAS life-giving. Since my mother was a park ranger, I memorized her lecture on the dangers of dehydration: did you know that a 2% decrease in water in your body results in a 10% decrease in brain functionality? And rain was always a blessing, whether it was accompanied by raging thunderstorms and flash floods, or a slow gentle rain that was absorbed into the dry soil and nurtured the flora and fauna found there.

"My life faced a great upheaval again at the end of my 8th-grade year in 2001, when my father's company was absorbed into a larger corporation, and my dad was laid off and we were once again forced to move. This time, though, there was not much choice in our decision of where to live; my paternal grandmother was growing old, and we moved in with her in Atlanta Georgia to ensure that she received proper care and treatment. We started attending my mother's childhood church, which was United Methodist, and I was confirmed and sought refuge there most Sundays. But it wasn't the polity and doctrine that I found so welcoming and wonderful about this particular church; it was the people, and when I went away to college I found that the Methodist Church no longer held the appeal that it used to for me. I returned to my own self-enforced religion: God was in the world around me and I could find him there without the church.

"I still held certain church rituals sacred; most specifically, I embraced the wonder and mystery of the Eucharist. This may be in part because of my study of ancient Gnostic sects, some of which chose to take the Eucharist every day, and others which rejected the Eucharist entirely, and many others which fell somewhere in between. It is clear through the history of Christianity that there is something powerful about this particular ritual, and I find the same emotion fills me when I partake of God's cup.

"So what do I believe? I describe myself to non-believers as an agnostic Christian. My strongest belief is that there is very little that we can truly KNOW, but there is quite a bit that we can accept on faith, and I CHOOSE to accept the story of Christ. At the same time, I feel that God is in the world; the glory of creation is made up of God's own being, but God transcends all of it. There is innate holiness in our bodies and our minds and in the world we walk in, but God is above all of us; he transcends creation. There is something sacred in water and baptism, and again something sacred about the Eucharist."

A Meditation on Names

ce-les-tial /səˈlɛs ʧəl/
adjective

1. pertaining to the sky or visible heaven;
2. pertaining to the spiritual or invisible heaven; heavenly; divine;
3. of or pertaining to celestial navigation;
4. (initial capital letter) of or pertaining to the former Chinese Empire or the Chinese people.

noun

1. an inhabitant of heaven;
2. (initial capital letter) a citizen of the Celestial Empire.

fig¹ /fɪɡ/
noun

1. any tree or shrub belonging to the genus Ficus, of the mulberry family, esp. a small tree, F. carica, native to southwestern Asia, bearing a turbinate or pear-shaped fruit that is eaten fresh, preserved, or dried;
2. the fruit of such a tree or shrub, or of any related species;
3. any of various plants having a fruit somewhat resembling this;
4. a contemptibly trifling or worthless amount; the least bit;
5. a gesture of contempt.

tree /tri/
noun

1. a plant having a permanently woody main stem or trunk, ordinarily growing to a considerable height, and usually developing branches at some distance from the ground;
2. any of various shrubs, bushes, and plants, as the banana, resembling a tree in form and size;
11. ...the cross on which Christ was crucified.

I am beginning a journey. It is one I have wanted to begin for many years now, and I have only just reached the point in my life where I feel capable of trying. The trail that I want to hike leads not to some blissful meadow, or stunning mountain peak; it leads instead to a friendship, a relationship, a communion. I have been called to know Christ.

I have been a Christian all my life, though I have never been particularly religious. Church was not a large part of my childhood. I came to know God in other ways, mostly through living in a beautifully isolated mountain region in the desert of West Texas. So to me, religion is a historical thing that I study, while God is something I experience.

Now that I have graduated from Rice University, I am pursuing a Master of Divinity degree at Yale Divinity School, where I have already experienced God in different ways. I never before understood the importance of being grounded in a Christian community, but now I have experienced it. There is nothing quite as remarkable as being able to study in a place where everyone around you seems to know God, even if they experience him in different ways.

So I have decided to (try to) keep this blog as a record of my personal growth through my years at YDS. And, being the person that I am, the name I chose for it was of the utmost importance. So here is a little bit of the thought process behind the name I chose:

While I was still in my mother's womb, my parents spent a very long time in the process of picking out names. They both had ideas for names they liked, which often conflicted. My mom liked long, flowery names, while my father liked simple, short names. Eventually they came to choose Katelyn. My middle name, on the other hand, was harder to pick, and they first encountered the name I was given while browsing a nursery, where they found a Celeste fig tree. They liked the name, and debated it for a little while. The fact that it was the same as my aunt's first name sealed the deal, and my name became Katelyn Celeste.

I have always loved that in some way, I was named after a tree, but I never really thought about the significance of the tree. The name Celeste, I have always known, meant "heavenly". But what I did not know was that figs were used as a symbol for peace and prosperity in the Bible (1 Kings 4:25; Micah 4:4; Zech. 3:10). Trees are symbolic as well: they represent growth, life, and more obscurely, rebirth, through the crucifixion of the Christ.

At heart, I am a tree-hugging, Christian girl, and I know that I am always striving to be better than I currently am. To me, the Celeste fig tree is a symbol of the kind of growth I am pursuing. My journey: peacefully heaven-bound.