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The Pain of Conversion

I do not consider myself a born-again. How could I be? I was never religious. I came from a Catholic family and I was the only one who wasn't Catholic. And everyone knew it. The story goes like this: my family did not attend church every weekend, especially near the time that I was born. When they went to baptize me, the Father of their church refused. They hadn't been as devoted to the churchgoing process as they should have been. That's when my immediate family officially became lapsed Catholics. What about me? Well, I was left to be nothing. No denomination, no legacy of sacred teachings to be passed on. It was up to me to find out.

I grew up knowing that I wasn't Catholic like my brother and my parents. Everyone told me. I didn't have first communion or any of those things a few of my friends were going through. I learned to live with it. No one bothered me about it until I came to college. It's not like I was go to St. Joseph's or anything. I went to a public university. But hours after I had settled into my six feet of dorm room space, I had two or three neighbors come up to me to introduce themselves.
I'm sure it's not as bad as I remember it to be, but in my memory it went something like this: "Hi. Nice to meet you. Are you Christian?" At first I wasn't sure how to answer. But as the first few days of college freedom flew by, I kept getting that question. To answer, I would try to tell them that I might be Catholic, my family is, but I was never baptized. They looked at me strange. "But do you believe in God?" I didn't know. No one had really ever asked me before. I told them I didn't know and then that's when they really got going. They (even if they were newbies who knew nothing about campus life) told me about every religious organization on campus and that I should come to Bible study with them. I told them I didn't have a Bible. They didn't want to give up on me though. They thought it was their mission to turn me into a good Christian woman.
I had a neighbor across the hall that would like to hang out with me and slowly inject Christianity into our conversations. Once she began to argue a point with a religious reference I didn't know, she used it to get me to study the religion. I explained to her many times that I wanted to know about all religions before choosing. I compared it to shopping for a car. I wanted something that was rightnot too flashy, and not something that's going to rust away in the winter.
Needless to say, I spent my whole freshman year looking out for the perfect religion to fit my life. I needed something that wouldn't change me or my values that had already been established by just living life in America for nineteen years. At this point, Buddhism began looking very appealing to me. It seemed to fit with my lifestyle.
At the end of my freshman year I hit quite a few bumps in the road. I became deeply depressed and couldn't shake it. Once I began practicing Buddhism, I realized that nothing changed. I was still depressed.
I kept at it. I didn't want to believe the religion that I had shopped around to get for so long to fail me like this. But then I really started studying the religion. My depression vanished. It wasn't the religion that did it, necessarily, but it was the change in attitude that Buddhism had taught me. They are just feelings. I needed to be aware of them, but I didn't have to fall into the trap of permanence. Nothing is permanent. It was the firstand most importantlesson that I have learned so far. I'm still learning my way through Buddhism, but it's one of the few good choices that I have made in my life. And I can't wait to see where it's going to take me.

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