I never, ever dreamed I would become a “person of faith.” My secular atheist childhood offered me no God, no church, no temple, no prayers, no heaven, no hell. It was like living in the song “Imagine,” but without Yoko Ono. Although we had lovely Christmas trees and all the trimmings, there was no God but Santa, and Rudolph was his messenger.
When I say we were atheists, I mean it. My mother kept a folder in her desk labeled “Religion.” She used it to store newspaper articles about church buses filled with pilgrims plummeting off cliffs. She would shake her head as she filed yet another clipping about missionaries raped and murdered by natives. The “why do bad things happen to good people” argument was her bedrock belief. “Why do little kids get brain cancer? What kind of God lets that happen? He wants it to?”
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