How I Found Religion - or - How Religion Found Me

Rod Dreher is asking for readers to submit stories on “How I Found Religion“. Since today happens to be an anniversary date for me in that regard, I posted the following …

Kevin O’Brien says:

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September 23, 2014 at 4:13 pm

At the age of nine I saw Madeline Murray O’Hair, the famous atheist, on TV. She made perfect sense to me. I became an atheist from that point on, and was an adamant one, back in the day when this was not the fad that it is today. I stood out in my small town Missouri high school in the 1970′s, where everybody else was “Christian”, or claimed to be.

But it was my experiences on stage as an actor that began to change me. I found that no matter what I did in preparing for a role – no matter how well I knew my lines, my blocking, or how intensely I researched my character – my performance would be lifeless, lacking a certain spark, a gift of spontaneity that was not of my making. All I could do was prepare for the performance and then invite the “spirit” in. In fact, I had to lose my control and abandon my preparation in the moment of performance or else things would seem contrived and stilted.

This was tangible evidence of something beyond my own control, something quite real but spiritual. I thought of it as the “life force” as George Bernard Shaw called it. So for about fifteen years after these experiences on stage, I considered myself “spiritual but not religious”. I read the entire collected works of C. G. Jung (Freud’s disciple) and was rather awash in a Gnostic New Age worldview.

But then something happened. I was physically assaulted by a guy I was working for (I tell the whole story here), and the pain and confusion that sprang from that – plus the free time that I suddenly had on my hands – led me to start reading books from the library.

I stumbled upon C. S. Lewis, who was the first Christian I had encountered who made a clear and rational defense of the Faith, and who was a tremendously talented writer to boot. Lewis kept mentioning this guy G. K. Chesterton, whom I began to read. Chesterton kept mentioning his friend Hillaire Belloc – and once you follow that chain: Lewis to Chesterton to Belloc, the only thing left to do is to pick up a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and pray.

And in fact it was 17 years ago today – Sept. 23, 1997 – that I said my first prayer since before the age of 9, a prayer that was answered in an immediate and stunning way … but sometimes these things are too personal to describe. I’ve told the story more than once on EWTN’s “The Journey Home”, and the only thing I can add is the grace of God is utterly fantastic.