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Finding the Answer
By Jennifer Schwirzer
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| Jennifer Schwirzer |
I was born into a fairly classic middle-class American family. Memories include such wholesome activities as tobogganing with my dad and brothers, picking raspberries at my nice neighbor lady’s house and singing in the children’s choir at church. Mom was stay-at-home, nice to us, and pretty. Dad was hard-working, fun to be around, and strong. There was no sexual abuse, physical abuse, or even divorce. I should be entirely unscathed.
But I’m not. As I started to surface out of my dream-like childhood into adolescence, I noticed an unnamed angst inside. I now have a label for it—alienation from God—but then I thought it was something more individualized than the fallen condition I shared with the rest of the human race. Right around this time my dad was transferred to Milwaukee, Wisconsin from Aurora, Ohio. The more cosmopolitan culture of Milwaukee caused my small-town head to swirl. For the first time in my life I experienced social rejection and the overwhelming shyness that came along with it. At one point I was abused on the playground by a group of kids. That failure on the part of human beings increased the size of the “God-shaped hole” in my heart.
When I finally made friends, they were pretty racey types. One friend and I started smoking and accidentally burned her house down. The load of guilt that came from that experience drove me to seek more escape options, which were readily available for a teen in the drug-and-free-love ridden culture of the 70s.
I entered high school at exactly the point when my best friend moved away. This made me a lonely kid again, swimming in a sea of people. Nicolet High was a big sea of 2,500 kids. There were three main cliques: greasers, who greased their hair back and drove jacked-up cars, jocks, who pursued athletics and scholastic achievement, and freaks, who experimented with drugs, wore long hair, and flunked classes as a sign of rebellion. I didn’t fit neatly into any group, but I defaulted to the freaks when I met Rick, a handsome young pot-smoker with a ready laugh.
Rick and I had a three-year relationship, all total. This was eternity by high school standards. My young heart was pretty worked over in the process of falling in love, breaking up, falling in love again, and breaking up again. That’s how it went. The first time he dumped me, the second time I dumped him. As much as it appears to be, it wasn’t revenge. I truly lost interest.
Part of the reason for this was my increased interest in spiritual things. I began to attend various religious events—mostly things that had to do with Hinduism or Buddhism. I decided that the nominal Christianity I’d been raised with would never deliver “the answer.” I have a curvature of the spine and was encouraged by my doctor to do Yoga exercises. This led to a series of books read and lessons attended, which ultimately resulted in a belief in the doctrine of karma and reincarnation. I began to believe that the angst inside of me was just my karma—soul-baggage accumulated through centuries of existence in other life forms—and my mission was to release that karma through good works so that I might someday reach God-consciousness. It sounds weird, but it made perfect sense at the time. I started to meditate, became a vegetarian, and gradually quit drugs, drinking and smoking.
Through a paper I was writing on draft-dodgers for history class, I met an ex-Jesuit priest who had become a mime and performed with an underground theater group in Milwaukee called “Theater X.” He told me of a school in Michigan that featured a gradeless system and a student-designed curriculum. Much to my parents’ consternation, I ended up there for my first year of college. The school attracted many non-conformist types, so I was exposed to a very dazzling array of weirdos. All the female teachers were gay lesbian feminists. All the male teachers were hitting on the students. Most of the students were vegetarians, and not a few of them lived in teepees. This seemed to be the ideal place to further my spiritual quest. Plunging into everything from theosophy to tarot cards, I explored and experimented to my heart’s content. The problem was, my heart wasn’t content. My inner turmoil had grown into a boiling mass of fear and sadness that no amount of meditation or fasting could take away.
I lived in a farm house with three other students. One night my roommates threw a party there, and the original tenants came back. Because they were wearing “Jesus Saves” and “Praise the Lord” buttons, no one would talk to them. But I did. I wanted to know what had happened, because last I knew they were just as New Age as I was. Realize that my astrological sign is Pisces—the fish. The first words out of their mouths when I asked them about their new religion was, “It’s like water. You drink, and you never thirst again.”
Within a few weeks I had decided to consider Christianity. I was going to try it like a person tries a dish at a potluck meal. But one night in my cold little room in the farmhouse I found myself praying. I was in front of my terrarium, which was my meditation spot, but instead of meditating, I was praying my heart out, addressing God as a person instead of a mindless force or an energy mass. I cried from the bottom of my soul, “Jesus take me back to the Father.” This wasn’t experimentation, it was conviction. I wasn’t tasting Christianity any more, I was banking on it.
Through a series of trial and error church visits, I found a fellowship I felt comfortable with. By this time I had spoken in tongues at an Assemblies of God church, sat through cold, lifeless Lutheran services and attended social events with a Non-denominational group. The fellowship was Seventh-day Adventist. Their passion for the Bible and simple living, as well as their vegetarian emphasis, won me over. I studied with the Seventh-day Adventist fellowship for nine months and found that their entire belief system was based on the Bible, of which my newfound Savior and Friend, Jesus, was the center.
It still awes me today that God led a little hippie flower child who knew little to nothing about the Bible into the world’s most biblical church. I am reminded that “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether it be of men,” John 7:17.
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