In 1979, I asked Christ to save me from hell and got baptized in a church. The minister dunking me held me under the water a little too long, triggering a claustrophobic panic. For a split second, I fought the urge to wrestle him underwater and put him in a headlock.
The truth is, I never felt comfortable in church. The music grated on me, the displays of piety felt forced, and I was already battling social anxiety that made the whole scene intolerable. My Christian friends from high school were there, but they didn’t seem to understand me. Their conversations were peppered with Christian clichés, the kind that make your skin crawl. I felt crushed by a constant thought: all my Jewish relatives, long gone, were suffering in hell. The “good news” wasn’t working with me. I was depressed, and the sheer cheerfulness of everyone around me only magnified the dissonance I felt.
At the time, my mother was dating Bill, a man in his fifties with a grim past. Abandoned by his parents, both alcoholics and addicts, he was found half-dead and drunk in a gutter at the age of eleven. He got sober as an adult and spent his life helping others do the same. His blue eyes, sad and weathered, hinted at that broken boy inside him. I couldn’t look in his eyes without seeing that eleven-year-old boy drunk and alone in the gutter.
One Sunday morning, as I was begrudgingly getting ready for church, Bill surprised me. He said he loved going to church, even though he didn’t believe in God. He wasn’t moved by the theology—he was an atheist, after all—but the hymns, he said, brought him joy and a sense of community he couldn’t find anywhere else. This stunned me then, and it still does now. How could someone, an atheist no less, attend church just to soak in the music and camaraderie? But Bill embraced that contradiction without a second thought.
A few years later, my mother, in tears, told me Bill had died of lung cancer, the kind of death you might expect from someone who had smoked like a chimney. The news hit me hard, but what lingers most is the memory of those sad blue eyes, the ones that saw through me and seemed to carry the weight of that abandoned child in the gutter. Even now, the thought of him, lost and broken at eleven, leaves me feeling a heaviness that’s hard to shake and brings tears to my eyes.
In her book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, religious studies author Elaine Pagels writes about the pagans during the early Christian era who threw their unwanted babies in the trash. The Christians loved those abandoned babies and did all they could to save them. Their belief in God made such abandonment repugnant. Part of me thinks, I don’t know if I’m a Christian or not, but God bless those Christians for saving those babies.
I want to believe there is a part of me that wishes to love God for the same reason I was heartbroken when I learned of how Bill was abandoned as a small child and treated like unwanted rubbish. I want to believe that God would embrace such a child and bring him into His fold.
Cinemorphosis 
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