Despite living most of my life in the South, I am a liberal in pretty much every way there is to be liberal. My father was an award-winning investigating newspaperman fighting injustice from early on.  On the Saint Louis Star Times, he took on the largest arms manufacturer during World War II by exposing their selling defective ammunition that blew up in our own soldier’s rifles. He won several Journalism awards, but then he ended up in the army having to use their bullets.

In the early 1950’s in Houston, Texas with Dad still at the paper on an election night, our doorbell rang in the wee hours and I started down the stairs thinking maybe dad had forgotten his key. About halfway down, there was a loud boom at the front door sending me running back up the stairs. We called Dad, he called the police, and they called the FBI.  The FBI decided that the bomb that left both sharp pieces of slate and confetti packing stuck in our door and the walls of the entry to our apartment was set off because as City Editor of the Houston Post dad had written an editorial supporting a black woman for the school board. It wasn’t even an issue of integrating the schools, just about getting some representation for segregated black schools. I struggled to understand how anyone would want to maim or kill someone they didn’t even know. And for the first time I had a glimpse of the fear black children and their parents live with all their lives.

Later, my father was in the running for the Pulitzer Prize after winning all the other Journalism awards for writing an expose of a pressure group that was secretly getting liberal University of Houston college professors fired.

In the nineteen sixties, I was married and living in Nashville, Tennessee. I started actively working for Civil Rights after one of my college-educated Junior League friends, who worked as a volunteer at our Catholic hospital, bragged at a party that she had refused to carry a “nigger” baby out to the car in front of the baby’s parents, I began tutoring children who couldn’t read in a black elementary school. Then I started interviewing blacks at the NAACP headquarters who were looking for work. I then tried unsuccessfully to find businesses in the white community to hire them. I was working in the NAACP offices the day the buses for the March on Washington stopped there. The sheer hatred for whites by the young SNCC and CORE members in those groups was as strong as white prejudice.  I began to fear the threat of a bloody race war.

Martin Luther King spared us that.

As a Catholic from birth, I had four babies in my first five years of marriage. Because I was unable physically to deliver any of my babies without having Caesarian Sections, I was told that I was in danger of dying if I had another child in the next two or three years. Since the church taught that using birth control was a mortal “go to hell” sin, I asked our priest what to do. His response was that many children have had good stepmothers. After much soul searching, I decided that men who had never had wives or children should not be making this kind of decision for women. So, I quit the Catholic Church and because I had unknowingly made religion my God, I threw the “baby out with the bath water” and stopped believing in both Jesus and God.

For several years I lived a fun, but increasingly meaningless “party” life and dulled my unhappiness with alcohol. I had begun a search through classes on philosophy and World Religious at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Then, when my father died at only fifty-two, I intensified my search. After reading the whole bible, I took some introductory classes at other Christian denominations. I even read some of the “God is Dead” literature. But nothing brought any real enlightenment, though the book of Acts made me wistful.

Becoming alarmed about my struggle with feelings of inadequacy as a wife and mother and my need for alcohol to stay functional, I found a counseling group for alcoholics started by a Presbyterian Minister who had been though a similar battle. After a few months I broke down in the group weeping and admitting that I was so overwhelmed by the challenges of my life that I didn’t feel capable of loving anyone, not even my husband and children. Instead of judging me, the people in the group seemed to care and even feel sad for me. The next day as I was vacuuming my living room, I felt freed of self-hate somehow. As I stopped to just savor this new feeling, I had a sense of someone putting their hand on my shoulder in a supportive and loving way. My first instinct was it had to be Jesus, but then I questioned whether I even believed in Jesus. So, I put it in my mental file labeled, “Need more information.”

About that time friends of ours decided Earle would give up his Vice Presidency in his father’s company and sell their house so they could go to work as missionaries for Campus Crusade for Christ. I was shocked, but also a bit jealous that they had found something that mattered enough to give up their safe and very comfortable lifestyle. When they came back to town almost a year later, Judy asked her sister, my best friend Hilde, to host a “Christian Coffee” where several women would tell about the positive changes in their lives since they accepted Jesus as their Savior and Lord, I pitched in to help with it, telling people jokingly that I hadn’t known that our usual coffee get togethers weren’t “Christian,” but the talks would be short and we were going to have great refreshments.

The women’s descriptions of changes in their values and relationships appealed to me, but I still felt unable to make that leap of faith. So, when they led us in saying a prayer accepting Jesus as our Savior and Lord, I didn’t join in. And as the others were hugging and celebrating, I went into the kitchen to wash dishes. After a few moments the woman leading the group came in and asked me if I had said the prayer.  I confessed that I had not, because I didn’t believe in Jesus or God.  She didn’t blink or hesitate, she just said, “Well, why don’t you say the prayer this way, ‘Jesus, IF you are who you claimed to be, the Son of God and our Savior, take my life and help me to become the person God created me to be.”

I hesitated, but it seemed like a no-lose proposition, so I just nodded and said the prayer that way. She hugged me and congratulated me and I went back to washing the fragile china by hand, wondering how I would recognize an answer.

Suddenly, pure joy began bubbling up inside me. A feeling of being both known and loved in a way I had never experienced before overwhelmed me.  I felt so joyous I was afraid I’d explode.  Driving home I sang  “Jesus loves me” at the top of my lungs with tears of joy streaming down my face.

This is the just the beginning of my journey as a liberal, born again, baptized in the Holy Spirit, Christian. My hope in writing this is that I will be able to flesh out the reality that a spiritual journey can include both liberalism and Jesus as Savior and Lord.