86/365 crisis of faith (sec.3)

Religion and Faith are something I've dealt with for pretty much my entire life. I was born Catholic. My parents were non-practicing for the most part but felt it was something I should have. My parents gave me the choice to be confirmed or not when I was a teenager and I inevitably chose not to. Not because I was lacking faith at that time but being gay I didn't really feel like I wanted to be part of a religious faith didn't want me to be there. Out of resentment I abandoned my faith and gave up my beliefs in that area and moved on, which didn't matter much at that time. However I was left with a void that I couldn't seem to fill at the time. Faith, belief in a higher order and purpose, these things become part of your daily life when you have them.

Eventually I embarked on a quest to fill that void. It started in early college when the first person I ever fell in love with someone who happened to be Jewish. I was inspired by the sense of community and family structure and ideals of the religion and that had a great appeal to me. I even started learning up on hebrew and the torah in consideration of possibly converting. But eventually that fell to the wayside and I decided I didn't want my belief structure based upon a community but rather the inverse.

I found my way into Uniterian Universalism and they are awesome. The respect of all peoples and community shared with them was incredible as well. And I find their view of religion being a personal experience that we all can share together to be in line with my core belief of humanity. But alas I discovered them at a point in my life where that was not a priority and that never ended up progressing.

I find myself now quite where I was 10 years ago; with a belief in a benevolent loving god whose nature, while being the epitomy of all that is good in this universe, is still ineffable to me. I have a hard time with Christ and think I may not end up a Christian at the end of it all. But I definitely still feel the void left by its absence often and have not given up on finding the solution to this problem.