SKIRT! Team Challenge: SPIRIT: "Square Piece, Round Hole"

Recently I decided, once again, that I would try to fit what I try and explain as fitting a square peg into a round hole, for all the right reasons, but usually the same results.  It doesn't fit.  I thought I'd try just one more time.  I signed up for a wonderful Bible study led by an amazing woman, Joanne Ellison.  She is knowledgeable, kind, charismatic, and accepting.  I love listening to her, learning from and being around her. Her daughter and I are very, very close friends.

I've tried for years to forget and ignore the attraction I had toward Judaism since I was 9, when I read the entire series of "All of a Kind of Family" by Sydney Taylor.  I was completely taken by Judaism and memorized by this story of an Orthodox Jewish family with five daughters that lived on the East side of Brooklyn, during the early 1900s.  Even at nine, I felt something change from within, I just didn't know what to do about it, or even what "it" was.

I went to church for years.  Different churches, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone.  I studied Buddhism.  I spoke to priests, ministers, lay people, friends, Campus Crusaders for Christ, Young Life.  You name it, and I've probably been there. But the foundations and beliefs of Judaism seem to still be burned within me.  I even got shunned by my roommate's 74 year old Orthodox Jewish father.  There is little acceptance for converts, and surely not in his home. 

Finally, a few years ago, I went to Rabbi Holtz at the Reform Synagogue on Hasell Street downtown Charleston.  We met a few times, and I began to read.  I joined the Jewish Choral Society, because singing was the one thing that had always brought me closer to God.  But I was intimidated.  I was scared.  I was the only one in my family, who if I converted, would be Jewish.  I married a solid Catholic man.  I have managed to raise one agnostic, one atheist, possibly two atheists, and one too young to know.  

Last week the Bible study began.  I went and I completely enjoyed it.  I opened up in ways that I hadn't felt safe in years.  I told them things that I hadn't said out loud to another soul.  Yet, I still didn't understand their connection to Jesus.  It wasn't because I don't have faith.  I do, but it's just not what I believe.  A few days later I went to church with my neighbors.  I sang every song they had because it truly does bring my closer to God.  Yet still, I could tell it was not me.  It really was not what I believed.  Only this time it hurt me a bit more because I thought I would find that I was a round piece, and I was in the round hole.

And so after, all these years -- from the time I was nine years old, until today, at 46 -- I have brought in front of me what I believe to be truly part of my soul, my being.  Tomorrow I will call the new Rabbi and ask to make an appointment to see her.  I've been scared because I'll be different from my family, though they always shared in my Shabbat dinners on Friday nights, willingly, without complaint.  Yet still, I'll be different, but maybe, just maybe I'll find that same level of comfort that I did deep inside those books where they meet the need I've had for all these years.  Maybe I won't convert.  Maybe I'll just study, study, and study some more.

But I have this funny feeling, though, even if I don't convert -- I'll finally be the square peg, and I will have found the square hole, where I've belonged since I was nine.