The Williams Telos

Very early on, I believed. These memories are faint, but I still remember praying aloud every Sunday for a parking spot, at my mom’s request, while my mom drove us around the cramped alleyways of Taipei. I asked God for help whenever I lost something, which I often did. I prayed with my mom before bed. We prayed together when I was diagnosed with a severe case of scoliosis and when we couldn’t find my cat. Although I was never that dedicated—going to church and reading the Bible were never fun to me—I did have faith.

My mother, a devout Christian, raised me in her non-denominational church in Taiwan. It was a thriving and close-knit community, but it might seem pretty unusual to most Christians in the US. We didn’t celebrate Christmas or Easter. Our meetings had no sermons, no priests or pastors, no pews—we all sat in folding chairs, people stood up spontaneously to pray or testify, and people would call on the name of Jesus again and again, with increasing fervor and volume. The adults and baptized teenagers would have grape juice in tiny little plastic cups. They practiced full-immersion baptism in a small bathtub in the basement. 

I don’t remember exactly how or why I stopped believing in God; it happened gradually, so that when I was twelve, I came to the conclusion that God didn’t exist. 

As a child, I understood prayer as a magic spell that was supposed to get me whatever I wanted. I quickly realized that my magic spell didn’t work most of the time, so I largely stopped praying. But I sometimes still made bargains with God when I was really desperate, when I really needed something to happen, rather than merely wanting it. “If you do this for me,” I’d beg, addressing a God I wasn’t sure was listening, “I promise I’ll worship you forever. Give me another chance, and I’ll give you another chance, even though I don’t know if you exist.” God promptly let me down. This sounds silly now, but for a child who was completely sincere, it felt like a serious breach of trust. I felt like God had betrayed me. I don’t think anybody offered me a different interpretation of prayer, one that went beyond asking a distant genie to grant wishes. Since that was my only conception of prayer, and prayer was my only relationship with God, I felt like God wasn’t there at all. 

Apart from this feeling of abandonment, I started asking questions that my mom told me not to ask. I had always annoyed adults with my incessant inquiries, and as I learned more about the world, I developed many questions about our faith. It wasn’t even something as deep as the problem of evil; most of it was inspired by my mom and her church’s insistence that every single word in the Bible was the literal and perfect word of God. As a kid, I probably took that stance even further and more literally than they intended it, thinking that God personally wrote everything in the Bible and completely endorsed it. So when I began to read the Bible for myself, I wanted to know if God really ordered disobedient children to be stoned to death, whether all the people and animals in the world were produced from incest after Noah’s ark, and whether my mom really thought that wives must submit to their husbands (she said she did, even though she was far more assertive than my dad). Apparently, my burgeoning moral compass, curiosity about science, and refusal to accept patriarchal norms got in the way. Adults evaded and dismissed my questions, refusing to have an actual discussion about them. I was left feeling estranged and confused. What was supposed to be God’s writings and teachings began to seem ridiculous. Once I started thinking for myself, my childhood faith became untenable. 

I grew bitter. I rolled my eyes when people praised God or read the Bible to me. I read novels during church, paying no attention to anything I was told. I made it clear that I didn’t want to be there. Even as my mom pressured me to go to Bible study and well-meaning cousins called me to read the Bible, I disengaged completely and inwardly scoffed at everything. In my stubborn pride, I considered myself above it all. 

This was the first unraveling. My faith came apart completely; the belief system that my mom gave me had disentangled beyond repair, and could no longer hold me.

As I got older, I developed an even stronger contempt for God, for religion, and for Christianity in general. In high school, I realized that I was bisexual and fell in love with a female friend who became the first person I’d ever dated. During my honeymoon phase, I was so excited that I almost told my mom about my relationship, hinting at it while leaving myself plausible deniability. But my mom immediately started panicking, saying that she was worried that Satan was luring me into sin. (When I was little, she often shared interviews about how God saved “formerly” gay people from their wicked homosexual lifestyles.) At this point, I had already identified as atheist for years, and my mom’s hurtful reaction to my attempt to share my joy only solidified and intensified my distaste for Christianity. After all, my entire high school friend group was also queer, and I received the message that Christians condemned our very existence as evil. Because I had never been exposed to any other form of faith, I was convinced that all Christians held these beliefs—beliefs that not only made no sense to me, but seemed actively cruel and harmful to me and my loved ones. As time went on, my attitude went even further than atheism, into something that could be more accurately described as anti-theism. Thus, I wove together an impenetrable set of ideas about Christianity, all of which I strongly opposed, since I am passionate about justice and equality for women and LGBTQ communities.

During COVID, something strange happened. I had been stuck in a multi-year rut of meaninglessness and emptiness that only got worse when I started college. I felt lost. Something was missing, something deeper than what my therapists could address, and I was inexplicably drawn towards religious and spiritual life. It’s hard to express just how shocking and surprising this new development seemed to me, considering the deep aversion I held against anything Christian; my yearning for God was completely out of character. You must understand that I was stubbornly atheist to the extreme, having rejected God much more resolutely than I ever believed in God as a child. It pains me to admit this, but ever since my first unraveling, I looked down upon people of faith as delusional and narrow-minded, and I was filled with contempt and bitterness against Christianity. 

I thought I had left faith behind forever. And yet, there I was, nervously setting up meetings with the College Chaplain, Reverend Valerie, meetings that proved to be revelatory and cathartic. One Sunday, I worked up the courage to step into an Episcopal church service, a drastically different experience from the Sundays of my childhood. I emerged stunned and in awe of how much it spoke to my soul. There I was, daring to ask questions again, this time finding myself engaged in refreshingly open and honest dialogue with priests and chaplains. They patiently encouraged my curiosity and demonstrated that I—a queer person who is deeply distrustful of exclusionary religion—had a valued place in the community, and that my faith did not have to go against everything I stood for. In fact, I learned that my faith could bolster and ground my passion for justice and reconciliation. There I was, dismantling my preconceptions about faith with the help of kind peers and mentors, surrounded by people of faith who welcomed me just as I was, difficult questions and all. There I was, somehow feeling God’s loving presence again, as if for the first time.

It felt like healing—from the ways that religion had hurt me in the past and from my own misguided prejudices against faith. It felt like freedom. 

As I tentatively dipped my toes into a very different kind of faith than the one I had known before, I felt pulled in, deeper and deeper; and the deeper I delved, the more alive I felt. Even though I was filled with wonder, I was also disturbed and perplexed at how this could happen. I was unraveling again; my cynical self was coming apart. If anything, this second unraveling was harder and more destructive than the first, since I was older now and had stronger and more deliberate convictions to untangle. This time, I had to painstakingly unravel the rigid intellectual edifice I had built up against faith for years. It was a long and arduous process, but I had help along the way—I read books that offered a radically different vision of faith than the one I was used to, I actively participated in progressive Christian communities online, and had long conversations with chaplains and priests. I learned that, for me at least, faith isn’t intellectual assent to a set of propositions. It isn’t about having absolute certainty; instead, I’ve found it to be more about trust and relationships and sacrificial love. At my current church, I learned that women and queer people could be, and are, in positions of leadership, bringing much-needed voices and perspectives to the church. I learned a new way to pray using the Episcopalian Daily Office and the Book of Common Prayer, which I have grown to love. I learned about various non-literalist ways of reading Scripture, discovering the vast and wonderful diversity in biblical interpretation and realizing that I didn’t have to shut down my mind and heart when reading the Bible. I learned that participating in my transformed faith, both communally and privately, brought me a special kind of joy and fulfillment that nothing else had been able to give. I learned to make peace, for the most part, with my mom’s expression of faith, even if I did not share it myself. Above all, I learned that God’s love is expansive—much more expansive than our selfish attempts to limit it. And Christ does not abandon his lost sheep. 

As I see it, God called me back. It might be presumptuous of me to relate my experience with Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, but that was kind of how it felt. My old self would probably scoff at my current self in contempt and disbelief. Sometimes, I still ask myself: what have I become? And then I wonder: who else could do this but God? Who else could be the originator of such a comprehensive unraveling, such an unbelievable reversal and transformation? 

Untangling the trappings of my previous worldviews was challenging, and I cannot possibly detail everything that I’ve come to see differently. I’m still changing and learning more every day, and I know I’m never going to have faith completely figured out. But to me, that’s the beauty and excitement of it—I am on a lifelong journey, with infinite possibilities of discovery and renewal ahead of me. This is a well that will never run dry. 

Because I’ve had to unravel my inflexible systems of belief, my faith isn’t as tightly-wound as before. I don’t cling too hard to intellectual arguments about specifics of doctrine. But I do believe that my repeated unravelings made my faith more resilient than it ever could have been otherwise. Because I have already torn everything down, twice, my new understanding of faith is much more durable than anything I’d possessed before. I worked out what was important and what was not; I realized that faith wasn’t about weaving a tight and unchanging web of unassailable beliefs. Unraveling wasn’t something to be afraid of. In fact, it saved my faith. Here, I am reminded of the symbolism of baptism: “Therefore we have been buried with [Christ] by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4, NRSV). I see my departure and return to faith as such a dying and rising—my old self needed to be unraveled before I could discover a new way of life, itself a form of death and resurrection. For me, faith is about transformation. It is an openness to be changed, a willingness to see things differently and to do things differently. And so, paradoxically, the unraveling of my faith has been an indispensable part of my faith. If I may be so bold, I would even say that it has been a gift from God.

Abby Shen ‘24.5 is a Philosophy major. In a Record article, Abby shared that making Kant memes is one of her favorite things to do, and she wants everyone to know that her favorite tree on campus is the tree next to Schapiro near the First Church Congregational Parking Lot.

Athens doesn’t have skyscrapers. Due to strict zoning laws that prevent any building from obstructing the view of the Acropolis, the city simultaneously feels both incredibly open and claustrophobic. There are no buildings looming over you, so you can see plenty of sky, but at the same time, that means all the buildings and sidewalks are that much more squeezed together. But when you do get to some elevation, you can see a whole lot more than in other cities.

One morning during a trip to Greece with my school’s Classics department, we were walking toward the Areopagus, also known as the Rock of Ares, which is a sizable overlook on a hill next to the Acropolis. I opened my Bible app and began to read Acts 17, the chapter where Paul first enters Athens and gives a sermon at the Areopagus to the Greeks. It’s unclear whether Paul actually delivered the speech on or just near the rock, but I liked to imagine that he might have been at the same lookout spot that I was as he prepared to preach.

Luke sets up the scene by telling us that “while Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” [1] It’s always comforted me to know that a man as joyful and optimistic as Paul felt this way when looking at the world. Despite this feeling, Paul began by looking for common ground with the new citizens he had observed. “‘People of Athens!’ he opens, ‘I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.” [2] Bishop Robert Barron calls the Areopagus sermon a “masterclass in evangelization” because “moving through the culture of his time, (Paul) assimilates what he can and resists what he must.” [3]

Yet, even with a nuanced sermon being delivered by one of the church’s most famous evangelists, Luke records that while a few people believed Paul, it wasn’t overly effective. In fact, some of the listeners sneered at him, and Paul departed for Corinth shortly after. Athens is then not mentioned for the rest of the New Testament. There’s a good chance that Paul would’ve died thinking that Christianity in Athens would never take root. So reading this narrative atop the Areopagus, I was very moved by just how many churches I could see in the distance. Not just that, but all around the Areopagus there were ancient pagan sites that only remained as ruins, and next to many of them, you could see large churches standing tall. It was very powerful to think that the same idols that caused Paul to feel distressed were now all overtaken by churches that came from the seeds of his ministry, even if he was never around to see it.

It’s interesting how Luke seems to describe the members of the Areopagus as men who just waste their days talking about vanities. Luke’s entire account of Athens is unusually short, so it’s funny that he took the time to include the following description: “All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.” [4] You can almost hear him rolling his eyes as he wrote it. It reminds me of a great quote by St. John Chrysostom, a fourth century archbishop and church doctor who describes vanity in one of the most unique ways I’ve ever heard. “Consider what comes of food, into what it is changed. Are you not disgusted at its being named? Why then be eager for such accumulations? The increase of luxury is but the multiplication of dung! For nature has her limits, and what is beyond these is not nourishment, but injury, and the increase of ordure.” [5]

In isolation, this might be a pretty depressing quote. Chrysostom seems to suggest that much of what we pursue in life, whether it actually be food and luxury or the vain talk at the Areopagus, is in fact a waste of time. Not just a waste of time, but an active multiplication of something bad. It’s like in the movie Inception when characters are described as getting stuck in dreams, where nothing they do matters, and they can become apathetic almost to the point of death. The plot revolves around characters creating little personalized items called totems, something like a coin or a spinning top, that can help them identify what is real and what isn’t. So if so much of what we do is just multiplying dung, what do we focus on to know what’s real?

Later in the same sermon series, Chrysostom says the following. “God made Heaven, and earth, and sea. Great works these, and worthy of His wisdom! But by none of these has He so powerfully attracted human nature to Himself, as by mercy and the love of mankind. For that indeed is the work of power and wisdom and goodness. But it is far more so that He became a servant. Do we not for this more especially admire Him? Are we not for this still more amazed at Him? Nothing attracts God to us so much as mercy. And the prophets from beginning to end discourse upon this subject.” [6]

He tells us to focus on the Incarnation and the mercy that flows from it. By prioritizing that, we can make sure we are spending our lives on what’s real and avoid the pitfalls described by Luke and Chrysostom. Going back to Paul’s sermon, we can see a nice parallel. “In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.” [7] Paul knew what these men were used to talking about, and made sure to center his message on Jesus’ identity and actions.

I truly hope that one day I get to explore more of the locations from the Book of Acts, and walk by more of the geography that the early apostles visited as they preached. But in the meantime, as I try to avoid vain talk and multiplying dung, I’ll never forget visiting the Areopagus, and seeing the impact that was eventually had by preaching centered on Jesus and his mercy. Lord, give us the strength to do the same!

FOOTNOTES

1: Acts 17:16

2: Acts 17:22-23

3: https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/barron/paul-on-the-areopagus-a-master-class-in-evangelization/

4: Acts 17:21

5: Sermons on 2 Timothy

6: Sermons on 2 Timothy

7: Acts 17:30-31

Andrew Nachamkin ’24 is a Statistics and Classics double major from the Hudson Valley, NY. Ever since middle school he has been fascinated by church history and apologetics, and is grateful for Telos for giving him outlets to explore these topics. Outside of school, he enjoys Nintendo games and basketball. After graduation he will move to New York City to work in finance.

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways” – 1 Corinthians 13:11.

When I was a child, my parents taught me two moral maxims: “Try your best,” and “Treat others the way you wish to be treated.” I suppose most children learn some variant of the Golden Rule, and for a good reason—it teaches you to share your toys and hopefully later in life to do something altruistic out of your abundance. The other maxim runs deep in the American culture and canon, that the hard work and effort of individuals ought to be rewarded, and it is an invitation that my parents inherited from their parents.

On my mother’s side, my grandfather was once a self-described “rote Catholic,” and he put my mom and uncle through 13 years of Catholic school for its solid formation. My father’s family grew up non-religious. My mother threw off Catholicism like a restrictive garment after high school; my father had never worn religion aside from a few Baptist services. They raised us non-religious until I was about 8 or 9 and they realized we did not know who Jesus was, as a figure in history. So we started attending a Unitarian Universalist Congregation, a quasi-humanist religion that believes in a higher power and that all the other major world religions are equally valid approximations of one God, although it has a historical connection to Judeo-Christian values. While such an inclusive sentiment is politically correct, and some Toronto-area professionals drew inspiration from this religious potpourri for meaningful work and commendable service, it seemed hard to establish a belief system on such shifting or relativist ground. When the only thing you can say about a higher power is that it is everywhere and infinite, you end up worshiping some derivation of my parents’ moral maxims, what C.S. Lewis calls “ethical platitudes” in The Allegory of Love. ¹

To my dad, “try your best” meant continuous self-improvement in the form of to-do lists and Getting Things Done and 10-point plans. My mom gave us sound proverbs when my brother and I left homeschooling and ventured into public high school: put in the work at the start of the semester and your teachers will be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt later on, and don’t cut corners now lest you deny yourself the opportunity to build skills for the future.

As a family, we left the Unitarian Universalist Congregation when my mom felt that our learning there was stagnating, and some of us relocated to a Christian Reformed Church. My mom had a friend who worked there with a feisty heart for God, and she was open to giving a church that could form someone like that a chance. I found myself, a 7th grader, in the company of people older (sometimes) and wiser about God. I began reading the Bible, overcoming my social anxiety to participate in the youth group, and having weekly conversations with the youth pastor. I would ask her questions like, “What does it mean that Jesus descended into the earth after He died?” She showed me the bedrocks of her faith, the creeds and the meaning of grace and baptism, and how she had walked with God through her husband’s early passing. Most of my questions were innocent, intimate, but if I had asked anything profane she would have unraveled and answered those questions, too. 

I felt loved in these conversations, and I felt enough, resting in God’s love. My initial acceptance of Christianity, then, was on an emotional level, feeling that the presence of God abolished my fear and my inadequacies. I cared a lot about what other people thought, and I thought a lot about my “looking glass self,” introspecting my life’s feelings and purpose. The verse from the Gospel of John about Christ offering the Samaritan woman “living water” brought me release from my inner monologues. I was baptized at the end of the 7th grade, shortly before we moved back to the U.S. from a work permit in Canada. My parents were accepting of my choice; my mother felt the religious potpourri from the Unitarian Church had been the training wheels from which my siblings and I could decide the beliefs and principles to guide our lives.

We moved churches again, this time out of necessity. The Christian Reformed Church is known as the Dutch Reformed Church in the U.S., a nationality that (despite the many other European countries in my ancestry), my family doesn’t share, and a denomination that doesn’t have much of a presence in southern Connecticut. By this time, my mother believed that church was a body of people working together to become better people and was looking for something with “a little more of Jesus than the Unitarians.” She opted for the United Church of Christ, a denomination that has as its tagline, “don’t put a period where God has put a comma.” I went to church on Sundays with the family, then to a youth group on Tuesdays at an evangelical megachurch with contemporary rock worship music. I was caught between two churches, with different creeds and different politics and at bottom different dispositions: “come as you are” versus “come to Jesus.” I wondered if these could be different sides of God’s love, the radical inclusion and also the right formation, but my mom seemed to think they were two different incompatible “versions of Christianity,” and the evangelical megachurch was not her version of Christianity, so our conversations in the van ride home from youth groups never got much of anywhere.

When you treat others the way you want to be treated, sometimes you miss the mark; I missed the point of Christianity for most of my childhood and adolescence. Theory of mind is an early developmental milestone but we carry emotional immaturity and the heuristic that the love we need is the longing of the world into adulthood. When we ask the question, “What would Jesus do?” we commit to treating others not the way we want to be treated, or even the way they want to be treated, but in the way that God regards them. The great commandment of my childhood was not wrong, but it got at a secondary perspective to Christianity, like a book jacket that doesn’t do justice to the contents within. When asked, “‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?’” Jesus responded, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:36-39). As Christians, if all we do is look around the world and mirror the love we can give, we miss the primary perspective: seeking God’s face. Perhaps, like the oft-mentioned reconciliation of faith and works in salvation, the relationship is not so much quantitative as it is qualitative. Jesus calls us not to love God more than we love others, since in its highest expression it is the same love, particle and wave, but simply to love God first.

Like our family’s past moves between churches, coming to college jolted me into reassessing some of the things I had taken for granted. I wrestled with my persistent confusion about the kingdom of God and the promise for a “new heaven and a new earth,” that God wants to transform not just the spiritual but also the physical. I wrestled with the vagueness of my idea of God, that I had always seen Him as infinitely perfect, eternal, and the ideal of all virtues, but not always as relational and near. I had to remind myself that I was a child of God, through a debilitating season of depression in junior year of high school, before I could put the ways, the beliefs, of childhood behind me.

I had started, like some of the rationalist philosophers, with myself as the measuring line and the center. Descartes’ asymptotic view of human perfection in Meditations charts the course I tried to take, on my own terms, a quest of continuous self-improvement to which faith was prefixed. But I could not, and neither could Descartes, see God face to face in the mere negation of my inadequacies, finitude, and imperfection. C.S. Lewis cautions against such an approach to God: “Thus at each step in the process of refinement our idea of God contains less and less and the fatal pictures come in (an endless, silent sea, an empty sky beyond all stars, a dome of white radiance) and we reach at least mere zero and worship a nonentity.”² Living water could only be a generative “mental image” if I focused not on the experience of being thirsty but on the one who wants to give me rest. 

C.S. Lewis summarizes this shift in attention as seeking happiness as a by-product instead of chasing it, seeking God and not our own self-referential states or even our idea of Him as the object of our thoughts. Lewis writes, “My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast.”³ Help me to see you, God, as who you are, not who I think that you are. I needed to unravel the thesis that I was ultimately working toward my own redemption (whether on earth or in heaven) and to come back to the cross; it was not my imperfections but my very desire for perfection that I needed to cast down. I found an interlocutor, another first-year student willing to unpack his own faith history and the reason we both ended up here—at the credo, at Williams. He got baptized last spring and I started observing the Sabbath. What would it mean for our relationship with God to more deeply pervade our lives?

On a recent drive home, my mother wept, saying that in religion you don’t have to worry about and control things so much. The maxims “Try your best” and “Treat others the way you want to be treated” wove our family together in my childhood, but as my siblings and I grow up, and my parents get older, we have pulled on them at the edges. My grandfather, for one, has become more than a “rote Catholic,” and shared with me a worship song that brought him closer to God than he’s ever felt before. I hold those two postures in my mind: my grandfather standing up with his hands outstretched and my mother weeping with her hand on her chin. [Re]formation and unraveling.

“…but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” 1 Corinthians 13:10-12

FOOTNOTES

¹ The Allegory of Love, p. 324

² Miracles: A Preliminary Study, p. 73

³ A Grief Observed, p. 92

Harper Treschuk ‘26 is a Philosophy and Psychology double major. She enjoys writing longhand in composition books and going on afternoon walks with a voice recorder. On campus, she is a representative in the Honor and Discipline Committee and co-leads a first-year Bible study.