Blast from the past: Wife and the Baptists

Did I ever explain how Wife—who started our marriage as a Wiccan—ended up attending a Baptist church? I don't remember if I ever did, but it looks like I didn't. On the other hand, the other day I was looking through some of my old emails, and I found one of my old emails to Marie in which (among other things) I discussed about half of it. At the time I thought I should paste that into here, and then I realized I should go one step further and give you the whole story. Or as much of it as I can remember these many years later.

So this all started in … well, I think it was the early 2000's. Wife started getting terrible migraine headaches. Or rather, she'd always had migraine headaches from time to time, but they were getting worse and more frequent. So she went to her doctor, who ran some tests and finally took images of her head. When the images came back, he informed her that she was suffering from pseudotumor cerebri. This is a condition where some blockage in one of the vessels in her brain stopped the spinal fluid from draining out the way it should. So she was developing a pool of spinal fluid in her brain, that was acting like a brain tumor. It wasn't a real brain tumor, because it wasn't a growth of excess brain tissue. It was just a pool of spinal fluid. But it put pressure on the rest of the brain just like a brain tumor would have done. Hence the name "pseudotumor cerebri."

Great, so now Wife had a diagnosis. Heaven knows she collected diagnoses the way some people collect baseball cards, and now here was one more. So she asked her doctor what could be done about it? 

Her doctor suggested that she put her affairs in order.

That was it. That was the treatment suggestion. Sorry, there's nothing we can do. You'll die soon. Yes, you'll leave behind two sons under the age of 10, not to mention a husband. That sucks. But there's nothing we can do. Have a nice day.

It will come as no surprise to long-term readers of this blog that this news sent Wife into a complete tizzy. She called up everyone she knew to complain that she was going to die soon, and to vent her fear and panic through the phone. She might even have asked for advice or help, though I imagine the conversation was mostly pretty one-sided.

One way or another, though, someone asked her, Have you considered the Healing Rooms in [a town about an hour's drive from here]?

Huh? What's a Healing Room?

It's a room where you go when you have an incurable disease. People stand around and pray for you. Then you get better, or at least some people do.

What kind of prayer?

Intercessionary prayer, of course. They are all Christians, if that's what you mean. Mostly Pentecostal or Evangelical Christians.

But I'm not a Christian! I'm Wiccan! Remember?

How many other choices do you have right now, and can you really afford to be that picky? 

That last question seemed to seal the deal for her.

So she went to the Healing Rooms. They made a circle around her and prayed. In tongues. When Wife told me about the experience that evening over dinner, she explained that the "tongues" they spoke in were incomprehensible gibberish … until she held hands with the people on both sides of her, thus "completing the circuit." At that point, she told me, suddenly she could understand what they were saying.

"So what were they saying?" I had to ask.

"They were praising God."

As the prayers went on, suddenly she felt something warm wash down her back. It was nothing external and there were no physical signs, so she didn't think about it a lot. But she definitely felt it.

She went back to the prayer rooms a week later, and again a week after that. Finally she went back to her doctor for a checkup, and asked him to take images of her head again to check the progress of the pseudotumor.

The pseudotumor was gone. Poof. Vanished. 

At a medical level, Wife was thrilled. But at a religious level this left her with a crisis. What was she supposed to do, now that the Christian God had cured her of an otherwise incurable and lethal disease? She felt like she ought to start going to church in gratitude, but at the same time she already had other religious commitments. So she took the issue to Cerridwen in prayer: Can I honestly and legitimately go to a Christian church while I am already pledged to You?

Cerridwen's answer was to remind Wife of a formula she [Wife] had learned from her High Priestess, way back when she was a student: The One is Two, the Two are Many, and the Many are One. In other words, the number of gods in a pantheon isn't a problem, and you can worship the Christian God if you like as long as you don't break your vows to Us (which means as long as you still worship the Wiccan gods as well).

So Wife started shopping among the Christian churches in town. She tried out a few Pentecostal churches for a month or two, and finally ended up at an evangelical Baptist church.

And that's probably a good point to transition into a second post.