Finding their way home

Young adults often drift away from the church, returning years later. "You realize you're not immortal," says one woman who went back.

By NANCY PARADIS
Published December 19, 2006

Ann Bulmanski is a "cradle Catholic," someone born into the Catholic faith, although she admits there was a time in her 20s when she "floated away from it." She returned because she wanted a church wedding. Now at 57, she is an active churchgoer in Gulfport.

Raised as an Episcopal, Patty Rondolino was entrenched in her church at a young age. At 18, she left the Episcopal church.

When she married and had children, she went to her husband's Methodist church. But she left the Methodist church when she divorced.

Now at 53, she is a member of the nondenominational Unity Church of St. Petersburg.

The experiences of these two women are typical, says David Wulff, professor of psychology at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass. "There's a plunge in religiosity in the 20s, and by their 30s, people start coming back, many because they have children."

"When I was a teenager I was invincible," Bulmanski recalls. "But the older you get, you realize you're not immortal."

In a longitudinal study that has followed nearly 200 people born in the 1920s in Northern California, college researchers found that "religiousness" enhances the quality of life in the second half of life.

Following an organized religion, say Paul Wink, professor of psychology at Wellesley College, and Michele Dillon, professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, provides a buffer against depression for someone in poor health or facing other adversity.

Rabbi Stephen Moch of Congregation B'nai Emmunah in Tarpon Springs says he has been struck over the years by the fact that people return to their faith as they age. Often this is in response to a life-changing event, such as a death, although Moch cautions that such events can send people in the other direction:

"Some people, rather than turning to God at such times, become angry at and deny or question him," Moch said.

The California study, however, found that highly religious people were least afraid of death. Ironically, it's an attitude they share with nonbelievers.

"There's no evidence that atheists suddenly panic at the thought of their mortality and become religious," says psychology professor Wulff. According to the study, those who were moderately religious were most afraid of death.

The study showed that religious people also were happier, healthier and more engaged in life, Dillon said.

The life of Ruth Hodges of Tampa illustrates another finding of the study: that the religious are more involved with helping others. As a child, she searched for answers to her mother's suicide, which she witnessed at age 6, by searching for God.

She started attending church and after high school attended a Christian college in Richmond, Va. Having heard from a fellow student and a missionary about the poverty and lack of education in Haiti, she accepted their invitation to visit the island.

"It was love at first sight," she says, and "decided to use her life to help others have a better life."

Since that first trip in 1969, Hodges, who is now 81, has made 50 short-term mission trips to Haiti.

As Rondolino's experience shows - going from Episcopalian to Methodist to Unity - the church in which an individual ends up is not always the original church.

But a person's involvement in a church in adolescence will generally predict their religious involvement in later years, Wulff says.

Take Betty Bonfield, 83, of Gulfport. Her Amish mother vehemently disliked Catholicism. Betty was raised as a Methodist in North Dakota, going to church three or four times a day.

She was first exposed to Catholicism through a beloved aunt. When Bonfield married a Catholic, she took instruction and converted.

Bonfield now considers Most Holy Name of Jesus in Gulfport her second home. She leaned on her faith during the illness and death of her husband three years ago and during other life crises.

The Rev. Manuel Sykes, pastor of Bethel Community Baptist Church in St. Petersburg, has also noted a drop in attendance in young adulthood. But by their mid 30s, these same people are seeking grounding - something to fill a pervasive emptiness and the sense that there's more to life than material success.

If they were raised in a home that valued faith, they often return to church, confirming the hypothesis that a person's early experience with church can predict their later involvement.

But not everyone who lacked religion in their youth ended up as nonbelievers. Sharon Jebens, who gives her age as "in her 50s," was not reared in a particularly religious home. When she married a Catholic, then an Episcopalian, she became involved in those faiths.

But she could not reconcile her belief that we are all children of God with the message of exclusivity she kept hearing.

Ten years ago she moved to Florida and discovered the Unity Church. Her spiritual seeking and need for some sort of worship came together. "There is one God and all paths lead to God," she said. "Our inheritance is to be happy and joyful."

Nancy Paradis can be reached at (727) 893-8342 or nparadis@sptimes.com.

[Last modified December 19, 2006, 11:06:30]