By LouAnn Edwards
Book reviewed: “Something other than God, How I passionately sought happiness and accidentally found it” by Jennifer Fulwiler
Jennifer Fulwiler was an atheist. She was a successful computer programmer and embraced the fun, carefree lifestyle of the Austin Texas social scene. She had no desire for a traditional life of marriage, children or “The Jesus stuff.” But by the end of the book, she is a married Catholic with six children who goes on to become one of the most successful Catholic authors, podcasters and standup comics of our day. Yep, you read that right! Of course, there is no shortage of stories about “finding God”; they’re in every yard sale heap, library, bookstore, or your local Kroger aisle, so when this one came along, I thought it would be another of those “isn’t that great, feel good for a few minutes” page turners. Except that it wasn’t. Unlike other “I used to be an atheist” tales, Fulwiler lays out her specific problems with religion, particularly Catholicism, and then proceeds to show how the arguments for our faith end up getting it right every time. Her humor sneaks in right from the start. In her author acknowledgements, she thanks her husband Joe by saying “He helped shape each draft, watched the kids while I worked, and wasn’t afraid to write edits like, ‘this paragraph makes you seem insane.’”
Her first openness to God came after the birth of her first child. “I told whatever or whoever might be out there that I was open to knowing it, if it did exist …I suppose I had to admit that I had just said a prayer.” Soon after she took home a book about Christianity that left her wondering “What if there were a God? What if He were here, now, aware of this moment, wanting me to know that He exists?” She soon found an atheist website where a few Christians debated the author and the other readers. Her goal was to seek out those who did the best job of defending the faith. She was shocked to discover that the Catholics had the best answers for the deep moral questions she was struggling with. One by one she comes to terms with the hardest areas of beliefs: purgatory, abortion, contraception, homosexuality, papal authority, Mary, and the saints… the usual line up. “These readers, whom I had handpicked to comment on my blog based on the ability to defend their beliefs against atheistic arguments…every one of them was Catholic.” she reflects. One day, a unique area of inquiry came about when some co-workers criticized some pastors for saying hurricane Katrina was a punishment from God. Did they really believe that? Why? Online forums had rigorous debates about who was interpreting the Bible correctly. Was God a God of wrath or a God of love? She needed to know. Her humor peeks out again when she describes bolting into the workplace restroom while pleading with God for an answer — “I realized I was addressing the Almighty from a toilet. Surely there were rules about that.”
Eventually, Jennifer and her husband went thru the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) and became “official” Catholics, but she credits her true conversion to times when God spoke to her in personal ways: a nine-hundred-dollar prescription that suddenly changed to thirty, an affordable home that sprang out of nowhere, and a life-threatening medical condition that rocked her new found understanding of what it means to truly trust God. In the end, there was one final gift, the surprise she’d never expected: the proof of her own Catholic baptism as an infant. Jennifer was finally home.
