By Mark Ellis, Special to ASSIST News News Service
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (ANS -- April 21, 2015)
-- She turned her back on an upper middle class Jewish upbringing and
lived in a Hindu ashram as a monastic nun for 20 years. After a
desperate and exhaustive pilgrimage, she finally found the truth in
Jesus Christ.“I was a lost and lonely pilgrim for a very long time,” says Faith Collier, author of Home at Last (Deeper Revelation Books).
At only six-years-old she began to resent her birth into a Jewish family. “My parents told me it was a blessing to be from the Jewish blood line, that I was one of God’s chosen people, but I just wasn’t satisfied,” she writes in her book. “In fact, for some odd reason, I thought I wanted to be a Christian.”
When she asked her orthodox Jewish grandmother about Jesus, the woman screamed at her, “Don’t you ever mention that name in this house, ever again!”
One day at school, Faith asked a Christian friend why the Christians seemed to like crosses so much. “Jesus was nailed to the cross,” her friend stated. Her friend then declared nonchalantly that the Jews killed Jesus, probably not realizing that Faith’s Jewish roots would be jolted by the revelation.
In high school, Faith stopped believing in God altogether and decided she was an atheist. Later, she followed her parents’ chosen pathway to become an English teacher, studying at a college in upstate New York.
“I spent as much time as I could smoking cigarettes and marijuana, drinking alcohol, having casual sex, performing folk-singing gigs at a popular club, and eating at restaurants with my roommate, perfecting the poor-college-student art of ‘dine and dash.’”
She met a young man named Robert in school and they married after graduation. They moved to San Francisco, where Robert entered law school and Faith became a high school English teacher.
The summer of love
The timing of their move to the Bay Area coincided with the full-flowering of the hippie movement. “Robert and I lived double lives for quite some time…on the weekends we got stoned out of our minds and danced with wild abandon at love-ins.”
They took Timothy Leary’s advice literally to ‘tune in, turn on, and drop out.’ Robert quit law school with only one semester to go and Faith quit her teaching job. “Off we went into the world of psychedelics, ostensibly seeking truth and God,” she notes.
Faith thought she saw God on one LSD trip at the beach in Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco. “All of a sudden the clouds turned into the most exquisite sight I had ever seen… the majesty of it all took my breath away.”
Photo: Faith at ashram, 1970
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