My parents were both raised in kind of the Bible Belt area.
They went to school in Tennessee.
My mom, I think, started going to the Baptist church.
My dad went to the Church of Christ.
And so when my mom and dad married, they both started attending the Church of Christ, which
is a very fundamental Protestant denomination.
And that's how my sisters and I were all originally raised.
But my parents started experiencing the need for more than what they were getting out of
that experience.
And they were introduced to the whole full gospel experience after we had been attending
this Church of Christ for a while, and the Church of Christ was kind of against the gifts
of the Spirit, whether it was healing or speaking in tongues or whatever.
And so our family was actually literally publicly disfellowshipped from this church that we had
spent years and years in, not because they didn't like us, but because they didn't believe
that some of the things that we were embracing were valid expressions of faith.
So that set us on a journey to try to find our place in the church.
And we ended up at a four-square church.
And that's where we stayed for several years.
And that's where my husband and I were ultimately married.
But we ended up not feeling quite at home there either.
Being raised by a celebrity, you can imagine, is an entirely different kind of life.
You're in the public a lot.
And my sisters and I started performing with my dad by the time I was 13 years old.
So we were part of that public persona as well.
And it was kind of like the way I've described it before.
It's kind of like being a preacher's kid and a celebrity's kid all at the same time.
Because there were the expectations of people who were from the religious part of the culture
that expected my dad and his family to look and behave a certain way.
And then there were the people who were fans of my dad and of our family, who kind of,
I think, embraced the fact that we were kind of the clean-cut, wholesome family image.
But still, there are those that judge you by appearance and by actions, and not quite
as embracing as the religious community might be.
Definitely, I think, first of all, I'm a firstborn.
So those of us that are firstborns tend to be perfectionistic anyway.
I took it upon myself to be my mom's little helper.
The only problem is, my mom had four of us in three and a half years.
So that made me a very little helper.
And I was happy to take on that role.
But very early on, I became a real people pleaser, somebody who judged myself by how
other people thought of me or what their opinions of me were.
And I also drove myself to a pretty ridiculous level.
In school, even in elementary school, I would stay up hours and hours doing homework that
I probably could have gotten an A on by seven or eight at night.
What carried over, that perfectionism carried over into what we looked like and what we
did in the performance world, too.
And so I grew up in the period of time where people like Twiggy and Cher were the role
models to try to emulate and look up to.
And so being the perfectionist that I was, I felt like thinner, if thin is good, then
thinner is better, and thinnest is best.
So I started really trying to control my weight.
I had gained some weight, as a young girl often does when she's going through puberty
and stuff.
But I felt it much more personally and painfully because I was also being viewed by a lot of
people.
And we had to fit into costumes, and they always say, TV puts 10 extra pounds on you
and all that stuff.
And I was really trying hard to be what I thought would be the perfect image.
The only problem with perfectionism is that you are consciously aware of how you are falling
short of these unrealistic standards that you've set for yourself.
So you're focusing on everything that you're not doing and everything that you think you're
not, rather than all the things that you are doing and the things that you've accomplished.
So it's kind of a no-win situation.
I always took my faith seriously, even as a little kid, and if I hadn't had that to
hang on to through my years with eating disorders and self-esteem issues and things like that,
I don't know how my story would have turned out.
I felt like my life, at the point where my eating disorders really got bad, I felt like
my life was kind of falling apart, and in my attempts to try and take control of an area
of my life I had completely lost control.
And it was a long time coming out of it, but I remember as part of my experience in going
through anorexia and bulimia, for a period of time I literally took communion every day.
And the reason I did it, even though I wasn't raised Catholic, was that I believed that
by taking communion I was taking more of Jesus in me.
I believed that wholeheartedly.
I believed that in the same way that eating or not eating were causing my behavioral and
emotional and psychological struggles, I believed that taking communion would be redeeming my
eating and taking more of Jesus into me so that I could be more of him and less of me.
My husband had lived in the Middle East and had done missions work for a while, and he
had really been trying to find what the early roots of the church were and to try and find
the earliest expression of Christianity and figure out why it had branched off into so
many different varying denominations.
And so he started with the Jewish roots of Christianity and lived in Israel for a while.
And then the next step was to look at the Catholic church.
And he had a friend who was a Catholic kind of a scholar who kind of helped him answer
a lot of his questions and point him in that direction.
But he didn't actually follow through at that point.
I was going through a similar journey myself at that time, and our family had done a TV
special in Israel, and I had felt overwhelmed by that sense of being, you know, walking
through eternity, you know, where you're part of the past, present, and future all at the
same time, and felt that I really wanted to learn the language and maybe go back someday.
So I was studying Hebrew, and in fact mutual friends of ours knew that Dan had lived there,
and so they introduced us, and the first words we ever said to each other were in Hebrew.
But we ended up communicating with each other about this kind of restlessness in the church
that we were going to.
I was drawn to the Catholic church more for the symbolism and the sacramental aspect of
things that just felt so true to my nature, being kind of a creative person myself, a
writer, songwriter, you know, singer, that kind of thing, it just felt, it felt more
natural to me to find an expression of my own faith in that, in that environment.
So after we found out, after I found out that Dan was actually going to start going to the
catechumenate classes and stuff, I decided to embrace him, embrace the journey with him.
And because I wanted to understand what it was he was going to be doing, but I also wanted
to go into it with an open enough mind that if I felt that it was something I could embrace
too, that we could do it together.
But it was mainly for the understanding of it.
But as a Protestant, I realized the more I learned about what the Catholic church really
believed and what they really teach, the more I realized I didn't have anything to protest.
I think one of the things that really appealed to me about the Catholic church, one of the
things, the whole idea that confession or the sacrament of reconciliation was built
into the structure of the church.
It wasn't like everybody was expected to be perfect, it was like everybody was expected
to blow it.
And so we could all have a place to go when we need to talk about that and when we need
to make our confession and feel forgiven.
Romans 8, 28, that talks about all things work together for good, for those who love
the Lord and are called according to his purpose.
And then I also love the very simple verse that says Jesus wept.
Because one thing that I felt so much as I was going through all of my struggles was
that Jesus was understanding what I was going through somehow and the fact that he was so
human that he could express those kind of human emotions and feel those human feelings.
