Teen publishes her journey of faith
Published: October 10, 2005
It started out as an e-mail correspondence between a young fan and a respected essayist, and it then blossomed into a book on faith.
Randolph resident Marjorie Corbman, 17, a freshman at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, celebrated the release of her book, “A Tiny Step Away from Deepest Faith: A Teenager’s Search for Meaning,” on Friday at the Morristown-Beard School, from which she graduated last spring.
“It has two dimensions,”Corbman said of her book in a phone interview on Thursday.
“On one hand it’s about my own personal journey to faith. On the other hand, it’s about teenagers my age and their spirituality in general.”
Corbman’s path to becoming baptized an Eastern Orthodox Christian last spring began when she was in the sixth grade.
“I was raised Jewish in a Reform Jewish household,”Corbman said.
“We weren’t particularly devout in terms of belief and speaking of God.”
Corbman said she became disinterested in religion, and by the sixth grade she was an atheist. But by the eighth grade she became interested in religion again and had her “own spiritual awakening.”
“Basically it was a beautiful spring,” she said.
“I fell in love with creation, I fell in love with nature and it awakened in me a spiritual longing for something else.”
Corbman studied “almost every world religion” before settling on Christian mythology.
“And I went from skeptically appreciating it, and actively resisting what I was being drawn to,” she said.
As for the book, it came about through correspondence between Corbman and Frederica Mathewes-Green, a Christian writer whose essays caught Corbman’s eye.
Corbman said she was 15 at the time and didn’t know much about Orthodoxy. They e-mailed each other, and Mathewes-Green became impressed with the writing contained within Corbman’s e-mail, Corbman said.
Mathewes-Green forwarded the e-mails to various publishers, and eventually Paraclete Press became interested.
Corbman then turned her e-mails into sample book chapters, and the rest is history.
Corey Abate, Corbman’s English teacher at Morristown-Beard during the ninth, 11th and 12th grades, said she knew Corbman had a preternatural writing ability.
“What needs to be made clear is, it was all of Marjorie’s own doing,” Abate said.
“It was solely independent. As a result she never missed a homework assignment. She never missed a class. In no way did it impinge on her academic aptitude.”
Abate said Corbman took an interest in various subjects. Abate would recommend a book to her class, find out that Corbman would read it and come back the next week to discuss it.
“I’m not trying to tell anyone what to believe,” Corbman said of her book.
“Being 17, I can’t teach anyone anything. It’s more just sharing my own story my, own personal experience, and the personal experiences of those around me.”
She said her parents and friends were very supportive of her book, and she said the actual process of writing took “a lot of effort.”
“What I’ve been saying is, it was a terrible experience,” she said. “But I would do it again in a second.”
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