I grew up about as secular as it gets. I attended some variety of church service maybe 5 times my first 28ish years alive. I met my now wife in that 28th year and knew she was a church goer, so, in order to get the gal I started attending her non denom church with her. Super long story short: I fell in love with Holy Scripture thanks in large part to her family, and like many curious seekers, I stumbled upon Jordan Peterson's Genesis lectures which definitely grabbed my attention. Not long after that I found his friend Jonathan Pageau giving a lecture on symbolism and was really blown away by what he had to say. I started hearing a lot about the church fathers through Pageau's different talks, specifically St. Gregory of Nyssa (Life of Moses), St. Ephraim the Syrian (Hymns on Paradise...my favorite book of all time), and St. Maximos the Confessor (The Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ) and decided to read some of their writings. Naturally, after getting through a few books, I was flabbergasted as to why I hadn't heard a mention of these ancient fathers in the church circles I was familiar with and realized very quickly how ignorant I was to church history. I went down the church history rabbit hole and just could not get enough (still can't) of all these early Christian writings. There is so much more to say as I know you understand, but it was reading the early fathers that did it for me.
