Eurovision contestant Rugilė Daujotaitė tried everything from shamanism to ayahuasca in her search for peace. Then she opened a Bible.
There probably aren't many conversion stories that begin with a woman dressed as a Lithuanian thunder goddess hoping to get to Eurovision, but Rugilė Daujotaitė's journey to Catholicism took a particularly unusual route.
For Americans unfamiliar with the Eurovision Song Contest, it is difficult to explain quite how enormous -- and occasionally wonderfully bonkers -- the annual competition is. Countries from across Europe and beyond send one musical act to compete in a spectacular live television show watched by more than 150 million people. There are soaring ballads, wind machines, elaborate costumes and performances involving just about anything you can safely squeeze onto a stage.
(And in the interests of full disclosure, I should admit to a little family bias here: My uncle Paddy McGeegan -- real name Paddy McGuigan -- represented Ireland at Eurovision in 1968 and came fourth with a beautiful song, "Chance of a Lifetime," so I've always had a little soft spot for the competition.)
Back to Lithuania... Daujotaitė was among the singers hoping to represent her country. A professionally trained jazz vocalist who studied in the Netherlands, she appeared several times in Lithuania's national Eurovision selection and became a familiar face on television.
Yet away from the cameras, her life looked very different:
“I was getting worse and worse,” she recently told the BBC. “Inside, I was tortured emotionally, spiritually, mentally.”
Looking everywhere for God
Daujotaitė had grown up surrounded by New Age spirituality. Her mother and grandmother were drawn to a mixture of spiritual traditions, and a house full of books fed the young Rugilė's own curiosity about God. As she grew older, that search took her through different countries, beliefs and practices until she became deeply involved in modern shamanism.
While studying jazz in the Netherlands, she participated in ceremonies involving ayahuasca, the powerful psychedelic brew used in some South American religious traditions, and eventually began leading spiritual retreats herself.
From the outside, her life looked increasingly successful. She was performing on television and establishing herself as a singer while also teaching others how to find spiritual fulfillment. Inside, however, she knew something was badly wrong.
“I felt like a liar,” she recalled of trying to guide other people toward happiness while her own mental and spiritual state was deteriorating.
Her doubts were also being fed by something she noticed among the people returning to her retreats. She described many New Age practitioners as gentle and peaceful people sincerely looking for answers, yet she couldn't understand why some returned year after year without seeming to become any happier.
Eventually, Daujotaitė began questioning the beliefs she had spent years accumulating and, almost unexpectedly, started reading the Bible.
An unexpected road home
In an earlier interview about her conversion, Daujotaitė described how she'd travelled widely gathering what she called “a whole collection of gods,” believing that different religions were simply different faces of the same divine reality. Christianity slowly began to challenge that assumption.
The change wasn't immediate or tidy. At one of the last ayahuasca retreats she led, this time in Tenerife, she was already reading Scripture and becoming increasingly uncomfortable with what she was doing. She told the group not to take the drug and began questioning practices that had once seemed to offer the answers she was looking for. Eventually, she walked away from them altogether and turned toward the Catholic Church.
Years later, the contrast she draws between the two lives is striking. New Age spirituality, she says, had encouraged her to search constantly for greater enlightenment and to construct her own understanding of truth. Christianity asked something quite different of her. Rather than believing she was progressing toward some higher spiritual state, she discovered the freedom of accepting that she was simply an imperfect human being who needed God.
“I searched for the wise all over the world,” she said in a Lithuanian interview after her conversion, recalling journeys through jungles, ashrams, villages and cities in pursuit of spiritual answers.
Yet one of the loveliest details of her story came after she finally stopped looking quite so far afield. Daujotaitė had experienced what she described as “morning depression” since she was 18, waking without wanting to face the day. After turning her life over to God, she remembers waking one morning and realizing something had changed. She wanted to live. She went out into the forest and felt at peace.
Today Daujotaitė still sings, although her music has taken a different direction. She has taught Christian music, led young people in worship and worked within Catholic parishes in Lithuania. Her voice, which once took her onto television screens dressed as a thunder goddess, is now frequently heard singing in church.
Conversion stories rarely follow a typical route. Faith can be handed down quietly through a family or arrive through a friendship, a crisis or an encounter nobody could have anticipated. And sometimes a person can travel through countries and spiritual traditions, searching ever harder for God, only to discover that the answer begins with something as simple as opening a Bible.
If you're curious to see the singer in true thunder goddess mode, click on the video below!
Unfortunately my Lithuanian is not up to scratch, so AI was used in the preparation of this article.
