A few moments ago, I checked my email and opened a message from someone I don't know very well. The message contained incomprehensible gibberish about falling in love, followed by a graphic depiction of Jesus, bloodied, wearing a crown of thorns, sitting naked on a cross, then a verse from Matthew (10:32), and an exhortation to forward the message to ten friends if I really love Jesus.
Which I don't.
The person who sent it to me--forwarded three times--wrote to all the recipients of this email from her address book, "I hope this brings you blessings."
It doesn't bless me in any way.
I don't recall the exact date I lost the religion of my upbringing. It was a process, a journey, one step after another after another toward truth, toward understanding, toward a more reasonable perspective of the Universe and all its mysteries. I didn't decide one fine day to stop being Christian, though I do recall an occasion that I realized if I went much further down the path I was traveling, there would be no going back. I couldn't un-know what I was knowing.
But the journey began when I was young, asking questions to which the answers were a condescending "god is sovereign." Fast forward to my mid-twenties when I began to question in earnest the teachings of the church, the contents of the Bible, everything I'd always known was true.
Perhaps the beginning of my departure from the Christian religion began as early as my exposure to my father's insistence that I question everything, even while he was a devout born-again Christian. He lived through the era of Nazi Germany, and he believed that good German people allowed Hitler to rise to power because they stopped asking important questions.
In yesterday's post, I wrote a bit about the influence the Star Wars saga had in my life. Several bits of wisdom from those films paved the way for me to depart from my religious education and think for myself. Princess Leia said to Luke Skywalker about Han Solo, "He's got to follow his own path, no one can choose it for him." And Obi-Wan Kenobi told Luke, "You will find that many of the truths we cling to depend upon our point of view."
Indeed.
Faith is tricky. Religious faith demands that we suspend our disbelief indefinitely. At least, that is how it was with the religion of my upbringing. Believe without question. Nobody has the right to question almighty god. In the brand of religion I grew up with, we were to be isolated, kept away from any inkling of anything that might make us look away from what we were told was absolute truth, right there from the pages of god's inerrant word.
I remember a book that I loved when I was living with my best friend Jill in Minnesota. It was called The Dreamer, and it portrayed god in a much more positive light with a much more positive myth than all that hellfire and brimstone of the Biblical old testament. That book made me weep with relief. Could god really be that loving, compassionate, just a dreamer like me?
My little brother also started to question his religion. He actually had plans to join the ministry at one point, studied Greek a little bit, so he could interpret parts of the Bible in their original language. He started to be intrigued by Native American Shamanism, and at the same time, I was being exposed to other Nature religions, including Wicca. I remember having discussions with my parents and my little brother, and I remember asking my friend for her books about Wicca because I was thirsty to understand a different point of view.
I read, and I conversed with people who had other ideas, and I thought, and I wrote, and I read some more. I started to understand that Christianity had lied to me. For decades. I read about holidays originally celebrated by Pagan cultures that were adopted by the new Roman religion as the Roman empire conquered everything in sight.
Losing my religion saved me, and I'm hoping to write a book about the entire process soon. (It's one of those projects on the list of things I want to write.) The faith I have now, which is difficult to define in any simple terms, though there is a refreshing simplicity to it, differs so much from the faith I knew at 30, at 20, at 10. It has been deconstructed, reconfigured, built from the ground up, streamlined, and the process continues.
There was a time that I could not even fathom a person being an atheist, and now that word defines my approach to the world better than any other, certainly better than the word Christian. (Pagan runs a close second; I can be Pagan without believing in any deity.)
I understand faith much more sanely, now. I see different kinds of faith. I carry daily faith that the sun will rise every morning, even while not knowing exactly the mechanism of how the sun shines. In a comedy bit about religion that is as poignant as it is hilarious, George Carlin said that he could easily believe in the sun because he could see it. I can have faith that when I get on a plane, I will get from point A to point B without knowing how the plane stays aloft. The important distinction is that it is possible for me to know how the sun shines and how a plane flies.
I understand that the concept of god was invented by humans to explain and define a Universe they couldn't have explained and defined in the same way we now can with the scientific method and the ever-expanding technology that assists in collecting data to analyze scientifically. It is completely logical that ancient people would explain weather phenomena as the gods throwing lightning bolts. On an episode of Cosmos, Carl Sagan mentioned that different cultures named the constellations differently, and something clicked with me. Of course! Just like different cultures have different languages, different cultures have different explanations, different gods.
It's an exciting, baffling, interesting time to be alive. The more science discovers, the more questions it answers, the more questions arise, and religion no longer provides any useful answers to life's great mysteries. At the same time, we live in an age in which, as John Mayer sings, "Belief is a beautiful armor...the chemical weapon for the war that's raging on inside."
People need faith, it seems, but I think that religious faith is a poison, an armor, a chemical weapon that damages everything and everyone in its path, even its perpetrators. The war that John Mayer speaks of, the war raging on inside, is the need to matter, to be loved, to be relevant, to be sacred.
Faith in myself is the way to win that internal war. Losing my religion saved me. That loss was the foundation on which I built my life, one of self-reliance, of wonder, of discovery, of love and tolerance and acceptance that isn't based on some dusty nonsense from several centuries ago when people still believed the world was flat.
Faith, the good kind of faith, should be fluid, like water, like a river, always moving, always changing, always adapting and carrying a spirit forward.
Copyright 2008 Melissa LaFavers