Losing My Religion

Well, frankly, it's long gone. 

And every year at Christmas, I am reminded of what I did once believe, at first as a matter of indoctrination and later, fervently and with all the Pauline conviction of one who has had a conversion experience, and then later still, tentatively but in increasingly vague "mystical" ways until— so tentative as to be meaningless, and then poof, gone. 

But even as late as my junior year of college, at age 23, I was trying to rescue Christianity for myself, from it's unlikely and incredibly far fetched and absurd claims. My second semester junior essay was an attempt to encounter the synoptic Gospels in a way which would square with my burgeoning sense of reality, my increasing doubt and incredulity. In fact, I think that enterprise began the process of losing the religion of my childhood once and for all. 

See ya! Wouldn't want to be ya!

To be perfectly clear, I am referring to Christianity here, the religion that claims with a completely straight face that God impregnated a virgin, sent his son as expiation of original sin, that incarnation of the divine in human form actually occurred, that this same God had his son crucified, but this same son came back to life and continues to live now. That is the story in the Gospels-- a lot of other things, equally difficult to accept even on faith, were added by Paul and the church and later accretions. The Second Coming, Armageddon, salvation versus damnation, etc. 

When I was a kid, I just went along with all of it. So I have had that experience of complete unquestioning acceptance of cultural indoctrination. I'm glad I had the experience, because it has helped me understand just how powerful these contexts can be. It seems to me there are a great many people who have stayed with that indoctrination for the rest of their lives, and who were able to accept it entirely on authority and not question any of it. It is shocking to me now to imagine myself at this time with the same religion of my childhood. 

That's nice Kurt. See you in hell. 

Being essentially an aesthete even as a boy, what I most appreciated about Christianity were the trappings-- candlelight, live music (our Presbyterian church spent $250,000 on a pipe organ in 1975-- a sum that is now equivalent to more than $1 million— and, in the face of protests about the expenditure, of course it was all "for the glory of God," which is an argument I am much more likely to accept NOW, but that's somewhat of a different story)— stained glass, amazing stories of magic and power. I liked the idea that I was special enough to be loved by a loving God, and that humanity as a whole was special enough to be worth saving. The Jesus of my earlier years was basically the nice, sort of bland hippie Jesus who you could talk to and who would put his hand on your shoulder and say "It's okay, I forgive you." There's nothing necessarily wrong with imagining the Universe in such a kind form. 

This kind of image on the wall in my Sunday School classroom— then home for a nice dinner of lamb patties with mint sauce

Especially around holidays such as Christmas, I reveled in the full range of color, light, scent, celebration. In spite of it ostensibly being a celebration of the birth of Jesus, it always seemed Dionysian, hedonistic and pagan to me (though I didn't have that language of course). 

Combined with all of this Presbyterian suburban friendly country club white collar Christianity, there were other dimensions within layers of Christmas that I particularly relished. Santa Claus and his inexplicable magic (in the house we moved to in 1967, there was no fireplace- and I was disconsolate, until it was explained to me that Santa also can come in through an attic or even a window, because he's magic), gift giving and receiving, wrapping paper and its colors and shine and designs, the tree and its decorations and lights, candy, cookies, the whole deal. It was also true that my parents and siblings all seemed much more cheerful at least for a while every Christmas, and I observed that the older relatives all partook of cocktails, beer and wine a little more loosely than usual. It all somehow jumbled into a sort of odd pastiche that basically said "well, if this is what religion is, cool. I like it. It's fun and shiny. I guess I'm a Christian." 

I went for many years under the general assumption in American culture, maybe especially back in former times, that the only real religion was Christianity, and that the other religions of the world were quaint superstitions at best, or the road to hell at worst. I believed for a while that, if one was not Christian, one was definitely going to hell for all eternity. I believed I would live forever in heaven if I just had faith in Jesus. These were the simple dimensions of my indoctrinated faith from age 5 to about 12 or so. 

Things began to get complicated as I got older. I've written elsewhere of weird white light mystical experiences that felt like direct contact with the divine. Alongside these same experiences, probably due to conversations with friends who were not religious, I began to have doubts. The more I learned about the mind and the more empirical I became, the more doubtful all of the propositions involved were. Yet I kept having powerful experiences of something sacred in life, and because of my indoctrination, I thought they were necessarily Christian experiences. 

There were darker stretches all of a sudden where I didn't believe any of it. Yet I often pretended outwardly that I did. Alcoholism started to emerge early in my life also, and Christmas through New Year's became the perfect liquid slide, a great occasion to get intoxicated with what seemed like cultural permission. It all got tangled up too in my conflation of intoxication with spirituality, the great yearning for Oneness with the divine that Carl Jung talks about in his letter to Bill W. 

There was also falling in love with my first real Christian girlfriend the very same year we read the Bible at my liberal arts college, as a seminar reading. I was meditating one night in my dorm room with Coltrane on the stereo and had another white light experience. Christianity influenced that relationship in mostly toxic ways for the next several months. 

But by the time I was in my mid-20's, suddenly, Christianity was what I used to believe but did no more. 

This is an awful existential moment. At least, it was for me. Because the indoctrination was so strong, losing faith altogether was equally strong. If we are not saved, if there is no Jesus, no resurrection, no eternal life, then we are nothing, there is no hope and when we die, that's that. For some years, parallel with my increasing alcohol consumption, I grasped in vain at anything that seemed like it would give life meaning. 

Nothing ever reliably did. 

I am very glad I had this dark, hopeless stretch also. I believe it has made me more compassionate and open minded, and more capable of holding space for my own despair as well as that of others. I don't enjoy the company of people who have not crashed and burned all the way to the fucking ground at least once. Fortunately, that's a huge segment of the human race, so it is still possible for me to have friends. 

I also think there is a distinct and very important difference between an atheist who has been an atheist all of their life and an atheist who once was a believer. I am glad to be the latter, because I think the weird trip through belief gave me access to a lot of inspired conflict and torment and complexity that a simpler, more consistent experience doesn't provide. I understand the fevered religious impulse of utter devotion, and I understand the complete despair of not having anything to believe in combined with the conviction that one *has to believe in something*. (If I don't have to believe in anything, then the despair goes away, or is replaced by other kinds of despair). 

Since I got sober 13 + years ago, I have enjoyed cultivating a spirit of devotion, wonder, gratitude, compassion, mudita and reverence without believing in God, and without having any religious beliefs at all, for that matter. My higher power in sobriety is love, freedom, art and inspiration, still a touch of the Dionysian revelry but without chemical assistance, still a touch of hedonism without same, resonating with the wild, with beauty, with music and the planet I call home. I pray and meditate every day. Many of the things I do on a daily basis also are prayers, or are rooted in a meditative consciousness. But none of my practice is conditional on any beliefs in anything at all. 

Sometimes I miss having a set of doctrines into which I could nestle back and just accept entirely on faith. But usually I am quite relieved not to be in the war anymore between my naturally devotional spirit and my naturally skeptical, questioning mind. In order to make a home for myself, I had to leave the home of my childhood decisively. It's funny too that this is also a journey away from all of Western culture, in many ways. 

That is probably worth at least another separate dispatch from Hades, however.