Reflections 10: That's how the light gets in

The one thing I can't bring myself to fully deny as delusion is the thing that some Christians say identifies Christianity as unique. Relationship. There is no denying that I had a relationship with God, with Jesus- truth or delusion, the relationship was there. It still is. I still talk to God daily. I have seen too little to simply believe without doubt, but I have seen too much to simply walk away without qualms. Admitting possibility means possibly walking away from God. That's what can make his elusiveness so frustrating. You'd think I'd be able to see him, to feel him in some way that I could hold on to. At the same time, I am somewhat afraid that he will show himself and force me to come face to face with what i can not reconcile. Perhaps His invisibility is as readily grace in this moment as it seems grand apathy in another.

Grace that taught my heart to fear and grace my fears relieved.

There is something else that I can't deny. There's the good, the mountaintop, the unfettered beauty. There is the joy, permeating peace, senseless satisfaction- things which characterized days, many of them just memories, that yet give me hope that, even while I'm wrestling these snares out, grace might, one day, lead me to where I belong.

Reflections 9: There's a crack in everything

At this point it begins to seem more attractive to let down my guard completely; I could still call myself a Christian if i wanted to, I suppose, if i wanted to fit in in my current society. Importantly, however, it would mean to let go of all that baggage of sunk costs. I would be free of a dying investment. I would be liberated from a sense of responsibility that doesn't benefit me any more than it apparently benefits anyone else. The feeling, sometimes, is akin to the one you feel when you've been at a dead end job too long. It no longer pays the bills, its the same unfulfilled routine, its taking away from other opportunities and you don't even really like your co-workers that much anymore anyways. When you look at them, half the time, you see exactly what you never want to become. No, leaving church altogether might be the best option. I could always hang out with the ones that would accept me despite me outside the institution.
Seriously? Not likely. Once raised in a certain manner, it is especially unsavoury to break ties and habits.

But is that all it comes down to?

We see what we want to see. I observe that a significant shift has occurred in my psyche. I used to want to see God and from the Christian power-of-Jesus paradigm, but over time it became harder to see. Then, it shifted. I came to the point where i would have preferred to see from an agnostic paradigm. I used to say that despite having never seen enough to believe, I have also seen too much to walk away. Now I say, “like what?” Have I ever seen an undeniable miracle? I certainly haven't had one happen for me, not that couldn't be explained away. Yes, there is benefit to religion. There really is. But if one can't truly believe, can one really benefit?
I wonder, now, if, just like those who want to see miracles see miracles, I've chosen to ignore the possibility of such because of what I want. I can't bring myself to believe the whole of the Christian belief system, and so I can't bring myself to believe a portion. If I am forced to admit to a true miracle, then I might have to face the whole thing again, and I don't feel like i can do that.

Frankly, I feel too broke. I can't go back now.

So “surely your 'miracle' was either fallacy or farce.”

But it can't possibly make me believe.

Reflections 8: Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn

I was pretty much through with church, mostly through with church people. I was getting more and more worked up. I would still go though. Today I would still go.

I smoked a few cigarettes to try and calm down.

As I sat in the congregation I couldn't focus. I couldn't take it. I didn't need to back further down, I was becoming aware that I was at the end of my rope. There was nothing left to hold onto.

A bulletin informed me that there would be a seminar series starting. It was conducted by a pastor with a degree in theology, in history, and a phD in philosophy. He would be addressing some of those issues that confront people that are having trouble reconciling their pithy faith with the real world. His sessions were especially pointed at students who were confronting real intellectual problems in their first years of university.

I signed up for every session.

Let it be said that, despite what may sound to you a mostly emotional tendency on my part to get away from faith, I was also a student confronting intellectual barriers. I wasn't, however, just the regular first year student hitting philosophical errors for the first time served up fresh from a vehement atheist prof. I'm not an intellectual, but I did read books. I had spent three semesters studying theology, exegesis and biblical history at seminary. I had the advantage of a world-view shift from Canada to working in environments steeped in Catholic, Anglican, western protestant, and indigenous paganism and culturally “other” experiences. The world was big and complicated, and I wasn't a first year student fresh out of my Christian high-school with my pop as pastor and mom and housemaid. My background, like any-ones, was distinct and I couldn't expect everything to translate.

I also had a few years on the average freshman. People would say I'm young, and I am, but they also say that the twenties are the years of your life, and I'm almost half way through mine. If they promise to be prime, you'd think I should make some calls to make sure I'm making good my years.

The leader of this seminar series said that he was helping young people make paradigm shifts through a time in their lives when their brains weren't completely formed. Apparently completion doesn't happen until you are mostly through your twenties (and most of those “good years” are gone.) He wanted to make sure no one gave up their faith without giving it the fair run that it deserved.

I won't disagree with him, but I will say that with all the running, its hard to imagine, some days, that it's going somewhere.

He said that many of these young students want to give up their weak faith partially became there is a party going on in the next dorm, and they really want to get high and laid. As fun as those things would be, I am not really that kid. I have been holding on to the morals attached to my faith quite religiously in hope that doing so is worthwhile- even while many of my contemporaries (many of whom also seem to have no problem still identifying as “Christian” by the way) have not. Can you blame me, however, for courting abandonment. Its viable. In which case, hell, maybe my morals don't have the value I thought they did either.

But as I said, hedonism is not my lone motivator.

At the least, these seminars have proved that there are some Christians who really work out their faith, who directly confront everything and yet don't find the crux compromised at the end of the day. Its challenging. I can see why so many people fall on pat answers. The truth is much harder to work with.

I might have reached the end of my rope, but there might be another rope, and it might be longer.

reflections 7: Does it dry up?

Economists talk about “sunk costs” and “opportunity costs.” The sunk costs are your investments- what you've already put into a project. Opportunity costs are what staying in that present endeavor means you are giving up by not quitting it and reaping the benefits of a new project. The simple moral is to get out of something that is not paying out, even if you've been in it for a long time. Naturally humans are bad at doing this because we want our past investment to be validated. Pride can undermine the data which says we should give up and let ourselves fail.
The perplexity of my faith is made further difficult if this rule applies. In this vein, a decision is not merely economical. I have sunk a huge amount of investment into the ideals promoted by my spirituality and my religion. As I have outlined, recently my sentiment has been that it has not paid me out. You can argue that its not all about me, or that benefits will come later, but that's an annoyingly elusive motivation to hold up. They are both possibilities that are as unconfirmable as they are said to be lucrative. The natural state of things tends to show that without some kind of incentive that plays out within the near future, humans do not respond very well. If you find a committed and invested church patron, you will find someone who says that their faith satisfies them with some kind of benefit in the here and now.
Sure, I'm probably missing some profundity. Maybe I had a hold on it once, but I don't feel it anymore. I can't deny another experience either, if it can't relate. The case being, I'm just trying to understand why mine is different.

reflections 6: world serves its own needs, dummy serve your own needs

Since I was about 15 I had been involved in one kind of ministry, public-service, volunteering thing or another, mostly youth ministry, with some music playing for church services. The music was usually fun, but became disillusioning if you looked around and saw a static stagnation of routine characterizing it (“Now lets send off the congregation with an up-beat song!” How I'm sick of hearing that old drum.)
Youth ministry could be rewarding if you could find those youth who could genuinely say that what you had contributed to had made their life more worth living. In all reality, however, the greater landscape of their lives will probably have more of a pull than what you did. The overbearing worldview of parents, of teachers, of friends of events shape our horizons and pull us more than we like to believe. Now, if we do believe in the power of God and that it is beyond our little efforts, that's something else. I had certainly hoped in this. Now, however, its hard to remind myself of it, if I run into a youth on the street whom I had invested in with prayer and relationship. I get the feeling that most of them consider the ministry a blip on the radar. Good while it lasted. Ultimately they had continued mediocre lives, and whose to say whether they were better or worse off for it.
I didn't start feeling so disillusioned until some time after I arrived home from my last “big” ministry experience. What I felt coming back was that I couldn't fully engage in the same sorts of ministries that I had before. I did at first, when I came back at the same time summer camps were happening and i poured what I feels like was my last portion of passion into that. I've become increasingly less engaged since. Basically, I was tired of helping people. I needed someone to help me and my best efforts at asking for help (which, I'll admit, weren't always great) reinforced the idea that no-one was interested (again: “if no one cares, why bother?”) Even when I wasn't directly involved in a formal ministry position I had always made a point of helping someone. I guess I thought I was finding purpose and acting righteously by investing into others.
But now I was loosing my grip on any kind of commitment.
“Sounds like a classic case of burnout” were the words of someone kind enough to finally hear me out.
With this realization, however, I still couldn't seem to make quality contact with anyone who seemed interested in helping me. How do I heal from being “burnt out”? My town felt like it was full of flakes.
I could move.
I almost did, twice. Few people knew how close I was to doing so. Both times, however, something pulled me back, to pick up and carry on resolute in my career vector, though perhaps not in that of my soul. Could a change in scenery really help anyways? That said, I am a runner. When things look bad I like to run. But when is that actually a good idea?

Reflections 5: Does it explode?

Something else happens, I've found, when the people you hope will approve you for a certain moral life don't seem to notice you exist. You start to wonder why you bother keeping face. Sure, there are certain morals that I held personally valuable outside of societal pressures, some I felt were too imperative to my relationship with God to compromise, but when my word-view of values was shaking and my relationship with God felt so pithy, it wouldn't take much to set the bar lower.
Its not like I was alone in my flailing either. That much was apparent. Young marriages I watched die, seemingly reliable characters fall apart and pray to vice. Those standing were often self sustained within a bubble of ludicrous religiosity.
Probably my biggest motivator to live up to a certain standard came from the work with youth I had done for most of my adult life. I was kept accountable by children. I, however, was working less and less in this field, and, despairingly, I was at a point where I had seen enough of these youth come of age and throw all caution to the wind regardless of my best efforts. What did it matter what I did?
A journal entry that reflected on this past autumn adds to the sentiment in the following:

“Nothing made sense! Leave it to the philosophers to 'disprove God' in their own logical way. As someone looking at history, I couldn't see how anything added up. It was, is, and is heading for chaos. My delusions have created a mechanism for me to believe in hope, love, the soul, purpose- and now that was all slipping away. And without faith, what were morals? Without the soul or purpose, what is conviction? My grip was slipping, and I would admit that it would only take an inclined tap to say yes to [here I insert some common vices that i thought better of printing] Frankly, how different were we all....? Where God seemed absent I became more aware of a world of people affected like me, treading water, making their best guesses, and feigning altruism to hold one another up. I had denied myself access in some sense of self-righteous arrogance. Now I wanted not just to hear other stories, I wanted to join them.”

Reflections 4: And I Feel Fine

One day, around April I think, I was in a bad way. I knew that things were very wrong at the soul level and I was seemingly incapacitated to do anything about it. When I stepped forward in an especially moving church service, two friends who I had grown up with- but didn't spend time with anymore- stepped forward, prayed vigorously for me, saw my desperation laid bare. One offered coffee. I took him up with immediacy and intent. He had dealt with depression too, worse than mine, but was now doing better, on top of the world in his social and spiritual life. We talked out my situation for a long time. He said he had great hope for me, having his own life as reference. I bared my fear of meaningful relationship, that I might drag down someone who counted on me. He said he understood, and told me to hope.
I was too realistic to believe that one church service and a good talk would fix everything, so I hoped that our conversation wouldn't be the last.
But it was.
Perhaps my expectations of relationship got re-arranged when i was abroad. I came to believe that they should last, be supportive, be healing. I guess that maybe my north American life could never be this way. It was too much to expect?
I pulled up my bootstraps for a while. Went to the church where something good had happened, but slowly, my hopes for betterment faded and life went on with its dips and swings. Maybe never as deep again, or else I just became adapted to it, a living with the numbness.