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.

reflections 3: What happens to a hope deffered

Arriving back had all the units of experience one is told to expect on re-entry to home culture: high to be home, disillusionment with a system which one is a part of, compromise, and eventually a re-settling into a more informed value system. For me, however, resettling hardly ever happened. Compromise was a coming to terms with my loneliness and the fact that I didn't need to come to rest, that my questions would not be answered, and that these things were best to continue defining me.

The things that I used to think so important for maintaining a proper lifestyle: no smoking, no cussing, moderate drinking, healthy eating, tolerance for all, a quiet and submissive spirit- they hardly mattered. The bigger picture was so much bigger, the size of our lives was so much smaller. Even doing those proper things that a good Christian should do, praying for a quotient of time, reading a regulated portion of scripture, trying ones best to interpret it, be at the ready to defend ones faith, going to church and not leaving half way through because your soul is breaking- they fell by the roadside too.
Oh, and I hated war-metaphor.

Who was I fighting?

I was so often assuaged with this feeling from Sunday morning services that I had to go out at attempt some impossible feat- to fight the fight! Defend the faith! When my pastor found me working at one of the prominent cafes in the middle of town he gave me a grin and a fist jab and said, “we're taking over!” As if I had positioned myself there directly to push an agenda that “we” upheld.
“us” “them” “take” “infect” “show” so more often used than “listen” “learn” “relate” “befriend” “be freinded”

As time went by and I processed my trip, it slowly came to me that the one thing I predominantly was taught – if someone asked me how I'd grown. I grew in an appreciation for the experience of others. It was humbling to understand more deeply that everyone has their own experiences, which in turn affect the way they act and the choices they make. How could I judge anyone without understanding the depth of their experiences?

I wanted to get to know people so badly.

When I moved back to my hometown, my closest friends had moved away and I was left treading water, trying desperately to make contact with new people. I tried to connect with people at school, at church, at work- mostly it was like knocking on a brick wall.

I started working at a cafe, and this, at least, was a valuable social sphere. As I got to know snippets of my co-workers life, and them mine, I found these people to be my contemporaries more than objects of an agenda. I found, also, that as I listened, genuinely for the no-strings-attatched purpose of getting to know their stories I could also share mine honestly and without censorship. My experience was what it was, and they weren't in any more a position to attack it than i was to attack theirs- so they didn't. Somebodies experience is their own, and you can't deny them that. Dialogue builds relationships, not walls. I didn't want to “Fight the Fight!” I just badly wanted to talk.

If the gift of humility was lowering my walls, was that bad?

Church continued to be the hardest sphere to break into. Strange, since I was mostly raised within it and I should feel comfortable there. I can't say I blame the congregations I attended. The fault might have been mine. It just seemed that if i could make contact with any social group within a church community that felt remotely on level ground it was short-lived and shallow. I began working through people, deciding that if they weren't going to give me enough of their time, I wasn't going to give them mine. I was on the hunt for people who would converse. Though, it seemed that those who gave me a quotent of time often didn't give me much quality relationship. I grew very sick of sitting around expensive bars with shallow conversations. I began walking away as soon as church ended so that I wouldn't be forced to face the empty awkward rejection that was the feeling that accompanied the defeating attempts to make small talk.

Reflections 2: The end as we know it

I felt broken, abandoned. God felt far away, if he were there at all. In a sea of flowing souls tossed more by the waves of this world than any deity, it was at least easier to believe that God had, at best, simply wound up the clock and left it spinning. But how much of all this feeling was a symptom of the depression that had set in with the culture-stress, homesickness and overwhelmingness? I swung and swayed back and forth on the pendulum which found ecstasy at the opposite side of those days when I preferred not to get out of bed.
Its like the rest of that good stuff, once you compromise a part of your paradigm, it leaves the rest vulnerable- there's no going back. How did the evolution of species, for instance, fit into my understanding of human relationship to God? How do other religions' explanations fit? Where did we get this Christian ethic set which the authoritative Scriptures don't necessarily even support? Unlike some of that other good stuff, however, the quest for truth not only left me wanting, it as easily left me low as high.
Certainty, I thought, was a blissful delusion.