Posted on Sep 15th, 2007
by 
Mike
NPR, last weekend, played a program entitled, "Sound and Spirit", which featured a segment about how a young man lost his fath in Christ. He had been afraid that a spirit medium who had been invited to demonstrate in one of his classes was actually a demonic emissary. So, he brushed up on his Bible studies, prayed hard, fasted, and came to class with his Book in hand, ready to fortify his position at the first sign of the Lord of Flies. Instead, he watched an old lady try to bamboozle his class, finally tripping over her own pile of bullshit when, in the middle of her possession by King David, our narrator unwittingly exposed her with a piece of Old Testament trivia which the real King David would have easily answered. It was in this moment that the young man discovered how powerful lies could be disappeared with book-learning and how little his faith had to do with the "victory." From then on, up to and including his broadcast, he felt that he had learned himself right out of the Evangelical church, crossing a border he had never seen into an awakening he could not close his eyes against. Like a ship passing into the fog beyond its port, past the sight of the pier, it was all left behind.
I don't think I've ever heard someone so clearly state the feeling of my faithlessness. Sometimes, you desperately want it back, just to give the darkness and the fear some context or purpose. But you can't unlearn what you have learned. I can't just believe in Santa, now, not the way I did when I was six, when it really meant something to me. Sure, I could decorate the tree, hang the sock, leave cookies on the kitchen table, and go to bed just like I used to do. But I would sleep the way I do now. I wouldn't fidget and kick my legs, finally unable to resist a sneak up the stairs to quickly peek around the living room, painted puce from the visual cacophony of the lights, and experience the AWE, that feeling like you're being hugged by the universe. It breaks my heart but I think that part of me is done.
And I get mad at the faithful, but not because I'm jealous. It's because I can't talk to them. I know what they feel but can't stand to be so close to a truth of my past, set like a fossil in a ledge. I used to be like that, I say to myself, and nothing I ever learn or see or feel will make me not think what I think about these people, who remind me of a time I can't understand, now. Maybe I'm afraid to confront that part of myself which, while gone, hangs about in the air I breathe. I feel loss, in this strange way, for what I never knowingly surrendered.
In the past year, I have dallied with Buddhism, Quakerism, and Romuva. The personality cult aspect really takes a lot of the shine from Buddhism and Quakerism doesn't allow haggling. This hurts their chances, needless to say. Romuva is very sweet, even if the whole Lithuanian thing sort of puts people off. But Romuva is a theistic pagain faith which, while nature-oriented, involves me having to believe in things I'm pretty sure aren't real. I like thinking that the clouds I see at work are the product of Perkunas, the storm-lord, but even without what I know of meteorology, it just isn't in me to buy it.
Ultimately, the hardest time I have with religion is knowing why I even still want it. It isn't so much of a hole in my being as an on-again, off-again feeling like there's something I've forgotten at home and I'm in a car, 50 miles away. It's very possible that this is just the pangs of completism, or some shred of a herd instinct that bubbles up from time to time. Unfortunately, I expect it's one of those nasty little life-surprises where you don't know what you need until you don't have it.
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January 2008 
