A crisis of faith

Ok, so evidently I'm not that good at metaphor. On Sunday, I blogged something incredibly spiritual and heartfelt, after composing in my head, in my Moleskine, in my head some more, and finally here on blogger. I never do that.

But no one really seemed to *get* it. Everyone read it and kind of went, "man you really suck at writing fiction," but that's too mean to actually SAY, so they just kept their collective mouth shut, as their mothers taught them to do.

I considered explaining at the end of my "story" what it was I was writing about, but it was already so damned long, I figured a little confusion would be better than tl;dr, yeah? But now it's time to explain things to you, because dammit, no one ever comments. If you haven't read You Can't Go Home Again yet, please do so before you continue, otherwise it will make no sense.

Did you read it? No cheating, now.


Ok fine. Here you go. I suspect this is not going to be a whole lot more eloquent than Sunday's post anyway, which is why I put it in that form in the first place. Don't say you haven't been warned.




I am Mary, and Christianity itself is Christian. The story wasn't fiction so much as metaphor, and our relationship was very real and very tumultuous. I know that in the end, Christianity didn't change; I just discovered a part of it I never really knew before, and by that time, well, it was just too late for me. Even though I did attend with a friend an extremely liberal Christian church on Sunday, the kind that should have spoken to someone like me; even though I attended with the most pious of spirits and the most open of hearts, that love is lost and it's just not who I am anymore.

A few people I know and love dearly have asked me the usual questions atheists and agnostics get asked by Christians who just don't get it. "Why do you hate God?" "What do you have against Jesus?" "Aren't you afraid of going to hell???"

Well, in short, No. As you read on Sunday, I have no lingering bitterness for the religion itself (as a whole), and I certainly don't hate God or Jesus. I just don't, can't believe in the Christian god anymore (I tried, yeah?), and I don't love the religion the way I used to. As for Jesus, his mythos is far and away one of my favorites.

Something else I wrote in my Moleskine on Sunday, when I was purging the plethora of thoughts that had run through my brain all morning while I was at church, was, "What is a crisis of faith?"My crisis of faith wasn't when I left Christianity, because even then I wasn't sure what I believed about God. I still had a lot of lingering feelings and worries, as you do when a long relationship ends. In my mind would ring the idea I expressed to others so many times as a Christian - God's always waiting, and you'll never fill that hole inside with anything else.

My crisis of faith is right now. When I've opened myself up to the possibility, when I went to church, lost myself in it, and said "hey God, speak to me" and all I heard were the echoes of silence. The hardest part of all this, for me, is that I DO have a hole. I still hunger and thirst for spiritual fulfillment. But contrary to everything I believed ten years ago, Christianity and the Christian God can't fill that hole or fulfill that need for me.

I had fulfillment that reconciled with my current self, at one point, at my Unitarian Universalist church in Detroit. NWUU took excellent care of my mind and my soul and my spirit. I miss them dearly, but none of the UU churches I've attended here in Chicagoland have met that need or felt like home to me. They're all too intellectual, too focused on the mind, to focused on politics and the world. That's fine for some people, but that's a need I can fill on my own. That's not what I go to church for.

I had many more thoughts as I was thinking over my experience Sunday morning. Anger that I was raised in such a literalist version of Christianity (maybe if I hadn't been, I would never have left), sorrow at not feeling comfortable enough to join in communion, jealousy of the people who still had it in them to believe, a sense of longing for spiritual fulfillment and peace, hope for those I love to find a middle ground, curiosity as to where I'll go from here.

So many thoughts to organize, and the best way I could think to do it was in a poorly written pseudo-fictional blog post. It would have been so much easier just to pray!