*as mentioned elsewhere in this space, these installments are my intention to get a very rough draft of a personal project I have been working on for a numbers of years (writing my life story) off the word d and somewhere where it could hold me accountable to doing something with it.
At this point I am jumping ahead in the timeline, as the period between 2000 and 2003 is what effectively defines what I might call the two sides of my life. If there is a whole lot of life lived inbetween the that experience from Grade 5 and these later moments, it is this period that can help pull together some of the common threads.
Having just graduated with my degree in Youth Leadership from a local college/seminary (Providence College), my church, the church that had played in a significant role in my formation from the time I joined is humble beginnings as a house church at 18, was also in the midst of it’s own crisis.
It could be argued that this paralleled a larger sense of disatisfaction and deconstruction that reached beyond the walls of this specific church body, embodied in the mass exodus of many in my generation from the church culture of the 90’s. What’s notable about this exodus is that it was far from uniform. On one side were those leaving what had become labeled a post-modern, watered down Christianity, for the then burgeoning and, at the time, emergent, neo-reformed circles taking North America by storm. This movement was marketed as a demand for more intelligent, more bookish, more “biblical,” more robust expressions of the Church driven by a need to reclaim and thus preserve the hallmarks of studied orthodox theology.
On the other side stood those for whom the whole post-modern climate had pushed them towards a different sort of “critique” of the same problem. Rather than seeking to reclaim orthodoxy, they were seeking to either abandon the whole enterprise altogether,
These two sides did not get along
And neither did the two central pastors at my church.
Where did this leave me? Thinking back on it, I suppose there was a degree to which I found myself trying to figure things out for myself, largely without a whole lot of support. For the nearly 8 years prior to this stuff all coming to a head, my identity had been rooted in a place that had been defined by these people. They were my world. And like the shifting tides, I often found a tendency, probably out of desperation to find some sense of coherency while silently grieving a still undefined and unclarified loss, to double down in defence of whichever side was being attacked in a given moment. Which isolated me more than anything. I think a part of me believed, or at least hoped, that we were somehow at the heart of it all fighting for the same thing, and that somehow something of what had helped the world to make sense might be preserved. Instead, the more people began to leave the more alone I felt.
Or perhaps better put, the more alone I became. Sometimes its difficult to distinguish between feelings and truth. In this case there was, without a doubt, a tangible and physical change when it came to the space itself. Given the degree to which who we are is attached to the spaces we occupy, what eventually became a full fledged church split had left me deeply uncertain about who I was.
And for that matter, who God was.
As I’ve heard it put by some, it led to a kind of homelessness.
There were other factors at play too, all playing an equal role in my feeling lost at this particular moment of my life. I’ll speak more about these things later, but 10 years of pursuing a career in music had come to an abrupt end. The catalyist for that shift- my investment in the youth ministry at much church- had culminated in a quiet, unspoken rejection. Both brothers had now moved out of my parents home, leaving me unable to clarify what that space now was and how I fit into it. I had lost my dog Ginger, my best friend. One of the pastors at my church who had been a vital mentor through the choas of these moments in my life had become a casualty of the exodus.
I no longer recognized the world that I had been formed within. I no longer knew who I was.
I no longer knew what was true.
I would press this further- everything felt like a lie. Shifting for a brief moment of time into the world of neo-reformed zelousness had only served to create more uncertainty and more confusion. Whatever bookishness it had promised me ultimately revealed itself to be more about gatekeeping than actual inquiry. The post-modern liberalism on the other side felt equally problematic, being more obsessed with targeted deconstruction than coherent conversation. And to stay where I was, in what was a highly competitive church environment, seemed to be constantly telling me that who I was was inevitably not good enough for these circles, leaving me on the outside of all three of these circles.
And so I quietly left the whole enterprise- Christianity, the world- life- behind. I went through the motions, but internally I was lost. I shoved my degree in my pocket, slowly left the ministries I had been serving with (namely youth and music), and got a job at a government agency involved with social services relating to high risk youth, dipping in and out of delivering papers on the side and a brief stint with Scholaastic Books.
It was around this time, now about 27 years of age, that I eventually moved out of my parents house and into a shared split level house with a friend. Which is really where I hit my lowest point, my existential crisis coming to a boiling point. Sadly affecting my friend in the process.
Usually when we speak of such crisis points we are also speaking of notable transitions. This might be points of no return. It can be points of revelation or points of change and redirection. This was true for me. The reason I see this as my lowest point is because it was the moment my life took an unexpected turn.
My parents had decided to go away, and they asked me to house sit/dog sit. I agreed. Looking back, I do wonder whether this was a moment that I leaned into precisely because it afforded me space to disappear into. When you can’t handle life, living with a roomate becomes too much to navigate. When you’re in a dark spot, that isolation and aloneness becomes something that we kind of need and crave.
It was late one evening, after having hashed out yet another conversation with my older brother online (our relationship had come to be defined by these kinds of cyclical conversations for a while now, ever since he had disappeared from the picture at 16 (for me, 14) years of age. To be honest his physical absence had been in play ever since elementary school found our lives incidentally parting ways). Having come to define myself as an atheist, which is really a term that emerges from and justifies ones rejection of their religious upbringing, this particular convo. although arguably reflecting nothing out of the norm, had led me to present myself with a challenge. I had been asking people within the online atheist communities I was engaging, whether there was a genuine answer to this simple question- why should I not kill myself.
An important caveat here- this is not to say I was necessarily suicidal. I don’t think I cared either way. Whatever was driving me was based on a singular concern, which was the integriy of my belief. Why was that so important? I’m not sure. I might suggest, as I’ve hinted at through my story up to this point, that this was ingrained in me as a young kid pouring myself into books. The more stories I encountered the more questions it raised about reality and the world. As a young kid i felt, and inuitively understood, that such questions could not be detached from the way I lived my life. All I knew was that it seemed to matter what I believed to be true if my convictions were going to be rational, coherent and revelant.
The question about suicide sseemed to be a microcosm of this greater concern, and one which poked at some of our most tightly held assumptions and values. If one was to simply say no, you should not end your life., the next question would be, why not? What is that prevents me from doing so? A cognitive/biological resistance? An ideological one? If there are good rational reasons to do so, why do I choose not to? My hope was to be able to get underneath the limits I was seeing (and feeling) within the entire rational enterprise, at least when it came to confronting what people were willing to accept within the atheistic framework. After all, if we ridicule religious communities for apparently being unwilling to face reality and instead holding on to comfortable illusions, our atheism should not be doing the exact the same thing.
I never got a real, genuine answer to my question, and so I concluded that people simply didn’t like the answer atheism handed us.
Great, now I’ve isolated myself in these cricles too.
I honestly don’t remember what precisely triggered the following move, but it emerged from that conversation I had with my brother. I also wouldn’t say this was a completely serious endeavor, although it was rooted in a weird sort of appeal to seek that aformentioned integrity. The question of God lingered in the background of my past life. So why not play to it’s relevance? Playing off something my brother had said, I reached into my backpack of cliches and pulled out a tried and true trope. I prayed to God right there in the darkness of that empty house and said, hey God, here’s my challenge. Let’s see if you can move a chess piece. If you are real, give me something, anything that you know would make me believe.
After all, as every good atheist knows, the problem of divine hiddenness is one of the most damning realities for religion.
And then I went to sleep.
And I got up.
Nothing.
Not that I was really considering it. Not that I was expecting anything. My mind was on the rational problem of my question, not the spiritual crisis problem. For me this was a silly game, conjured up in the moment as part of the ongoing interplay I was engaged in.
I continued on with my day. This was a day when I happened to be going to meet with someone who was associated with my church. After all, when it comes to such shifts in ones worldview it’s not like you are able to completely change the shape of your world. You co-exist within it. This is when I happened upon someone whom I did not know. As it turns out, this individual had been praying the evening prior and had felt prompted to write down some words. She wasn’t sure if they were meant for anything, but she wrote them down. In this moment she felt like they were meant for me. And so she gave them to me.
They recounted the words of my prayer from the previous night.
More than that, they tasked me with the act of remembering, recalling the events on my bike from Grade 5. I came to call this my letter from God. And this started a journey through comparative religions and eventually back to Christianity, albeit a Christianity that looked a lot different than the one I had left behind.
It also did something that, for me, was quite profound- it broke the chains of what i would now call a present manifestation of that aforementioned fear. A fear rooted in this haunting need to get things right. To not believe the wrong thing and to be willing to live my life according to what I believe no matter how much it isolated me. I will get further into this with my story as well, but part of what was being uncovered in these moments as well was a fear of being midusnderstood. These years of my life were captured by this pattern of conversations, encoutners, relationships, social circles, work environments, all meeting this same wall when it came my need to challenge what I perceived as constructs and conventions and gaps in reason and logic. As I have come to learn over my now near 50 years of life, we can fight and fight to convince ourselves that we are a self-made individual, which is what most people do, but we are never more or less than the person we are in someone else’s story. Thus, to feel misunderstood is one of the most frightening feelings there is, precisely because it’s the thing that is shaping and telling our story. As the old adage goes, to know and be known. One of the truest cliches regarding the nature of the human experience.
Side note- I read a few helpful books regarding how to write your life story as an amateur, and one of the common refrains I came across was the freedom these authors gave to both tell your story as you see it, but also to understand that your story is similtaneously telling the story of the many “others” whom find roles on your stage and in your play. There is no easy answer this end, simply the freedom to recognize the push and pull and to let go of the fear of gettting it wrong. After all, “as you see it,” can more aptly be described as your wrestling with the different versions of you the world has defined and created.
One of the interesting things to me in reflecting on this important transition in my life is the way it calls forward the thoughts in my first chapter on the importance of distinguishing between what is a life and what is a death. As I suggested there, the minute we lose the ability to define Death, we lose the ability to define Life.
And I don’t use these words in the sense of simple existence and non-existence. I don’t think fear of death is ever the point. Fear of death is always a mask for the true fears running underneath. I use these words in the broader sense of two different kinds of reality. Death embodies decay, suffering, oppression, division, chaos. Life embodies transformation, order, freedom, unity.
One of the great inconsistencies of my atheism was the fact that I found it largely deemed to be rational and acceptable to play fast and loose with these categories. Doing so might hold the appearance of coherency, but when it our ability to name Life and to name Death, and certainly our experience of it, it’s the exact opposite. The sort of willfull ignorance playing fast and loose with our definitions requires is in fact cognitive dissonance. A cognitive disonnance which, in my opinion, is built on a modern resistance to binaries and polarities. Pull back the curtain on how this world works and you find these binaries hard and fast at work all over the place. It’s how the human experience and human cognition intuitively functions.
In many ways I will keep coming back to where I started on this basic observation. The need to define Life and Death as distinguishable from one another was ingrained in me from my very youngest years. Without that I cannot get to my life long struggle with fear. Its what underscores my nightmares. Its what drew me to the power of story. Its what drew me to the power of the imagination. Its what frames my longing for discussion and debate, for the pursuit of rationalism in partnership with the spirit. It’s what makes sense of my deeply felt need to be understood.
On that level I don’t know if it’s a curse or a blessing. It certainly has the power to create enemies and form rifts as I go along. And yet I have also found likeminded souls along the way, people with shared language and shared concern. Some of which I know personally, others which are encounters, be it writers, filmmakers, thinkers, philosophers. Which helps me feel a little less crazy at the very least. On my brightest days, a little less alone.
Or as I once hear it said from the famed avante garde filmmaker, Alejandro Jodorowsky, “We all exist in our own personal reality of craziness.” It’s simply a matter of learning to see that others share that reality with us.
The Stories of my Life 