You may recall that I grew up in church. Perhaps you did, too. This card is funny because people have one of three responses, and maybe it’s actually this way for all fifty-seven cards. But I’m reflecting on the triad of choices now. It’s either a shoe-in, no contest, a definite value, OR it’s an easy card to toss in the “no” pile on the first round, OR, it is deeply wrestled with; compared and analyzed alongside other cards like a spiritual life or meaning in life. It all sort of depends on where you came from and where you’re going. I am, you may have guessed, moving away from organized religion in my life. Except… I’ve started going to church. About six weeks ago as of this writing I was sitting with my friend around a nice backyard fire. We were sharing a whiskey and a moment together and I was becoming animatedly enraged, (as I do), with various church leaders from our shared past, their abuses and untended wounds. He listened quietly, gave me space to feel and be myself as friends do, and then suggested I try a church he’s been attending with his wife for a while. It’s a very different kind of church than I’ve ever attended before, and I’m not going to make this essay a comparative side-by-side, nor am I going to give you a list of reasons why I’m still in church at all. We are all on our own paths. In this series I’ve admitted to being disillusioned with the church of my youth. I’ve tried to be fairly diplomatic about it, but if you’re paying attention it’s there. In this series I’ve admitted to stealing in my youth, I’ve admitted to my own capacity for violence and malice and dishonesty. Now here’s another admission. I am still on what I weirdly call a “Jesus flavored path”. No matter how much I grow weary of the church, all her rules, all her dominions, all her hate-dressed-as-love, I do not seem to grow weary of the words of Jesus. And I do not tire of wanting to be more like him. I think. I grew up learning a certain set of facts regarding Jesus, regarding his place in the larger story of the Bible, regarding our appropriate responses to those facts. Do you remember POGs? It was a fad in the 1990s. A game played by stacking cardboard disks, (the name was taken from the name of a Hawaiian beverage, Passionfruit-Orange-Guava, and the acronym POG printed on the cardboard bottle lids). You’d stack up your POGs face down and then use a heavier disk, a Slammer to, (as the name would suggest), slam the pile. The player would “win” any POGs that flipped face up. In my personal experience, I rarely ever played the game, instead I collected POGs. I had a binder with special plastic pages in it that was made specifically for displaying and protecting the little disks. I did have a SLAMMER though; a huge, heavy piece of acrylic plastic affixed to a metal disk that said the following, (this is why I’m telling the POG story): The Bible says it—I believe it—That settles it. I grew up believing in the Bible as a set of literal facts collected for my benefit. I grew up telling myself, (and almost believing it), that the very word Bible, stood for Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. In reality the word “Bible” obviously comes from the Greek biblia (βιβλία), meaning “The Books”, itself stemming from biblos (βύβλος) which means papyrus and refers also to the Phoenician port city of Byblos where it was commonly traded. But you already knew that. But in my little-guy brain, that’s exactly what the Bible was—specific instructions for living. If it wasn’t in there, it didn’t exist; it spoke, if you read hard enough, to every potential eventuality this life could throw our way. This is how I grew up. This is what I believed. I memorized various passages of scripture and performatively recited them to Mrs. Kennedy in order to win the 10¢ goldfish she’d bring in as prizes once each year for the good little boys and girls who’d done their memorization. I won my fish. I named him Clyde. He lived for many years and only died in the house fire I mentioned in the Privacy essay. He was six inches long living in a 20 gallon aquarium at the time. It was too small a habitat. I believe he’d still be alive today if not for that ill fated end, teaching us lessons about growth. And over time my beliefs have changed; I have already admitted that I no longer believe in a place of ECT, a real acronym used to shorten Eternal Conscious Torment, the specific kind of hell we believed in. The cracks began to form in that doctrine many years ago and they continued until one day I just… didn’t believe that way. I couldn’t. I couldn’t make myself see what some people see in the texts and I couldn’t unsee or unlearn some of the things I’d seen and learned that countered that narrative. And as I mentioned in the Spiritual Life essay, without hell, without consciousness in torment, evermore, evermore, what were we even left with? For me, I’m left with invitation. One of Jesus’ most often used words was come. He was invitational in nature, that guy. He was always speaking with authority the religious leaders didn’t feel like he did, (or should) have to forgive, to invite to repair. And those are things we can do, too! I cannot, (as I have already stated many times), speak to the afterlife. I do not know. But I can invite you into love, into kindness. I can look for the fruits of the spirit of God in my life, the Love, Joy, Peace in my life and I can foster and foment those things in my life. I can share good news with you—the good news is that we have this life. We have now, today, together. We can be heaven or hell for one another—indeed we will be heaven or hell for one another. We may have no other way. A few years ago I started tuning my ear to Rainn Wilson. Hopefully you at least know of Wilson and his character from The Office, Dwight Schrute. He’s hilarious and a treasure. He was born and raised into the Baha’i faith. I am compelled by his messaging and his stories, and I’ve thought, privately to myself and apparently publicly on the internet, that if I had it to do again I might dig a little deeper into the Baha’i. A few years ago I received my introduction to Buddhism. It was simple and a little silly, but it was mine. I was wandering Powell’s Books and picked up, almost at random, James Norbury’s The Journey: Big Panda and Tiny Dragon. In it two friends embark on a beautiful journey out of and into. They leave a comfortable home they’d made together taking only Tiny Dragon’s teapot as luggage. They face various beautifully illustrated trials and finally lose even the teapot before finding a new place, a new life, a new home, and yes, a new teapot. In the end all is different but all is well. So, I feel it going for me. Perhaps in another life I’d have pursued Buddhism. Perhaps I’ve had made a terrible monk somewhere. Am I devout? The question here is am I devout? Do I hold to a religious faith? And the answer, which still, after all this time, after all these words, is hard for me to write, is no. Not to the faith I know—not to the faith I knew. I have left the way I knew. I can no longer hold to a religious tradition. That word ‘hold’—as in grasp tightly, clutch, refuse to let go—that’s carrying a lot of weight here. Because I’ve let go. Not of Jesus, not of love, not of invitation. But of the structure that said there was only one way to understand any of it. But am I devoted? Yes, I think so. Devoted to continuing to sojourn on, continuing to identify those fruits in my life, continuing to discipline myself in the way(s) of love. A word used to describe people in my situation has been Deconstruction. As in, we’re de-constructing our faith. But I don’t like that term very much and I don’t actually feel like it applies to me or maybe to very many people at all. I do know folks who want to just tear it all down and walk out of the rubble—I’ve met them, I’ve known them, and I’ve even felt like one of them. But I see now that, (as I mentioned in a previous essay) that I am simply evolving and growing. I am going from one thing into another, quite naturally, quite natively. Like a caterpillar I am entering my pupae state; closing into myself for a quiet liquid metamorphosis into something different. If I had to guess I’d guess I’ll never become a Buddhist or a practitioner of the Baha’i faith. If I had to guess I’ll keep walking this Jesus flavored path all the days of my life growing less sure and not more sure that I know what I’m reading or what he was saying. I’d guess I’ll die the way I was born; unsure. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickfromoregon.substack.com
