I find it amazing, frustrating, and somewhat amusing to be at a new “crisis of faith” at mid-life. There have been several periods along the path where I believed I’d reached my “terminal belief system,” even while knowing that many become more religious later in life.
I always attributed late-life conversions to fear of the unknown, as the very real certainty of death approached. When we reach a certain age, while we may still feel youthful, we begin to lose the bold delusion of our youth that we will live forever. We see enough death, lose enough people, experience the onset of physical decline — vision changes, joint aches, reduced calorie requirements and the recommendation from our physicians for biannual anal probes — nothing maybe that signals that we have less years ahead than we have behind us — but we have tangible evidence that our own bodies will fail just as everyone’s eventually does.
I may have been wrong about such conversions. I have no illusions of being rescued from my own inevitabilities. I don’t expect my faith to evolve into the ability to create a new personal delusion that includes an afterlife either more glorious than my present beliefs allow, or more ignominious. My belief is in the unknowable and I expect it to remain so. And yet, I find myself wishing to better integrate my former Christian context with my current religious outlook and need for meaning.
In my youth, I went through a very brief period of ecstatic evangelical zeal. For me, that kind of passionate belief could not be sustained without contrivance. It might have been sustained longer if I had joined a church community that tries to recreate ecstasy each week at an appointed hour, by setting a stage, playing inspiring music, and providing a charismatic speaker to get me worked up all over again. If one gives in to the heat of such moments and feeds off the building ecstasy among congregants, it can be as good as a drug or great sex.
The problem is, the leaders of charismatic faiths tend to imbue those moments of manufactured joy with meanings that don’t ring true to me. Maybe there is a “truth” in that group ecstasy, but it is not exactly the truth that is being interpreted for you.
For any who has never experienced this kind of group ecstasy, take a look at one of the old “Peanuts” animations where Snoopy is doing his “happy dance.” Imagine yourself doing the happy dance and nothing exists except the dance. There’s not right or wrong about how you do it, no judgement, just you and the dance — and a large room full of others doing their own happy dances.
It’s a really attractive notion. Transcendence for transcendence’s sake. If that’s all it was about I might go find an evangelical group and rejoin the dance, myself.
Now what happens if you can’t achieve that ecstatic state week after week in the same way? How do you remain faithful if you can’t get your regular “fix” of infusion by the Holy Spirit?
What if while doing the happy dance you notice someone, a boy or a girl, same gender as yourself and watching their happy dance heightens your own ecstasy? Then, when the happy dance eventually winds down. A charismatic man, the same one who told you it was good to do the happy dance and feel so good, tells you that those who develop romantic feelings toward their own gender types will burn in a fiery Hell for eternity. There can be no end to their suffering. Ever.
What if your leaders tell you that you must abandon all intellect and individual discernment and receive the truth of all things from the Bible and that particular leader’s interpretation of its meaning? If you think killing innocents in Iraq in the name of freeing them is wrong, you must set such ideas aside, because your leader says Iraq is a Just and Holy war. He says that a war against “unbelievers” in the Holy Land will bring about the Kingdom of God as told in Revelation, and in the coming of the Kingdom, you and all faithful can then do the happy dance for all eternity?
If you question why Muslims, Hindus, Budhists, and even Christians who were only “sprinkled” instead of dunked should go to Hell while you are enjoying your Ecstatic Forever, you are presented with the jealous, vengeance-loving, arbitrary God of the Old Testament, and told to banish such thoughts, and all thinking, lest you burn with the others.
In the end, all the manipulation by rewards and punishments, begins to look like a way more to control people and exercise power over them than any kind of faith that matures and can sustain a person for a lifetime.
My knowledge of such simple faith systems is limited; I never knew the ability to return to such simplistic belief systems month after month and year after year. I admit to having no comprehension of how a person builds a life on what, for me, is so little faith.
Andrew Sullivan quoted H.L. Mencken yesterday, and that quote seems to fit here.
“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’”
(That Sullivan goes on to say that “he knows what he doesn’t know . . . is a defining characteristic of the conservative,” is a discussion best left for another post.)
If we accept moral certainty as inferior, what are we to make of religious certainty? At least with moral certainty, you are likely to have some tangible evidence around which to build an argument.
The evidence held up by most christian adherents is the Bible. A large portion of those who express certainty in their beliefs either don’t know or deny the known facts of how the book came into existance. Even dispassionate scholars with large bodies of evidence before them on the Bible’s origins lack certainty on aspects of the particulars. So where does the certainty of the non-scholar come from? One might say “faith,” but what is faith in the presence of known fallacy?
Faith has to come from somewhere else. It can come from the Bible, yes, but not exclusively, and not in an uncritical, literal interpretation of each chapter and verse, no matter how contradictory the juxtapositions of chapter with chapter and verse with verse. Reading necessarily becomes selective, given the contradictions. One can not act on “an eye for an eye” and “turn the other cheek” applied to the same case at the same moment.
Given some historical and literary context, though, one might understand that “an eye for an eye” is not a justification for retribution, but an admonishment against disproportionate retribution. Not a life for an eye, in other words. “Turn the other cheek” need not be seen as a contradiction, then, but as a higher, better, even more humanitarian response to the harms inflicted by others.
Given the misuse of the Bible and the Christian faith, I have for some time opted out. I have variously attended the Unitarian Universalist church where congregants agree on “principles” rather than creeds, sought evidence of divinity in nature and beauty and truth, and ignored or denied faith altogether.
Through such times I miss religious ritual and community. When I am more tolerant of creeds and trinitarian formulas, I attend an Episcopal Church.
And here is where I find myself. Either with insufficient intellect to span the cognative dissonances that arise when one seeks to make a “leap of faith” to experience the divine in terms supplied by others, or to embrace the “unknowable,” or with a particular brand of autism or obsessive-compulsive disorder that can not stop seeking to know the unknowable.
I suspect if I am somehow disordered, it is a common disorder. In this context, it is no wonder that fundamentalism maintains its hold. It must provide tremendous peace of mind to have everything figured out.
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