A bit about my spirituality...

Some people face a crisis of faith.  I have less of a crisis and more of a mystery.  As a young Catholic, I grew up in the church, with devout, faith driven parents that were both pious and scholarly.  My mother, related to priests, brothers and nuns, is one of the most well read people I know.  My father, after spending two years in the seminary, as well as growing up in a family with ten siblings, several of whom took vows, or darn close to it, was a treasure trove of wisdom, church doctrine, Aquinian logic, apologetics and wit.  The two of them were a passionate force to be reckoned with.  So with that as a basis, I grew in the church, learning the stories of our faith, taking upon myself to read first a children's book of Bible stories, followed by the "Good Book" itself.  In fact, I had absconded with a copy of perhaps one of the technically worst translated versions of the Bible, The Good News Bible from my school.  I had whited out the cover and changed the words "The Good News Bible" to read "The Odd Jew's Bible"  I felt that it was less sacrilege than appropriate.  Needless to say, I protected my father from the knowledge of my sin and read the book by torch light in my room after the rest of the house was asleep.  Genesis was all familiar to me of course, a well disseminated narrative, the stories I knew intimately, but was able to delve a little more deeply into, in an unabridged text, none of the fat trimmed so to speak.  Through Exodus and to the crux of the Torah, the law.  I admit I was surprised.  First by the somewhat titillating and at times scandalous laws concerning sexuality and sins of the flesh as laid out in Leviticus.  I was engrossed by the law, as well as the ease with which the Hebrew Scriptures' narrative flowed.  At this point, studying Scripture in school with a young priest that dealt with the subject matter in a rather aloof and at times sardonic tone made the entire experience a little confusing.  I was transitioning from a child's understanding of the scriptural narrative to an adult's, with in the contextual model.  I was confronted with facts, facts about how the Bible depicts the universe and how the universe truly is.  I was taught that the Bible is a story of a people's relationship to their God, a divinely inspired text, but unlike some Christians, we understood that the Scriptures were meant to be understood contextually rather than literally.  The truth of the message is what is important rather than the accuracy of the historical data.  This was something I struggled to wrap my mind around.  In fact, as I progressed in my studies, I became more and more aware of a nagging suspicion in my mind and my heart.  I wanted so much for the promise of Jesus, the promise of salvation, redemption and justice to be true.  I wanted resurrection and I wanted to exist in paradise after I died, to be reunited with all my loved ones after I met death.  However, the more I studied, the more I prayed, the more I learned about life outside the cloistered walls of a church, the more I recognized something, it was there, at first it had no name, then I realized what it was : Contrivance.  I studied faiths, from around the world.  Every people no matter how advanced or "barbaric" had a spirituality, a story, a relationship to the sacred and an explanation for the unknown.  What made everybody else's stories lies and the story of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Paul true?  Circumstance I guess.  Some believers would call it providence that the Romans adopted a small Jewish cult, a sect of messianic pacifists that refused to worship the emperor god or serve in the army, took their symbol, a cross and placed it on their shield, rewrote their message of love and redemption to one of conquest and conversion, minimized the person of Jesus and maximized the person of Paul, a Roman, a pissed off Roman that believed the ends justified the means, demanded that salvation was universal and included the Gentiles, spoke with authority because (according to him) God broke a fundamental promise to all humanity and took Paul up to heaven, showed Paul his visage and allowed him to live so as to convert the world to Christianity.  Paul, the great "Apostle," a man that never met Jesus, became the most powerful voice in the church, arguing and vying for position against Peter (and winning,) against the rock, the foundation of the church as Jesus himself put it.  To some, Paul is a prophet.  The Epistles of Paul (and the epistles that either are or are not written by Paul depending on which Pauline scholar you discuss it with) are held in as high, if not higher esteem by many Protestants.  When the New Testament is quoted to lambast homosexuality, or socialism, or just about anything the "moral right" hates, they inevitably quote Romans, Galatians, Ephesians... Paul had a lot to say about what God doesn't like and what Jesus didn't like, and how we are to live our lives, but didn't Jesus have important things to say?  He had a ministry, according to the four (teen?) gospels written about him.  He had a message of love, not fire and brimstone.  Where Paul has his rap about sins of the flesh and sins of the soul, and blah blah blah, Christ's message was simple, Love people, love God, love yourself.  Jesus made we want to believe, but Paul killed my faith.  I could not ( and not for lack of trying) reconcile the two messages, not only their tone, but their content.  It was as if, Jesus had a message and Paul ignored everything that he said and looked at the resurrection as the onlything of importance and ignored Jesus' lessons and made up his (Paul's) own set of rules of how to earn? win? receive? resurrection.  I started to wander.  My devout Christian friends were appalled that I would even "listen to those lies" the ones told in the sacred texts of other people, the Upanishads or the Qu'ran.  When confronted with inconsistencies between the Bible and say, the fossil record or other clear evidence that the world is not merely 7,000 years old, they wold tell me that it was just God testing us, or we had to rely on faith and accept the Bible as the literal and true word of God...well that was it.  I went off, trying my hand at acting and drinking and whatever else I could find to occupy my time and fancy.  It wasn't until I met Lisette and had my true crisis of faith, the crisis of faith in myself that I sought out a second chance for Biblical enlightenment.  I figured if faith was that important, it would be silly to dismiss it out of hand.  I was not making it in the theater, and I made a hundred excuses for why, but in the end, I moved on.  Lacking a direction, I did what I knew.  I became a theology major, though I had no clue what I was going to do with it.  I took it as a personal vendetta, against myself and my marked lack of faith.  I was determined to get an answer, even if I wasted away my single greatest career opportunity in life.  I was determined to find God.  I studied (most of the time)  I became conversant in all of the jargon, studying epistemology, Biblical hermeneutics and church history.  I was going to church, playing church music and participating.  I was feeling it, I wanted to feel it, I was floating, but after a while, in the space where I knew God should be...well, I found a lot of space, some filler and a presence.  That presence was not an entity, that presence was an emptiness.  I struggled because I was in love with a woman of faith that believed me to be a man of faith.  We had married in a church, in front of our families and friends professing faith in each other and God.  I found myself feeling terrible guilt (go figure Catholic boy) every time we recited the Nicene Creed in church, realizing I did not believe the words I was stating that I DID believe.  After a while, I stopped reciting the creed.  We were busy and I worked weekends, so I had a great excuse not to go to ( as I was typing right now, I was thinking the word church, but I typed the word work.  That's what church became for me work)  By the time Liam was born, I was pretty sure that I had the answer I had been searching for.  I was pretty sure that I was an atheist.  I vacillated between agnostic and atheist, because I was afraid of the stigma that atheist held.  An atheist to some is a person who has given up.  An atheist is someone who is too weak to have faith.  An atheist to some is someone who is unwilling to live the law that Christ or Allah or Moses or the Great Spirit has given us all.  An atheist to some is just one of the damned, with no hope for grace or salvation.  I was less concerned with the status of my soul than I was with my role in the world.  My entire life I identified myself by my faith.  The people around me were mostly Catholic.  I went to a Catholic school, I went to a Catholic church, I lived in the Catholic Worker community.  It was the fundamental kernel of my identity and now I was throwing it away?  That scared the hell out of me (almost literally...I mean hell was actually gone.  I was able to disprove the existence of hell with basic logic and relative ease)  So I was a new father, sitting up in my bed in the middle of the night, senseless with fatigue writing a (for a lack of any more appropriate term ) manifesto.  I had to have it down somewhere, in some form, that I was something new, something different.  I was an atheist.  I rejected the idea of the supernatural.  I rejected the idea that spells, esp, prayers, magic, novinas, etc exist. I developed my world view over time and became more comfortable every day.  I felt no hatred or disdain for the church.  I loved it, and the traditions.  My separation was not a wistful one, damaged by a priest or a dogmatic difference (other than perhaps the divinity of Jesus) and so I lived my life, going to church on Christmas and Easter to make the wife happy, refusing to take communion in respect for the church which I held in high esteem due to my state of sin.  So it was that one day, I was faced with a true crisis of faith, and not a crisis of faith in myself, it was a crisis of faith in my faith.  May 9th, 2008 and Liam was diagnosed.  Now,I had been told by every believer that I had met that "There are no atheists in a foxhole."  I was told that when I met my greatest challenges, I would turn to God and he would be there for me.  Well, here it was, my greatest challenge, the bleakest moment...what did I do?  Did I pray?  Did I bow before God and beg forgiveness and mercy?  Would that have done the trick?  Well, I wrote this :

Atheism

5/12/2008

I wish I could pray for you

I would if I could

The believer says that when the heathen is at death's door

He'll fall to his knees and repent

What the believer fails to realize

Is that some heathens are of stronger faith

Than for what they have been credited

Some unbelievers have absolute faith

And are more likely to go fishing

Than to start praying

Some unbelievers are more likely to act

Than to pray

If no action will help then no action will help

Powerlessness is the birthright of man

This fact is accepted by all

The believer accepts this in grace

The unbeliever accepts this in truth

Still, I wish I could pray for you

Humble myself, lay prostrate and pious

Flagellated, purified, void of offense or contempt or pride

I would petition God for your life, your legs, 

Your blood, your hair

I would offer my honour, my reverence, my fidelity

My service, my life and my soul and I would mean it.

But, I cannot pray

I cannot believe

The only acts I can perform are to wait and to trust

So I wait for you with love and I trust

I recounted my experience of dealing with Liam's illness and later his loss to a friend.  He asked if Liam's death had hurt my faith.  i explained that it reaffirmed my faith.  I was glad for my atheism.  For the first time I was glad I didn't believe in a god, an omnipotent god that would allow this to happen, that could will this to happen.  People around me, people of faith tried to tell me there was a reason, a rationale unknown to us of why God would allow this to happen, will this to happen.  Perhaps God was saving Liam from a worse fate? I demanded to know what worse fate a man can know than to be robbed of a life before it can start, after being slowly tortured and daily killed piece by piece for a year and a half, spending a third of your life battling  hell to survive and ultimately being told by this God that it doesn't matter what you want, or what you deserve, or what you were promised, you lose.  I told my friend, I was happy I didn't believe in God, because if I did believe in a god, I would be so overwhelmed with hatred and rage for that god that it would consume me.  I have found peace and liberation in the understanding that the world is a place that has a certain order.  Wonderful things happen and terrible things happen.  People are born and people die.  It comes to all of us.  Some good people die before their time and some evil people don't die soon enough.  Once you remove the malicious intent from the rules of the universe and realize that we are, so do what you can to contribute to the world and enjoy life, the answers come a lot easier.  Despite the darkness I felt after losing Lim piece by piece, followed by oblivion, I did feel an emptiness.  I did feel a want for some comfort, even if that comfort came with a price.  I felt if I took comfort in the church I would be cheating, like smoking a cigarette or going back on the bottle after working hard to become sober (don't worry, I haven't done anything stupid like that)  Anyway, I had this emptiness.  There was a point at which I felt I wanted to kill the pain and thought about drowning it with booze or numbing it with drugs, and though it was tempting, I was luckily faced with the needs of a young daughter that was reeling and even more confused than I.  So eventually, I had to move forward, work again, brush off some of the dust and decide what I was going to do with the rest of my life.  I had been laid off as a carpenter just as Liam was getting seriously ill and I had no real desire to try to hustle work with the construction racket being in shambles due to the crappy economy.  I needed a job and I found one.  I started working at the Christi School (Christie Care, then called Youth Villages /Christie Care, then called Youth Villages of Oregon)  but at that time, working in a residential mental heath facility for youth, I was personally working through some prtty deep emotional trauma.  This was the perfect place.  I found a refuge in the Cedar Bough program, a program designed to meet the needs of Native American youth through re-ed behavioral counseling with a strong spiritual and cultural component.  The staff and the clients were there for their reasons, but what I found amidt these broken kids, these children that had endured horrific experiences, as well as their cultures history of collective trauma, what I discovered was something so profound, something so moving that I eventually found something that I thought was dead and gone.  I found spirituality.  I found a spirituality that transcends race or title or pretense.  I found a rudimentary connection to something sacred within myself and withing the people I met that brought me greater understanding of the world around me.  I was allowed a small peek into a world that has been glorified and sanitized and hyperbolized by Disney and Hollywood and countless hippies that insist their great-grandmother on their mother's side was a Cherokee princess.  I got just a glimpse, while sitting in a dark sweat lodge, listening to a Lakota medicine man tell me that his words, his truth, the words of the spirits are for all men.  The Lakota are the keepers of the story, but not to keep it from the rest of the world, but to share it with them.  So there I was, a stranger, in a foreign environment, being accepted without judgement, being allowed to experience the creation of the universe as experienced by the Lakota.  And as I saw the red ember, the only light in the lodge, glowing hot, I felt a spark ignite in me.  Perhaps it will go out, perhaps it will rage. I don't know.  All I know is that where there was nothing, now something exists.  I cannot put a name to it, but I don't feel the need to right now.  For now, like the Dude, I will abide.

Epilogue

I was having a discussion with my brother Gabe.  We were discussing faith and our religion.  Gabe was not a  very church-y person.  He, well I guess that is his story to tell.  While I was dealing with Liam, and the fallout from his loss, Gabe was suffering from that, but he was in a deep cycle of grief over the loss of our father.  He had been working hard on processing that loss (a loss I am only now really dealing with)  We were discussing our connection to our father and Gabe told me (in not so many words) that his experience of Catholicism was his communion with our father.  His participation in the church is his keeping the commandment and honouring his father.  In respecting the traditions of our father, he is communing with him and keeping him alive.  His faith was his expression of the eternal spark of our father's soul.  I took that concept and let it steep for a while.  Sophia started at Pius X Catholic School this past fall.  We have technically been parishioners there since 2000, but nobody there knew us, aside from a few people that knew us as Don Boss's daughter and son-in-law.  Don's kind of a legend there, as he was the custodian for quite a few years before he retired.  Ah, the gifts of the father.  So, we returned to the church.  At the same time, the parish got a new pastor, a young and (I must say) passionate preacher.  Fr Weeks discussed scripture in a way I always longed for in pastors, much the way Jim Coleman or well, no other great orators come to mind, though I have known many...did.  So, accepting that my presence in church is a good example for my daughter, with no wishes to poison her faith and a new opportunity to rejoin the community of faith from which I was born, I have found peace in the church once again.  I have a different sensibility about it all.  I feel no particular allegiance to the pope, in fact I think this one is kind of a jerk.  In all fairness, it's kind of hard to follow up after JP2 right?  I focus less on the intransigent dogma than the intent.  And, if my training has taught me anything, I have learned that the law may be important, but nothing trumps the conscience.  So, unfortunately for all those ultra-conservative, Knights-of Columbus-ring-wearing soldiers for Christ out there, you've got ME to deal with, a loud mouthed, sermon-on-the-mount-loving, turn-the-other-cheek Catholic who wont take no hate nonsense from anyone.  Beware.  And peace be with you.