He who has ears, let him hear
In a few months, it will be the ten year anniversary of me leaving the Christian faith.
In some ways, it’s hard to believe that ten years have gone by that quickly. In other, more painful, more personal ways, I feel every second of that decade reverberating through the present.
I was recently reading about the latest LIGO research on gravitational waves. The science nerd in me was geeking out on how cool it is that the prediction matched so closely with the actual physical detection. But as is often the case, there is always a part of my brain that draws very eclectic connections to other portions of my life. I was amazed at how much the waveform resembles my emotional experience of loss, over time:
A graph comparing the predicted wave amplitude with the actual measured wave.
For me, the loss of my faith coincided with the death of my grandma. I actually remember being in the chapel, looking around the room full of family and friends that were all staunch Christians, and thinking to myself, “I don’t know what I am, but it’s not this.” It was a defining moment. A shockwave.
But with a decade of self-reflection, I’ve realized that the rumblings of that impending paradigm shift were warbling ever stronger for many years, right up until that point. The funeral itself just happened to be the .42 second mark on the graph.
It’s also super fascinating to me that there is even truth in the faint background noise of the graph after the biggest portion of the wave was over. Likewise, for me, after the funeral, I spent several months in a sort of confused silence: not quite sure what this all meant, or where I was going.
The Good, The Bad
In this past decade, I’ve come to realize that I go through seasons of processing my life in religion. After all, it’s all I ever knew for 27 years, and my entire circle of relationships were built on that foundation. There’s no way to walk away from that quickly and simply.
Some years have been full of spirited debates, heated arguments, lost relationships, and a few, scattered productive discussions. Other years have been calm, quiet and reflective. Lately, I’ve even had moments where I begin to move past it altogether, which has been wonderful.
While I’ve talked, at length, about many of the reasons that I left my faith, and the ongoing issues I have with the culture of faith as expressed in America, I actually find it to be more challenging to talk about the things that faith did well in my life.
I think part of that challenge is fairly straightforward:
It is incredibly difficult to have nuanced, thoughtful conversations with Evangelical Christians, writ large. The culture itself is belligerent about its self-proclaimed stranglehold on “truth.” To even consider another perspective requires that an individual already have some predisposition to being willing to buck the party line a little bit. In “come back to Jesus” talks with former friends, and sometimes family, it quickly becomes painfully obvious that platitudes of concern and love are perfunctory, at best. There is no genuine interest in mutual understanding. There is only the rehearsed, in-group agenda in play. Over the years, I’ve gotten better at avoiding those exchanges altogether.
But the other part of the challenge is more nuanced, and difficult:
the things that I truly miss were only real if you believed just like everyone around you, and I haven’t found a meaningful way to recreate those experiences outside of faith. In a way, it resembles the magical feeling of waking up to a Christmas tree loaded underneath with presents, delivered by Santa himself, when you were ~5 years old. As soon as an older sibling or friend at school pops the bubble of belief, you won’t ever get the magical feeling back. Some parents go to odd lengths to preserve the lie, perhaps because they vicariously miss the magic, but the truth is that most well-adjusted adults wouldn’t want to truly go back to that time. The aspect that you miss, isn’t worth the loss of what you’ve gained since then. Likewise, the things that I miss are also things that I wouldn’t want to get back, if it meant losing the perspective I now have.
But, nevertheless, I miss them.
They’ve made me who I am. My humanistic worldview is more informed and nuanced because of those experiences. I would never go back to them, but I also wouldn’t want them removed from my story. And that’s a strange struggle to hang on to.
Parables
Getting back to my eclectic connections-
Why did reading LIGO research remind me of the loss of my grandma, and my faith?
Those seem preposterously unrelated.
The answer lies in one of those things that I miss: parables.
As a kid in Sunday school, there are a handful of Bible lessons that get taught and repeated in various ways. Basically, anything with animals, miracles, or epic events. But sprinkled in there, you always had to get in some lessons about Jesus and the gospel, even if it wasn’t as overtly exciting as Noah and the ark. (Yeah, I was easily entertained)
The gospels center around the ministry of Jesus, with a heavy emphasis on the way that he spoke. He would often tell stories to answer questions, or explain what he meant. As a believer reading those stories, the narrative was clear: Jesus was light years more advanced than the people he was talking to, so he gave them the truth that they needed, in a form that required something of them. The lesson is that as a Christian, you should be putting in the effort to understand what he meant, if you say that you follow him.
As I got older, I actually really liked the parables of Jesus. One of the central themes of Jesus’s parables was a phrase that he said often: “He who has ears, let him hear.”
I took that as a personal challenge. To me, there was an urgency to that phrase. It meant that the people who truly cared about what he was saying would be willing to mine it for deeper meaning.
I wanted to be one of those people.
I wanted to know that I was truly saved…not just a “casual Christian”, which was a derogatory term that we often used in the church for anybody that used the label of Christianity, but didn’t agree with our specific flavor. By being someone that could parse out the deeper truth contained within the parables, I could prove to myself, and those around me that I was legitimate.
If one is to believe how the gospels tell the story, Jesus’s parables were often confounding to the arrogant, religious leaders of the day. In fact, in a few places, Jesus openly admits that he used parables to confuse those who didn’t really want to understand. There are knowing winks to the readers of the gospels that the Pharisees were profoundly dense, and lost in legalism. Only the True Believers™ could understand Jesus’s real purpose.
There’s a lot of psychology to unpack from that, but suffice to say, I’ve realized how problematic many of those thought patterns actually are. The wilful exclusivity is at complete odds with many foundational concepts of “salvation.”
But, if you remove the specific trappings of faith, and boil it back down to the habit of mulling over an idea continuously to parse out deeper nuggets of truth, then there’s some tangible value to it. It was instilled at an early age, and I’ve actually seen the value of the habit over time in my own life.
I’ve found so many anecdotal examples where an ability to find meaningful connections between concrete and abstract concepts, or between processes, systems and human emotion and cognition, has given me a unique perspective that bring value and meaning to those around me.
In fact, in a great bit of irony, that habit may have been one of the very skills that eventually allowed me to compare my stated beliefs with the observed world around me, to see where they didn’t line up…and that eventually led me to path that I’m on now.
To be clear, sometimes, my connections are too abstract, or just outright wrong. I don’t rely on this as a central way of looking at the world…but it’s very useful as a tertiary skill.
With restraint and skepticism, I do feel that our world could benefit from people generally being more thoughtful and reflective about themselves and others. We could benefit from a shared desire to keep parsing out truth from an idea that warrants it (and quickly discard the ones that don’t). We greatly need the ability for people to empathize with points of view that don’t agree with their group, and then draw concrete meaning from that empathy.
That’s something that I find to be intensely valuable, and it squarely came from my time in the faith.
i don’t plan on discarding it anytime soon.
