I underwent my transition from doctrinal Christian to Christian agnostic almost exactly sixteen years ago. I had no blog at that time, so I wrote all my thoughts in a journal. I had written entries in the journal every day since 1989. I continue that journal, which now has over 11,500 entries and four and a half million words. The journal started off as a strict devotional, back when I was a fundamentalist. I am nearly a stranger now to the person I was at that time. In each entry, I studied scriptures, and then forced an evaluation of my life into a scriptural format. I seldom let my actual feelings show in those entries, since they were intended as an offering to God. But in 2005, all of that began to change. Until recently, I had not looked back at those entries. Now, I am curious about what I was thinking at that time and why. Perhaps some of this will resonate with you as well.
In case you think that religious fundamentalism is stupid and that is all there is to it, I remind you that religion is an appetite, just like the appetite for sex or food, and, in some of us, every bit as strong.
I used a strict devotional format of A (adoration), C (confession), T (thanksgiving), and S (supplication)—ACTS for short. But toward the end of 2004, my devotional format began to break down. By 2005 the ACTS structure had become “a pseudogene whose structure can be detected, sometimes and partially, in all that I write.” My daily entries became reflections of what I was experiencing, rather than what I was reading. I stopped regularly referencing Biblical passages. By that time, I had read and written about the entire Bible—as well as the Apocrypha—twice. I gradually slipped back into this practice, but not on a regular basis. My Biblical references were from the prophets, who struggled to understand what was happening on the Earth, as those whom the prophets considered to be God’s people were turning from him. I did not reread passages of doctrine and commandment. My journal entries changed from devotions to enigmas.
One major reason for the transition from fundamentalist to agnostic was that I was ill. Nearly every day, I was in a fog of tiredness, brought on by insomnia and muscle spasms that lasted nearly all night. I realized that I did not suffer nearly as much as millions of other people; but my complaint was part of a vast wave of suffering that God, if any, should hear. I felt I was going to surrender my vivid experiences into a brain-dead grayness. I literally thought I would die from the lack of sleep in a hospital. I was, at that time, on sabbatical, so I did not have a daily schedule of work, though I was writing book manuscripts, on which I put a great deal of effort. At last, I had surgery that corrected the sleep apnea. After I recovered from the surgery, I took a trip to see the desert and foothill wildflowers in Arizona and California in what turned out to be one of the best wildflower years. Thus, my rethinking of Christianity was started by personal suffering, but the suffering turned to the joy of seeing the beauty of the natural world. But, having once realized that I had been wrong about doctrinal Christianity, I did not go back to it.
Here follow (in this and later essays) some of the things I was thinking in January 2005. During my meditations, I was not talking to God, but to myself, although I liked to imagine that God was with me. Instead of holding onto God, I was letting him hold onto me, if he wanted to do so. I previously believed that God is love, but I now realized that love is God: “He exists within all processes, relationships, and situations of love.” I saw myself, and all humans, as “…protoplasm, sometimes twitching, sometimes broken, sometimes a broth for bacteria.” I decided to relax and accept the beauties of life that I could see, and listen for the “still, small voice” that Elijah found in the wilderness, “only I am not going to theomorphize it.”
I had great aspirations for myself, especially to become a well-known writer. That aspiration has not materialized as I hoped, although my five popular science books have been well received and widely read. I decided I would be satisfied to be a small plant down in the shade; it was not worth the effort and expense to try to be a tree, to be up in the light, where I might attract the attention of lumbermen.
I continued to write meditations, because I was ready to receive insights from God, though I did not seriously expect it. At the same time, I had to continue interacting with other people—my family and, once I was back from sabbatical, my colleagues and students—because I did not want to have bizarre ideas rise and grow in my isolated thoughts, “like island monsters.” (I was thinking of the strange species that evolve on islands.)
Join
me in exploring these ideas born of struggle, leading away from doctrine and toward
a certain measure of celebration.
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