Losing My Religion

In longing we live and move and have our being.

When I was young most of my life was spent on my own, born into the house of missionary parents whose calling demanded attention to others. Our lives were defined by the people under their care, which meant that on most nights we had visitors. While my parents ministered to them, I played by myself, read books, listened to records. This identity, crafted from the solace of words and imagination, gave shape to my aloneness. 

I have my books

And my poetry to protect me

I am shielded in my armor…

I am a rock. I am an island.

On this island of myself I built my fortress. From those defenses I looked out on a horizon that beckoned, calling me to a larger, more meaningful life out There. But in early years I kept to my castle, preferring the achievements of imagination rather than the incomprehensible work of sorting out who I was. It’s a common story, and the stories we tell ourselves propel us into lives of achievement, or despair, or excess or, in my case, solitary exploration. 

Alone, I was not lonely. Books were my companions. From their pages stepped mentors, parents, and friends. Chief among these, C.S. Lewis, wove the spell of lands beyond the horizon, in words uniting my religious life with my longing. His words became as real to me as my actual life. 

Surely it is from within that all we call our “real life” takes shape. A friend of mine put it well when he wrote about the liminal spaces found in the interiority of our minds when we walk through airport terminals late at night. I know this feeling well, and not just because I’ve been walking through airport terminals all my life. There is a point of departure within all of us to a horizon, to a destination that for a brief moment seems clear and compelling. Then, somehow, we wind up at gate 4 on our way to Topeka. Who knows? Maybe Topeka was the True Destination all along.

Whatever the case, from my earliest days books and poems and songs drew me to causes and destinations for my soul. My corruptible body was a weight, dragged along for the ride. Instead of leading to a rich inner life of love and exploration, my religious upbringing taught me to distrust my longings. Inevitably, inexorably, I was led to the Bible and a faith that narrowed the shape and meaning of my dreams. 

And so, for the better part of 40 years I gave myself to a Vision where meaning was found outside of myself. Since I was born in sin, fundamentally evil in nature, and headed to eternal torment in hell if I should leave the faith, I could not jeopardize my eternal destiny and the destiny of those I loved by looking inside myself for guidance. I learned to find Security and Comfort in a faith that looked toward life after death, toward a well-earned rest after a life of work and self-denial and sacrifice, run on the rails of “the clear teaching of Scripture.” Had not Jesus said, “The way to life is narrow and few there are that find it”? Happy was I to have found the Right Way at such an early age!

Years of daily Bible reading and meditation, Scripture memorization, church attendance on Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, Wednesday nights—these shaped me, not unwillingly, to a future spent in service to God. And while this future was anchored in the hope of heaven, the pages of Scripture hinted at a persistent, unfathomable love that would meet us in our everyday, holding out the promise of satisfaction for our present longings.

Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfall

I have come that you might have life

Jesus called me to an “abundant life,” but this seemed an impossibility on this side of the grave, if only because my wicked heart could not handle that much goodness. Rescue came from Lewis, who painted a picture of an eternity worth waiting for. And while The Chronicles of Narnia comforted me with a hope of a life after death, his theological writings awakened my mind to the philosophical beauty of Christianity. The spiritual tradition from which he spoke and through which I made sense of the world located this beauty ultimately beyond this life. In his essay The Weight of Glory Lewis wrote:

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours that we see…Some day, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.

Sure enough, moments of glory and beauty kept surprising me throughout my life - in the quiet of a woodland walk, in the eye of my cat, in the way the sun filtered through a jungle canopy, in the laughter of friends, in the taste of passionfruit ice cream on a warm evening at the beach, in the impossible beauty of a sunset. These tantalizing and fleeting glimpses of heaven were not things that could be fully enjoyed now. Sadly, we are not capable of the perfect, voluntary obedience to merit this joy. 

The greatest war in my soul came from this fundamental misunderstanding of Nature. The wind, the waves, the trees, butterflies, sand, earth, sky…all of it called to me over and over again. Over and over I ignored the call, trying to look beyond the beauty before me to a Great Beyond and a Greater Someone I could not see, much less imagine. The gnostic influence in Christianity runs deep. Lewis is hardly alone in explicitly enjoining us to look through nature to the greater beauty of her Creator, a foretaste of the Beatific Vision awaiting us. We see through a glass, darkly.

Whatever merits this worldview may have, it warped my emotional development and robbed me of joy. Continually looking for evidence of God beyond what I could see or imagine, I missed living a life of love in communion with Creation and, tragically, with those closest to me.

I am only now, belatedly, unravelling the mess this has made of my life and the lives of those I love. Through much pain and heartache this truncated view of reality was upended. The cold comfort of creedal certainty—and the weaker comfort of fictional fantasy—were unmasked during deep trials in my 50s. The mystics speak of the dark night of the soul, and in that long night I found depths of despair and rage that ripped the façade off the beautiful structure of my carefully constructed Christian life. 

But who to rage at? The painful and obvious answer - me. I have been sorting through the psychological, emotional, and physical wreckage of my life, my family’s life, and the lives of those I have known and loved and walked with through my years in the wilderness of American Evangelicalism. Why had I not awakened sooner? Why had I not saved myself and others from such soul-killing doctrines?

It was not good enough to blame Constantine, or the Avignon popes, or Calvin, or Luther, or any number of other Christians whose practices lead to the corruption of a Church allied to state power. It was too easy to look at Calvin’s Geneva, at the cynical sale of indulgences during the Black Death, at the Crusades, at Luther’s antisemitism and somehow believe that Christianity had nevertheless gotten the Main Thing right: we held the only key to heaven. If the vast majority of humanity throughout history was already experiencing the eternal torment of hell, largely because of the accident of having been born outside of the Judeo-Christian culture, then almost any invasion or atrocity could be excused as a well-meaning attempt at rescue, for who could question the noble aim of claiming heathen lands for Christ? Any atrocity visited upon these damned people paled in comparison to the torment that was their inevitable and merited destiny.

But then my world unraveled. The theoretical exercises I had engaged in for most of my life to excuse the horrors perpetrated by my Church were ultimately insufficient to alleviate my own suffering as those I loved were irreparably damaged and my family sorted through the blasted landscape of our lives. In this dark time, I met many others who walked this road with me. My rage at myself expanded to include anger towards my parents and Christian leaders whose teaching and guidance had numbed me to the cruelty of my convictions. 

But rage can only last so long. By God’s grace I encountered new mentors and guides who helped me expand my faith to see humanity in a new light, to believe in a God whose love would eventually restore all Their creation to Themselves.

In the dark night of my soul the Love that had always beckoned me met me in my despair, and I believed beyond hope in the certainty of love and of a benevolent God, in a Universe where longings could find satisfaction even in the midst of pain. Despite all that was wrong in my upbringing, I could not shake the conviction that there was a Spirit behind all matter that loved us. And this was no mere interior comfort. The community of my family and friends who journeyed through similar pain and heartache grew stronger and deeper, even as the familiar certainties fell away.

In his book Consolations, poet David Whyte writes that longing is:

the foundational instinct that we are here essentially to risk ourselves in the world, that we are a form of invitation to others and to otherness, that we are meant to hazard ourselves for the right thing, for the right woman or the right man, for a son or a daughter, for the right work, or for a gift given against all odds. In longing we move, and are moving, from a known but abstracted elsewhere to a beautiful, about-to-be-reached someone, something, or somewhere we want to call our own.

This longing for Someone kept me awake at night as a boy staring at my bedroom ceiling. This longing beckons me still in airport terminals at night. It whispers from the horizon that draws me every time I walk on a beach and calls to me in the cry of a solitary hawk wheeling above me on a late afternoon walk. These messengers are not the prophets of a distant, disembodied future. They urge me to engage now, to love this world now and, most importantly, to love those who are alongside me now. I do not think the call of beauty is a tease. Contra Lewis, I think Beauty invites us to mingle now with the splendors that we see.

In my attempt to rewire my brain, heal my soul, and enable me to be a better lover of all things here and now, I’ve followed the mystics and done a lot of walking in nature. Over the last ten years I’ve traveled extensively for work. In every new place I visit I find the nearest nature trail and head out, with no earbuds or headphones, practicing the sometimes-successful discipline of not looking at my phone. 

A few days ago, I was hiking one such trail near Lima, Ohio. I was not exactly roughing it over backcountry—it was an easy stroll along a well-maintained path through winter-thinned woods. I’ve learned that communion with nature does not depend on how far you are from a suburban strip mall, so I settled into the experience and drank in the trees and the wind and the way the dusky light reflected off the carpet of dried leaves. In previous years this experience would have been tinged with a slightly painful longing, if not outright sadness, as I thought about the Creator of this beauty looking down on a world of broken people hurtling towards hell. And of course, I would have missed the communion I now have as a regular part of these walks.

I now think I am meant to see—in the beauty of a fallen, mossy log, in the appraising eye of a sparrow, and most often in the eyes of family and friends—not only a love that endures beyond the grave, but a love that can be experienced now as I cultivate myself to heal my heart and to love others better. 

Which brings me back to the evocative power of the songs I listened to in solitude as a boy. Perhaps in poetry and songs we can find the enduring appeal of longing, of love. My own experience tells me that by following this love through all the pain and attendant disappointments I can find some healing. In this healing, I can be part of restoring a little corner of the Universe to what Original Goodness destined it to be. 

Even as I write this the never-dead cynic in me asks: Are you not just imagining a fantasy? Is your love really an angel, perfect in every way? Is there a love so divine that it can take away all sadness? Will our souls never grow old and our love remain green? In short - is Love all we really need? 

And yet…perhaps our better selves speak in anguished sentimentality and powerful metaphors. Perhaps the evolutionary reading of history is more than a brutal war of survival. Maybe what calls us from poetry, from Nature, in the eyes of our dogs, in the quiet beauty of our aging loved ones, is the love song of a gentle God or, if you prefer, a benevolent Universe.

And if so, then that Vision is not a cruel fantasy but a practical invitation to love, to throw our whole selves into meaningful and fulfilling works of love. Inevitably (and here I think C.S. Lewis and orthodox Christianity have a point) we will fail in this grand endeavor. But these failures are not evidence of our corrupt fallenness and the impossibility of a meaningful and lasting love in this life. They are a call to begin anew, to be fully present now. We can find the strength to love the world and the people that are given us today to love. While we continue to long for a new world of peace without pain, today’s loves are all we have.

Tomorrow’s loves will, God willing, be given us afresh tomorrow.

[Ed: All photos by Robert].