I find I just can't let my 25 year old self speak for herself. And really, isn't that what I started this blog for, to be able to think about what I once thought? And of course, share it with all of you and get feed back?
It just seems so painfully clear to me now that I was willing Christianity to be true. I wanted so badly to be able to find a home in the Christian church, because I wanted to please my parents. It was so important to me to be able to connect to my Mom and Dad and I think I unconsciously decided that since all paths lead to the summit, I might as well follow the one that would allow me to walk beside my family.
But it sure didn't take long, did it, for the questions to arise? For me to become uncomfortable? I persisted for a couple more years (as you will see), in a very serious way - because I was determined to make it work. I gave it the fairest shot I was capable of giving. And what came out of it for me, again, was more guilt. More pain. More inability to measure up. Where others are able to find forgiveness, I just keep finding condemnation. Standards set impossibly high. Each of my rounds with Christianity are flavored with anxiety, guilt, shame, and fear of being excluded, rejected, left behind.
Part of that is my own personal pathology. Since my father was a minister, my ideas about the Christian God will forever be entangled with my impressions, conceptions, and emotions about my Dad. He was the representative of God on earth to me as a tiny child, and those early lessons are not easily erased. As others have argued before me, and about gods in general, my picture of Yahweh is one big Rorschach test. And clearly I have long had issues of wanting to please my father but never feeling I was able to, along with a deep fear of being unloved by him. I believe I had plenty of valid reasons to feel these things - this isn't the place to get into details, but no, my father was not abusive. Nevertheless, he was emotionally unavailable.
But I don't think all of these feelings and ideas are idiosyncratic. I think they are a result of this kind of dualistic theology. There will be more about this as we go on, but if you posit a heaven and a hell, or any system of eternal rewards based on a single life, to which no one can know the outcome until they are dead - you are going to create anxiety in individuals. If you talk vaguely about there being one "unforgiveable" sin, people will be anxious. If you say some people's ears will be closed up and they will not be able to hear, through no fault of their own, well, how can that not make some folks feel a little antsy? I have developed lots of grown up, sophisticated theories since I wrote these entries, but all that discomfort I was feeling was not, I do not believe, due only to my personal pathology.
2 comments:
What I have found interesting is how many aspects of your theological/spiritual development resonate with my own, and I grew up in the Baha'i Faith with 1) no concept of original sin 2) the belief that all religions are one in their spiritual if not material nature, following the same God, with the same spiritual laws and 3) that law is nonetheless absolute and not relative. Oh, and 4) heaven and hell are not so much places but descriptions of the souls condition in growing closer to or further from God. And I still managed to spend a lot of my early twenties wondering if I wasn't somehow irredeemable, thinking I belonged outside of religion somehow, that I was much more comfortable striving to be a good person for the sake of goodness itself than for what was in it for me as a person. I am enjoying your blog so much and appreciate your sharing this.
Thank you mara, it is good to know these aren't just going out into oblivion : )
It is really interesting that your experience was so similar, considering our different spiritual bases. But I wonder if it is possible, in our culture, to completely escape notions of heaven and hell, and worthiness of either, unless one's parents really make a concerted effort to either shield, deflect, or constantly and explicitly explain?
I mean, did you watch TV? Read comic or any other books? See movies? If so, then notions of Christian morality, Christain worldview (and of course, not always the Christianity of Bonhoeffer, or my Mom, or others I would personally call "Christian" Christians) have permeated your thinking. Don't you think? Or am I off base?
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