Background information. The following was written in November of 2020. COVID-19 was still raging across the United States of America. The presidential election in which Joseph Biden had won had been completed a few days prior. President Trump was already fraudulently insisting he had won. The post-election rage of the Christian Right had somehow reached an even higher peak than the days leading up to the election. The monologue at the end comes from a scene in Season 3 of The Crown. I found the words spoke well to my own experience of faith. Not word for word or experience to experience, but the general idea is there.
The church did not fight for my faith. It did not bring out the full force of its resources to reignite the dying ember of my faith. It did not leave the 99 for the one. I am mostly certain the church does not yet even know that my faith has left it.
If those in the church did know, there is high probability they would blame me for the death of my faith. They would point to my unbelief, my doubts and my dogma and say, “See there? That’s why.”
My faith in the church did not die in an epic battle between good and evil, the last vestiges ripped from the church’s clutched fingers by ‘the enemy’. Rather my faith has slowly, quietly diminished ever more and more as it has suffered innumerable small deaths over the years.
How many others are there like me? Those who never really wanted to leave the church but felt no other option as the church left me.
One person asked much too late, what can I do? A question to which I had no answer because decades of hurt cannot be fixed in the space of a Midwestern goodbye.
I am left then with the ashes of a faith that at times burned brightly. Hurts and more hurts piled on top of each other. And the final hurt the church leaves me is the knowledge of what was true all along. That is, no one cares that I am not there. The church does not care that I am no longer a part of its community. It has not banned me or said I am no longer welcome, for it barely knew I was there in the first place.
Perhaps that is why I find no joy in being liberated of my faith and attachment to the church?
At best, I find apathy waiting me, confusing reigning and anger biding its time as I seek to fill that space with something else. Something what I do not know as I never really wanted to leave the church no matter how inevitable it has felt since adolescence. I never really wanted this but yet here I find myself.
The church is bullshit. The god of my Christian experience has been killed. And now, my faith is dead.
From here, I must move forward but the cry of my heart is only the pain of wanting someone to recognize, to know and understand it and to gracefully show me the err of my ways. But as I have well learned that person is not found in the church.
There wasn't a specific moment,
uh, when it started.
It's been more of a gradual thing.
A drip, drip, drip of... of doubt...
disaffection,
disease, dis... discomfort.
People around me have noticed
my general...
uh, irritability.
Um...
Now, of course,
that's... that's nothing new.
I'm... generally a cantankerous sort,
but even I would have to admit that
there has been more of it lately
(...)
An inability to find calm...
or satisfaction...
or fulfillment.
And when you look
at all these symptoms,
of course it doesn't take a genius
to tell you that...
they all suggest
I'm slap bang in the middle of a...
I can't even say what kind of crisis.
That... that crisis.
And...
Of course one's read or heard about
other people hitting that crisis,
and, you know, just like them,
you look in all the usual places,
resort to all the usual things
to try and make yourself feel better.
Uh...
Some of which I can admit to in this room,
and some of which I probably shouldn't.
(...)
She... she saw that something was amiss.
It's a good word, that.
A-Amiss.
She saw that something was missing...
Faith.
"How's your faith?" she asked me.
I'm here to admit to you that...
I've lost it.
And...
without it, what is there?
The...
The loneliness
and emptiness and anticlimax
of going all that way to the moon
to find nothing,
but haunting desolation...
ghostly silence...
gloom.
That is what faithlessness is.
As opposed to finding...
wonder, ecstasy, the miracle of...
divine creation, God's design and purpose.
What am I trying to say?
I'm trying to say that...
the solution to our problems,
I think, is not in the...
in the ingenuity of the rocket,
or the science or the technology or...
even the bravery.
No, the answer is in here.
Or here, or wherever it is
that... that faith resides.
And so...
having ridiculed you for what you
and these poor, blocked, lost souls...
Were... were trying to achieve here
I now find myself full of respect...
and admiration...
and not a small part of...
desperation...
as I come to say...
help.
Help me.
(...)
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