Journey

I am a spiritual mess. Throughout my life I've grappled with matters of faith, looking at any number of different perspectives because none of them made complete sense to me. Doctrine would clash with my experiences. Or people would turn me off. Despite the mantra to love the sinner and hate the sin, I sometimes can't separate the person from the behavior. I can only imagine what people can't separate from me.

Someone once told me that if I say I am a member of a particular denomination or faith, I have to believe everything it stands for. This person had a Master of Divinity degree, so I figured he knew what he was talking about, but I didn't agree with him. A lot of the things that separate denominations are details that really make no appreciable difference. Certainly not enough to make one church more "true" than another. But it got me thinking. I didn't agree with a lot that was taught at the church I attended at that time, and I was already questioning the fundamentals of Christianity in the first place. Instead of choking on these questions, I would follow them to their ends.

So for almost a decade, I've been on an internal journey, a solitary quest to determine what I personally believe separate from what religions tell me. I would question everything, explore other paths. And while it was liberating, I became very cynical. I hated going to church on the rare occasions I did attend. I mentally tore apart every message I heard, became angry every time I heard something I disagreed with, and felt like a blinking neon hypocrite for even being there in the first place. I developed a raging case of anxiety. During this time, I lost both of my grandmothers, my mother, and my mother-in-law. My much-beloved cat disappeared. I lived through any number of dark nights of the soul, staring into myself and despairing. This last year I wondered if I would fight if my life was threatened. I envied people in movies who died. Not that I haven't had spans of happiness, but they were tainted and difficult to maintain. My health problems seem to overpower me.

The reserves of hope have almost run dry.

An important part of me refuses to give up, though, because it feels like defeat. I want(ed) so badly to prove to myself and others that I don't need Christianity to define me or determine my beliefs. That I could make it on my own.

Except I've realized that I can't.

I thought, for this whole time, that if I returned, I would have to accept everything that infuriated me. The details. The purpose for suspending in the first place was to leave the details behind and discover what I really believed. That was the important part. So when I return, it's with considerably less baggage. After talking to people in various faiths and paths, I've realized that I can't accept everything. I can't even faithfully follow a recipe! I always change something. There are some things I learned in my journey that I plan to keep, lessons from Buddhism and Paganism that resonated so deeply that I can't discard them. Because that's where I am.

I still have a lot of issues. I can't hear worship music or anything that sounds like it without cynicism and pain because it feels so hollow to me after years of worship sessions wondering why I couldn't feel it like everyone else seemed to. I wish someone had told me in college that most of the people at those sessions were just as frustrated as I was, and just as afraid of what it meant. In the end, it meant only that that particular form of worship didn't close the circuit for you. Nothing more. Because I would often feel that sincere rush when I sang a song on my own, without all of the amps and guitars and drums and expectations.

A couple weeks ago, I was watching The Walking Dead. Michonne made a point, that the group had been "out there" for too long, trying to survive on their own. They needed a safe place and time to rest, to be human for a while before "out there" stripped them of what humanity they had left. That's what I'm feeling right now. I need somewhere to rest before I lose myself.