"YOU ALMOST HAVE to admire the presumptuous absurdity of the word godless. It posits God as a thing to be owned (the expression “my God” comes to mind, or the twittery “OMG”)—a possession that can be sought out and acquired, or cast aside once you’ve grown tired of it or discovered that it doesn’t work as advertised. As with your keys or your wallet, you “find” God or “lose” your faith. Whether you believe or don’t believe, you’re stuck in a vast lost-and-found department, presumably of the soul." LH
This week I finished another 1000 pc puzzle and started a 500 pc. I finished a book and started a new job. It seems like this week has me thinking of beginnings and endings. But is life really all about the beginnings and the endings, or is it just a journey that includes of a lot of things that were there all the time just waiting to be discovered.
People's stories fascinate me. Some people's stories motivate me to discover who I am beneath or behind the person that is out there for people to see. People who have heard my rants, have heard me say that I don't like labels. They are rarely accurate and never unique enough to define me. So maybe instead of a label to affix on my forehead or my identity, maybe "Agnostic" is better affixed to my journey. That might get people exited who are hoping that this is only a phase, but I do not see myself returning to what I had, what I professed or what I believed. The only way to go now is forward.
"Metaphors aren’t just for poets. Or perhaps we’re all poets without knowing it, because metaphors are built into the way we think." LH
Life is too short and too valuable for us to spend it pretending we are someone we are not. There are too many stories out in circulation trying to convince each and every human being to believe it. Even stories meant to be stories are begging to be marketed as a news headline.
"I'm real, I'm true, believe me!"
And we believe them. What if we can embrace stories as stories and understand the value in them as stories whether they happened or not.
"Naming God invites the personal pronoun—He, Him, His, all capitalized like the name itself, and all with a kind of male inevitability. Monotheism’s male gendering of divinity has run so deep for so long that you only need to refer to God as “she” for people to be taken aback. Try using “it,” and most will react with visible shock; even militant atheists will respond with a quiver of transgressive thrill." LH
Many of those stories are built around a three letter word that in English we call "God". Maybe faith and belief wouldn't be such a complicated concept if there was one idea floating around for people to grasp onto. The problem is, there are thousands and millions of ideas that are begging people to sell themselves to. The only relief for many is just to follow in the path of their parents. After all... "Mom and Dad know best!" What happens to that person who dares tread beyond the borders of what their parents have set up for them as children? What happens when they start to hear and see some of those millions of ideas that are floating around? Do they ignore everything and stay at home? Some do. Some don't. Here in lies the problem.
"But what exactly is being transgressed? The uncanny otherness of “it” seems to me to accord much greater respect than either “he” or “she,”though even it has its drawbacks. It still assumes an entity—something that can be described, defined, apprehended, encompassed. By even asking whether God “really exists,” all we bring about is an extraordinary diminution of the concept of the divine, so much so that for a growing number of people, the name has become little more than a convention, even an almost embarrassing one, like an outmoded term of endearment. Trying to make the unknowable knowable, we reduce it to what we know best. We make God human." LH
I stopped using the personal pronouns in my own reference to the Creator. It is awkward and so much easier just to reduce the giver of my breath to a specific gender, but it is far less real for me now. The Shack helped me transition to the idea that "Papa" isn't about gender restrictions, but about rising above them. But our limited human minds can't imagine Love coming from something or someone that defies gender. I would like to still imagine Love coming from somewhere. That is the hopeful part of the agnostic in me. I am just not willing to put my restrictions on what that will look like.
Where belief tries to expel doubt, faith walks with it, offering no easy answers. Belief insists, while faith hopes and trusts. The one is demanded, the other freely given, and this freedom means that real faith is both difficult and stubborn. It involves an ongoing struggle, a continual questioning of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas. It goes hand-in-hand with doubt, in a never-ending conversation with it. And sometimes even in conscious defiance of it. LH
Admitting I am on an agnostic journey, really just means I doubt and some things don't make sense to me anymore. And yet doubt is the most compatible with faith... or so I've been told. So faith would come easy if I can just doubt and have faith... right? Well... maybe not right now. Right now I have questions, concerns, struggles, wonders, unknowns that I don't feel like I can talk to too many people about. I wrote a poem about that. I just grew up in a world that is filled with people who must be uncomfortable with the unknown... so the need is great to latch on to something to define them and their reason for breathing. What would it look like if we all embraced the unknown? All we would have to do is be nice to other people and live life to our fullest. Love wouldn't need a face itself as long as it was something done to and with the faces we had before us. What kind of world would that be?
"I refuse to call closure on hope. Not blind, delusional hope, but conscious hope against the odds—the kind of hope that allows me to speak, to act, to not cave in to the stone wall of the impossible. If I have to, I will keep banging my head against that wall rather than sit numbly at its foot in the cowed inertia of despair, because despair is the inability to imagine oneself into the future. It is a failure of the imagination—of the human ability to conceive of a different reality, and to act accordingly. By resisting despair, then, I rationally choose to be irrational. I defy my own disbelief. And that, I believe, can only be called an act of faith." LH
I want to thank Lesley for sharing her story and her discoveries. These are the stories I want to listen to. Not that they will convince me in any direction, but that they will affirm the need for me to be honest about my journey. There is a big world of people who are longing to be understood, known, valued and loved for not only who they are but who they are becoming as they journey. Somehow this has to be the better way to live. Maybe if we have been told that we can't live this way, maybe it is those voices we need to question. That is what I have been doing... just questioning the voices.
Leslie has numerous Youtube videos and Ted talks for anyone who wants to hear a little more of her. There is no arrogance in her message and that is so attractive.
"For myself, I have no intention of only half-living this life in anticipation of a hypothetical next one. I want to live my life as well and as fully as I can—in consciousness, in commitment, in full acknowledgment of its difficulties as well as its occasional rewards, its pains as well as its pleasures, its absurdities as well as its mysteries. The last thing I would ever want is to have no end, to find myself adrift in the horizonless expanse of eternity. I want, that is, to live the mortal life I have." LH
I have already shared my thoughts in previous blogs on my idea of the "horizonless expanse of eternity". It has been a good thing to find people whose words can paint the picture of what that might look like if we really understood the idea of "forever".
"It’s often said that the more we know, the more we know we don’t know—the kind of remark that gets people nodding sagaciously only to begin their response with “But . . .” Even as we acknowledge this in principle, we hanker for the security of convincing ourselves that we understand reality, and that everything can be neatly laid out in a self-contained system. Both bad science and bad religion operate on this assumption." LH
I had a thought as I lay in bed this morning. Any label, be it atheist, agnostic, skeptic, none... seems a relative term. If I call myself this, I am relating my status to that of those who have walked a religious path of sorts. So in doing so, I compare myself to other human beings and thus making my identity dependant on their identity. Why doesn't that make any sense to me?
What if I just call myself a human on a journey of discovery. What if my identity is not dependant on another human being, but something that unfolds on the journey as I discover, as Michael W. Smith so beautifully put it, "My Place in this World."
But maybe I need to acknowledge labels too. We live in a world and are restricted by our language/s to communicate with others. So labels help others get to know us or understand us without a lengthy explanation. So there may be a place for labels. But they are limiting in their capacity to paint the whole picture. If anything, they are the base coat of the portrait. The fine details are seen as a relationship develops and the beauty of the nuances show through.
'The glory of the concept of infinity is that it always has room for more. It is an endless, open invitation to live larger.' LH