I know that losing my faith didn’t really happen overnight. Truth is, although I really wanted to believe, I always felt empty inside.
I did everything I could. A large part of my church was sharing the “Good News” of God’s approaching kingdom and its solutions for mankind’s woes. I took on the work full-time out of high school, even serving the congregation as a Ministerial Servant. I enjoyed helping others, writing and delivering biblical discourses, even handling other responsibilities at the meetings. But the more I did, the less honest I felt.
I was not happy in my marriage. I can’t blame it on her, but it wasn’t the relationship I had thought it would be. In our society, there are outs when this happens, but I was raised that this was not so. Leaving my wife would also be giving up the church and losing my relationship with family members and friends who were still members. So, when the opportunity came to run off to Montana with a beautiful girl, I did not go.
I beat myself up for years over wanting so much to leave. I stopped all activity in the church; after all, how can you recommend someone follow the same path you are taking when you are miserable? My sister Kori and her husband noticed my struggle and tried to “encourage” me, but I really didn’t want to talk to anybody about what I was dealing with, and their “upbuilding counsel” came across as condemnation, which just fed my downward spiral. It also led to my not really getting to see Kori’s daughter Katie all that much.
When a job opportunity came up in Indiana, I went, telling my wife she really didn’t have to come with me. Yet she did, and I really did try to make it work again, even returning to the church for a while. Same empty feeling.
I did find solace and therapy in my creative explorations, but for the most part, it was a long, lonely period of my life. While I maintained contact with my parents, my church friends slowly grew distant.
In many ways, what kept me going was focusing on memories and the kindness of an old man, who gave me something I have carried for over 40 years.
| Copyright © 2022 by Maik Strosahl Michael E. Strosahl has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there. |
Maik, you are probably aware that quite a few of my own posts on Moristotle & Co. have dealt with my own “losing my faith” and its attendant concerned conversations with relatives and religious friends….I put ”losing my faith” in quotes because it suggests that I regretted the fact. For me, it was more like kicking faith out, freeing myself from it. I found faith debilitating, and you too seem to have found it debilitating.
ReplyDeleteNow, of course, I have raised the question, What do I mean by "debilitating"? The question needs probing: How does faith "debilitate" a person? Or how did it debilitate ME, at least? Or debilitate YOU, if you happen to agree that it did you too.
DeleteMaybe I'll assign the probing to Goines, who seems lively with last thoughts these days. For doesn't faith, after all, have a lot to do with last thoughts; are they just our last thoughts here on earth, or will there lots more thoughts – either in Heaven or in Hell, and does faith have something essential to do with which place those further thoughts are had in?
For me, I still like to think there is a higher power out there, but somehow I just haven’t been able to make that connection work for me.
ReplyDeleteVery interested to see what Goines comes up with on his journey.
Maik, thanks for the additional words. "Like to think" is a provocative phrase, and I can imagine lots of reasons a person might have for it. Of course, one reason people have who "take on faith" that God exists, Jesus is His son and died so that we would "be saved [from eternal Hell fires] and spend a blissful eternity in Heaven" is that they sure as heck WOULD like to avoid those possible Hell fires! I seriously doubt that that sort of reason motivates you.
ReplyDeleteI wonder whether you actually have rational reasons for suggesting that God exists, etc., such as the simple statement by my friend who is a Presbyterian pastor, who – when I impudently asked him how he went on as a pastor when surely he had realized that Christian Doctrine was very, very unlikely to be true – replied that, "Well, we exist, and someone had to make us." By the way, he too (like me) majored in philosophy at Yale. In fact, he introduced me to the Scotsman who advised me how to go about matriculating into Edinburgh University's divinity school (in New College) even though there was barely a month before the Fall 1965 semester would begin. With his help, I did matriculate, only to drop out at the end of that semester on account of the gastro-intestinal upset brought on by the helping of Christian Dogmatics I was made to consume.
Of course, someone came back with the objection against the "whatever exists has to have been made" argument with the retort, "Okay, God exists because WE exist and we have to have a maker. Then, who made God?"...infinite regression.
Still, that is a sort of rational reason for thinking that God exists. Could it be that you "believe in God" for rational reasons and, therefore, have no need to "take it on faith"? In that case, it hardly matters that you have "lost your faith," because YOU DON'T NEED IT. If anything, you transferred your faith from Christian doctrinal reasons for believing x to rational reasons for believing x (or liking to think x).
Anyway, Goines would very likely find all of this a lot of fun to think about!
No, I am not a heaven or hell kind of guy. I figure I will close my eyes one day and cease to exist. I try to live as a good person because I believe it is the right thing to do, not because I believe there is an afterlife reward or penalty for not doing so.
ReplyDeleteI’d like to believe there is a higher power because I would like to believe there is some point to this existence, an order that came from some design and even if that amounts to some cosmic yo-yo, that it functions and for the few years I have on this tiny planet in a corner of the universe, I can have a part in that master plan, then be reabsorbed into the greenery so my matter may be used again in some other way.
Beautiful statement! A part of something meaningful, playing a meaningful role, however menial!
DeleteWhoa. I know exactly how you felt. My mom told me when I was 15 that I was going to get baptized, so start studying. I started, but man, the more I read, the more I did not feel it. I never felt it. And being forced to feel something that I didn't feel, well, that didn't work so well between her and I. I lost a lot of friends, and I regret that, but I had to be true to myself. I wish I would have known to you better when we were young!
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