Over the past few years I’ve fielded questions and concerns, and doubtful looks and evasive language, regarding my faith and beliefs, and I’ve largely avoided answering them because my answers feel so amorphous and unhelpful. I do think that one's beliefs are mostly a private matter, but because my beliefs were so public and so communal for such a long time, and because they served as the basis for the work and communities I chose, it felt somewhat necessary to write a brief exposé on where I am now. Well maybe not necessary, but helpful at least, for the curious.
I wrote a few years ago that I was taking a step back from concrete belief to reassess, to allow space for questions and doubts and hopefully to allow the same space for others. But that was incomplete, sort of like saying I was “taking a break from traditional housing” when all the walls in my home had fallen down—true, but by no means a full picture.
It would have been more true to say that my perception of god had gradually expanded and expanded, and expanded until it grew so large that it destroyed the house I had built for it, and then continued to grow so much larger that I began to lose the ability to perceive it at all. Like the effect of being able to see the boundaries of a continent from space, and getting closer and closer until you simply exist within the land. But the opposite. Sort of.
When the defining lines disappeared from view, I felt myself standing in a great expanse of uncertainty, a sort of white void in my mind’s eye, in which there were also two doors—one back to structured belief, and one to complete disbelief. And everything else was the expanse. And all I felt in that moment was the extreme discomfort of desperately wanting the definition of either door, but the strong sense that it would be better to resist that urge, and stay in the uncertainty.
I remember the feeling of walking on mental and spiritual eggshells over the next few weeks and months. Like any sudden movement might shove me through one of the doors of certainty, and I must protect the void.
The truth was that in the course of living and reading and meeting people, in hearing god described differently than I had before, as spacious and generous—not the leader of an exclusionary club but the breaker of boundaries and widener of circles, and in meeting enough people who my former communities would never fully accept but whom I experienced to be so worthy of love and unreserved acceptance…the rules and structures I’d built my beliefs on, and my confidence in them, had been eroding beneath me for a while.
The biggest question to me was how human nature, beat down and bruised as it is, could love more generously than the god of the universe, the source of all. It doesn’t make sense that we would feel the need to constrain our impulses to love and include in order to fit in the boundaries of god’s love, love that built the universe. It only makes sense that god must be much bigger than we’ve allowed god to be.
The final shake to my structure of beliefs was all at once allowing the bible to be what it is. Much of the bible is poetry, pure poetry of experience which cannot be described literally. Poetry where factual history would fall short of conveying the gravity of the message. Like the much weaker metaphors of houses and expanses above, if I cannot describe in literal terms this one experience in my life, how much less the creation of the world, how much less a feeling of higher calling, how much less a moment of communing with the fullness of life and creation? Allowing the words of stories so deeply ingrained in my mind and my world perspectives to expand and breathe in poetry…it was a freedom, like a floor giving out underneath.
My perception of all that is grew to a point that words like “god” and “belief” began to make me feel claustrophobic. For me they carried with them all the smallness of the former house, and all the constraints of former teachings. They were literal and definitive, they didn’t allow for the spaciousness of poetry.
So lately, when asked what I believe, if I still believe in god, I hesitate. I could maybe say…I “believe” in “god”, because everything exists. And also, at the same time, I don’t “believe” in “god”, because the terms feel arbitrary. God is not Santa Claus to believe or not believe in, and no part of the universe is separate from itself to believe or not believe in its other parts. To express “belief” in “god” seems to me to be a separation from god. And that doesn’t seem possible.
The closest I could come to forming the statement of belief would probably be something like…
“I __________ in _______.” With the first blank being some sort of emotive gesture from the heart or the gut, and the second blank being some sort of gesture at at everything. Or perhaps the first blank is more a look of concession or peaceful surrender. Because of course. Saying “believe” gives me the sort of feeling of saying that I believe in the universe. It is here, of course I “believe” in it, I experience it. And then the noun. “god.” Is-ness. Existence. It is. Of course it is, I also experience this. I am in and of it.
I am a part of that which is. I think that might be my statement of faith. I am a part of all that is. I am. And so is everything and everyone else.
It is. We are. God is all of it. And that’s where I’m at.
Practical implications in my life are as follows:
-I am not currently attending a church, though I am pursuing meaningful, life-giving, authentic community that allows me honest expression
-I do not consider that anyone is condemned to anywhere because of their lack of belief in any one thing
-I do not feel that what I’ve expressed above minimizes or negates any of the truthfulness of the bible. I do say “truthfulness” and not “factuality”, because I think they are different things, and I think the former is more important than the latter
-I deeply affirm the lives and loves of LGBTQ+ people, and fully support their right to be protected and celebrated socially, spiritually and legally
-I believe each of us has autonomy over our own bodies, to live and love and feed and care for, to rejoice with and seek pleasure through, to celebrate and feel beautiful in, to decide when and how and with whom to bear children
-I support the pursuit of safety for all people, including those who seek refuge across borders and those who seek the safety promised within their own countries and in their own homes and neighborhoods—immigrants, refugees, and people of color should not feel less safe at the hands of those from whom they seek protection
-I acknowledge that racism, through colonialism, infused with the inherited historic notions of manifest destiny, often explicitly defended with biblical interpretations, has been woven into the core of western societies and into the fabric of our faith communities, and that it is the work of white people in those societies, in all arenas, to take responsibility for dismantling the biases and structures that sustain it
-I am working to actively curb my knee-jerk reaction judgments of other people’s lives and choices as definitively good or bad, and trying to nudge myself toward a quicker “oh? tell me more about that” type response. It has challenged me, and given me the gift of knowing people in a much more real and authentic way
I love you all, and I mean none of the above as a judgment to what you believe in this moment, but I understand disagreements and feelings of disappointment or concern for me that is based in love. I’m not interested in debating to convince or be convinced. I am always interested in hearing your own questions and thoughts on everything that is, and though I offer no answers, I make a great co-ponderer.
I hope that you remain open, that I remain open, to all the possibilities of all that is and all that might be. I hope that you, you created in the image of god, trust the desires you feel to throw off constraints and love yourself and others wholly and without reservation. I hope I do, too.
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(from the 2003 movie Nothing, which I highly recommend) |
