In the year 2000, something both remarkable and terrible began. The journal entries presented in this section are a snapshot into my mind during that tumultuous year, one desperate prayer after another that I might hold onto my faith in God. The singular, all-consuming need to retain this faith would take me places I never thought I'd venture, ultimately to a point where the gospel was utterly muted in the face of my doubt.
I'd began to seriously contemplate the warping effect fear can have on a person's spirituality. As much as I dreaded to entertain the idea, I marveled at how conditional redemption had rendered my religion so...Pavlovian. In recognizing this, I also recognized the ugly truth that I was treating God's love as a means to an end, rather than the end itself. I suppose I was in decent company, what with the heavy emphasis on salvation streaming forth from pulpits across the country every week, but something irreversible had awoken in me. It was time to strip away the Pavlovian response and disavow myself from the pursuit of any end apart from God's love. Perhaps a study on the existence of Hell wasn't the most advisable way to begin such an undertaking. Then again, divine humor is often overlooked when obsessing over details...
Having departed from my childhood faith - a keystone upon which so much of my memory and perspective rested - I've found that my search for God is also very much a search for myself. At this moment of infinite possibility - silently immersed in this vast and quiet field, this expansive mystical tabula rasa - it cannot be ignored or overcome.
Read MoreOf this I’m certain: believing in this new God will require even more faith than in the one I cast away. It's just so much easier to lose faith in a construct of one's own mind. I have very little reason to have relationship with God now, for I no longer have any idea how to relate to him.
Read MoreI have reached an impasse. One thing is certain: I cannot carry on without first experiencing God's love as a living encounter. I cannot engage my heart from a sense of obligation. Such is the case with love.
Read MoreGod, you are such a fantasy. Even if you are out there, especially if you are out there, you are a fantasy, a phantom. You truly are a man of legend. Where did you go? Did you give up? Lose interest? Have you nothing left to give?
Read MoreThe Apostles, like all humans, were a product of the world in which they lived. By allowing the writers to draw up accounts according to what they witnessed with their own eyes, God clearly communicates that he his desire for us is comprehensible, available, and shouting out to us in the midst of the world we inhabit.
Read MoreIt is written that I should love God because he loves me, but his love is difficult to quantify. What life experiences, if any, are exemplars of his love? When he allowed Satan to strip Job of every reason to live, was this love?
Read MoreWhen I look back at how our faith has changed over the millennia, I must confront the fact that there is no one right way to do religion. A person must listen for the voice of God in her own day and age. The world changes and the things we need from religion change alongside it.
Read MoreThis new life in Christ is terribly unfamiliar, but on some level it commends itself to adventure. Setting out very much alone, how could I possibly stay true to the path? I must step out in faith and let the Spirit guide me, something I've been strongly conditioned to doubt. Still, as I embark on this journey, I sense it may be all I have.
Read MoreAll too often people approach transformation from the outside in or are content to consign it to the outside, period, as if a veneer could somehow compensate for the decay inside. I fear the internal journey I'm describing will take much longer to bear fruit, but I believe it's the better way.
Read MoreThe sense that Hell is incompatible with unconditional love and its ties to a God that seems ever-so conditional has quickly led me to the book store, where I've spent countless hours poring over books on theology and comparative religion in the pursuit of a theology that can salvage this slow-motion train wreck.
Read MoreWhat has become of me? On my own time, in the stillness of solitude, I fool myself. I hold at bay a growing awareness I may no longer be a Christian. When I sit at chapel, observing prayers being offered, hymns sung, and homilies delivered, I'm aware I do so as an outside observer. It chills me to the bone, horrifies me, because there's no escaping the realization that my faith is gone.
Read MoreMy March 20th entry has taken a severe toll on me, as the questions I raised have obviously hit a nerve and have sent ripple effects cascading outward upon my psyche. My mind is mired in incoherence. To make matters worse, I've taken on the shape of Oroborus, further discontented by my own discontent. What did I have to gain from my curiosity?
Read MoreOne thing seems obvious to me: being fallen is in every way a consequence of being born into a fallen world; consequently, compulsory inhabitation in this fallen world is a more than sufficient price to pay for being fallen. The world we live in should itself be the warranted price we pay.
Read More
