When I Left the Faith

Until I was eight years old I lived with my family in southern West Virginia -- Monroe County. We attended the Presbyterian Church that my relatives had attended for many decades. It was a safe place, an honorable little congregation of people living in time and space. It was a sweet little place. Christmas pageants, Easter pageants, choir, Vacation Bible School and of course Sunday School. The children took turns ringing the bell on Sunday mornings. People volunteered to clean the church and set it up for Sunday. It was and still is a mild and welcoming little place.

Some Sundays we attended the church my mother's parents attended. It was a mountain church on the Knobs. It wasn't a holy roller kind of place but it was definitely not Presbyterian. Everyone seemed so damned on fire with it all. People would kneel and pray these wild prayers of confession. The hymns were shape note singing and the people were kind of odd. Everyone was under pressure to be the most sincere Christian that ever lived. Now that I look back at it I think that they were just plain scared; scared of each other and most certainly scared of God. They would preach about other religions and call them un-Christian which did not sit well with me at all. Even as a child I was getting my back up about that sort of thing.

At about seven years old (which is the time kids start considering these things) I discovered space. I was laying on my grandmother's front porch on a hot summer day picking at the gray paint that was bubbling under the summer sun. Begonias lined the porch and there were high backed rockers and an outdoor lounge where my grandfather napped every summer day. I was alone there one day. I was looking up at the sky when I began to wonder where it ended. How high up was the sky, where did it stop and what was on the other side of it. I was somewhat hypnotized by it all and stared intently into the space that really made no sense.

I began to think of not only what I was looking at but also at the very act of seeing and looking. I began to wonder what seeing was and then I wondered about all the other senses in turn. I was particularly taken with hearing and how it worked. It did not stop there, however, and that was to be a real poser for me until this very day. I began to be amazed not only at the acts of sense but also at the act of thinking. What thinking was became the mystery. What is a thought? How do we think. Even then I knew that it was not just the brain which created thought. The brain, I knew, was only the way we could think. It, like the eyes and nose and skin and ears and tongue was the way that all those mysterious things happened. But the real mystery was that it was happening at all.

It was that same summer that my grandfather died. As he lay in the casket at the funeral home and as all the many many people crowded into that room with all the many flowers there was a mighty din of talking and laughing and crying and the sounds of people. I remember that I zeroed in on my grandfather's ears as I looked at him laying there from across the room. I walked up to the casket and was just tall enough to look inside his ear. I wondered if he could hear everyone. I was sure that he couldn't but I wondered what things sounded like in his head now that he was dead. I could not imagine that if I was inside his body I would not be able to hear anything -- that it would be dead silence and that there was no way that any sound could get into his body.

Those thoughts rooted deeply in my thinking and actually, I think, became the parameters surrounding everything else that I did in life. Those thoughts and the questions they posed were the only important things to me and in a way still are. I know that those thoughts and those questions became the engine that drove me profoundly into religion and I mean profoundly. I tended to creep people out about it and many thought that I was just a smart assed little kid who was concerned about things that had nothing to do with reality. I have to say that I don't think anyone understood what I was talking about. I could not imagine that anyone could go through life and not think about those things.

I thought that Christianity was answering those questions. I was centering on the fact that there was a Creator and that the Creator was on the other side of the sky and that the Creator was inside my head and ears and eyes and was directing the things I sensed about life. I was scared about that most of the time. It was almost the way kids feel about Santa Claus at the department store. They love Santa and they want things from him but when it comes time to sit on the old man's lap that's when holy shit-fuck terror screams through their little bodies as they encounter the ultimate in Boogey-men.

I thought that Christianity was addressing those questions and knew that if that was so then I would have to live my life in that entire arena because those thoughts and those questions were the only things that made sense to me. Yet, somehow, those thoughts and questions never seemed to ever be addressed in Church, in the Bible, by the Pastor, in Sunday School or anywhere really. I think I thought I was being fed. People told me I was.

About seventeen years later when I was on a street car in Frankfurt, Germany and reading Abraham Heschel's GOD IN SEARCH OF MAN that I read what he had to say about my questions. It went something like this: radical amazement is being amazed not only at what you are seeing but at the very act of seeing itself. I think I vibrated, nearly screamed and felt like I had been plugged in. Finally, someone was addressing the question directly; was directly describing the thing that I had felt on my grandmother's porch and at the funeral home looking into my grandfather's ears. I was already in seminary at that point and was serving my ministry internship in Germany.

Soon I read Rudolf Otto and learned of his mysterium tremendum et fascinans and my questions became more valid to me and took on a new character. I knew at this time that the Church was not addressing those questions. So I decided to ask them a little bit louder.