And so here we are now. The story is over. We’ve reached the destination.
If only!
The reason I’ve taken the time to re-tell all this (and if you’ve kept with me through all this, then thank you – you deserve a medal!) is to try and get my head around where I am now, and why I’m here. I still don’t think that’s easy, and if there’s anything that re-telling this story has taught me it’s that trying to comprehend the here-and-now is very hard – it’s often only in hindsight that we can make sense of these things.
All the same, I’m going to try and sum up where I think I am. I’m conscious that the story I’ve relayed may be a little light on specific details – beliefs, events, questions, etc. But hopefully here is where I’ll try and redress some of that.
I really don’t know if I believe in God anymore. There – I’ve said it. Part of me wants to (believe, that is), but a much bigger part of me really doesn’t know. It’s not that I don’t believe in God. That most definitely is not the case - I can't be that categorical. So I guess that makes me Agnostic. But that’s not in a “I can’t decide, or can’t be bothered to think about it” sense. I think my agnosticism is a case of genuinely not knowing. For me, God is the mystery at the heart of our very existence. But it is just that - a mystery. An unknowable mystery (which is why Apophatic theology - or Via Negativa - which attempts to describe God by what he is not, makes a lot of sense to me).
I guess in that sense I’m a believer, in that I have a belief in God. The question seems – to me, at least – to be what we mean when we talk about God. I can’t believe in the personal, friendly chap up-there that I grew up with from my evangelical roots. The one that randomly interferes with his creation, that talks to each one of us, and seems to worry about the pettiest of little things. That kind of God just doesn’t make sense to me. And I guess whilst I’m at it, any kind of being that can in some way be related to by us is something that I find equally difficult to accept.
Now that’s not to say that there may not be some all-powerful, all-knowing source that is behind everything. There may well be. But the key point for me seems to be that such a God would be so far beyond anything that we/I could every understand or appreciate or conceive of, that it seems we could never really know whether there was such a God or not (from another perspective, there is always the sense that God is in us - that is, God is that which is the essence of being human. That is another sense of God that makes sense to me).
So maybe I do believe in God. What I’m not sure about is what I mean by God - the classic God that I’ve grown up with in Church is one that I struggle to make sense of, but I know that isn't the only way of understanding God.
Yet I do still think that there is a place for religion in my life, maybe even Christianity, albeit a somewhat radical interpretation of it. Maybe religion is more like poetry - a creative response to the human condition that seeks to illuminate and guide, to challenge and bring comfort. Religion as art - an attempt to express the inexpressible, to make sense of the incomprehensible, a mirror held up to the diviine. That, to me, seems a noble endeavor worth pursuing.
Now let me get this straight - I never wanted to be here. I never wanted to openly destroy or deny my faith. But I view my current situation much more positively than that. For me, this is the next stage on the journey. I see new vistas opening up ahead of me – new possibilities, new opportunities. In many ways, it feels liberating and freeing to have reached this point. But at the some time, I can’t help but feel a sense of sadness for what I have lost. In some ways I feel like I’m in mourning for what has gone. Probably I’ve gone through some of those classic “stages of grief” (denial, anger, bargaining, depression), but I feel that I’m coming through to a state of acceptance.
Now there may be those reading this who have there own faith, maybe a more traditional Christian one than I feel I have for myself. To you I genuinely wish you good luck. I really don’t want to change what you believe. If your faith works for you, then that is wonderful – treasure it and value it, because that is something very precious. Just because it didn’t work for me doesn’t mean you’re wrong. But it didn’t work for me, and I can’t cling to the pretence that it does. So my journey has to move on. Where it takes me, I really don't know. But move on it must.
To close off for now, this piece by the philosopher Mark Vernon is my current favourite encapsulation of the kind of place where I stand.
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