About a couple months after I left Christianity, I was having dinner with a group of people after a Unitarian Church service. At the table I was at was an 80 year old man and his wife. We got to talking, and he informed me that he had slowly pulled back from religion. He had started out in conservative churches, became gradually more liberal and went to increasingly liberal churches as he got older, and, finally, at forty years old, cut off ties to religion altogether.
He was solemn as he spoke, and his eyes, though looking at me, were peering back to a distant time and place. I asked him how he walked away from it. He said that, at first, he was insistent. He was paranoid about his mother, who thought he was going to hell. He tried to convince his friends he was sane as they began to leave him.
We tend to think that time heals wounds – that eventually, people are going to get over the prejudices and eventually the people of your past will accept you so that everything will feel more like “home.” I thought that about my own life once. But you come to realize, sometimes, that there are simply some relationships that will never be the same. It’s not a pretty realization. It’s true, perhaps, that there may be a way to mend the bridge – or there may not be. Sometimes, though, the choices faces you to stand at the bridge and keep trying to find a way to help your friends cross…or walk away from the bank into your own inviting sunrise of tomorrow’s possibilities. Many times in life, you can’t choose both.
So I asked this man if things ever did get better – if his mother came to understand him, if his friends eventually connected to him even if they never understood. And a kind of sadness came into his eyes. He thought for a moment as the sadness slightly bowed his head, and he said, “No…no, my mother died thinking I was going to hell.”
“None of your friends reconciled?” I asked.
“No…most of them are dead now, too,” he continued, as he processed the history of the last forty years.
We sat there in silence, eating at the Mexican restaurant. I thought of my own family. It was just a couple months after my own deconversion, and all I wanted was understanding. I wanted people to “get it.” I wanted my mother to stop thinking I was going to hell. I wanted my friends to understand that I had genuinely tried to stay true to them. I wanted my siblings to respect their brother again. I wanted my heart to be able to come back home, accepted, although I so thoroughly opposed almost everything in the Christian religion. I felt terribly, deeply torn.
And he thought about his own history, his own former fears and desires, in the silence. He saw the sadness in me, the prospect of me being an 80 year old man and still not being able to come home. He finally sighed and finished his thought.
“But…you gotta live your own life.”
I heard those words about three years ago, and at the time it seemed lonely, depressing. But in my meditation of those words over the years, they’ve become something else.
Over the years, I’ve discovered my own life. Once upon a time I gave my life to a book and a church, and called the value of that gift “meaning.” My life wasn’t my own, in a sense. And these last few years have been a long process of taking my life back.
And I have a beautiful life. I have replaced old Christian friends I lost with new Christian friends that challenge me and aren’t afraid to entertain my deepest doubts. I have developed relationships with people who appreciate who I am without me having to pretend to be someone I’m not. I’ve had experiences that I wouldn’t have had if I’d committed to a church. I’m able to publically express myself honestly instead of living in the loneliness of lies or suppressed thoughts of doubts.
It’s a very beautiful life. And it’s mine. It’s taken some fighting, though. Some boundary setting. Sometimes boldly telling people and institutions that have had authority over my life for years that this domain was no longer theirs to rule. It took accepting insults from those I thought were friends. It also took saying some painful truths – painful for both sides – to people who loved me. It changed friendships profoundly – and created others that will last, I anticipate, for a long time that would never happen if I hadn’t had the courage to discover myself.
Y’know…a big reason I’m an anti-theist is because I know that people who leave religion – especially those who were most entrenched – are going to be hurt, angry, and confused when they come out. And it’s not for irrational reasons. It’s because they’ve been lied to, and the truth is tearing their lives apart. I think the worst thing we can do to people at that stage in their life is silence their pain. We need to remind them that no, they aren’t insane. It’s not them; it’s the lies of the Christian religion that has ruined their lives. They aren’t depraved sinners – they’re human beings with dignity who have the right to demand respect for themselves. I’m fundamentally indebted to the people who reminded me of that, who encouraged me through those difficult times, and who, thus, brought me to the place I am today, a place where, every day, in a new way, I find meaning not in church creeds or the Bible’s words, but in the joy of living my own life.
I’m not sure that older man will appreciate how much I appreciate not just his sharing of words, but his sharing of life. Because in that moment of silence when he thought about his past and I thought about my future, we had one of the most meaningful, profound, impactful conversations about life I’ve ever had. It’s something I’ll carry with me for a long time, a “me, too” that has reverberated in the last three years of my struggle, and may well reverberate into my own eighties, should I reach them.
So I decided to try passing it on from my life to yours.
[youtube width=”600″ height=”485″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwTr_CRw3GY[/youtube]
Thanks for reading.