I am always happy to find confirmation anywhere that other thinking women with brains, a leftward-tilting sensibility, and a devotion to progressive goals have struggled as I did and do with the chagrin of being Christian in an age when the label conveys to the people I respect "intolerant, narrow-minded, embryo-hugging-at-the-expense-of-sentient-humanity, climate-change-denying, taxes-nonpaying, liberal-baiting, logic-denying middlebrow moron." Bill Maher, for example, was all over the whole God issue as usual Friday night, in the very first Real Time of the season. Every time he gets on the subject I feel less and less affection for Bill Maher (even though he is still my hero) and more and more irritation that I can't be there to rebut his many, many wrong assumptions (and no one else ever has to my satisfaction).
I am slightly soothed to note that most of his guests admit---shyly, as a rule, and with a certain shame---to a belief in something besides hot tubs with twins and so on. But not by much I'm not. I'm an intelligent person and I can tell a hawk from handsaw regardless which way the wind blows, but the sometimes it's hard to hold shame at bay, even though Jesus---understandably---explained, as he had every right to do, that if his followers were ashamed of him, he would be ashamed of them.
For one thing, as I would expect Jesus to understand, I'm married to a Brit---i.e., an atheist who not only doesn't believe in God, but views any discussion of, or casual reference to, one's religious beliefs as a solecism of the worst sort----and I am surrounded by lovely, non-God-bothering liberals who are prone to announcing their nonbelief in a tone of really insufferable smugness, as if their lack of faith somehow set the final seal on their credentials as progressive thinkers with a sky wide tolerance for all faiths.
So I was happy to see this article by Sara Miles in Salon, since both her experiences trying to be a Christian in secret and the reasons why she let it happen to her are painfully familiar to me.
First, just to get it out of the way, the traction-like pull of the original fisher of men (and women) once you let him get his hook in you:
[quote begins from "My Daily Bread" by Sara Miles at Salon.com]
But the Christianity that called to me, through the stories I read in the Bible, scattered the proud and rebuked the powerful. It was a religion in which divinity was revealed by scars on flesh. It was an upside-down world in which treasure, as the prophet said, was found in darkness; in which the hungry were filled with good things, and the rich sent out empty; in which new life was manifested through a humiliated, hungry woman and an empty, tortured man....
[quote ends; link in original]
Second, what a person of even wavering faith can get out of prayer (if you consider prayer to mean Christ-consciousness, voluntarily induced and willingly received):
[quote begins from "My Daily Bread" by Sara Miles at Salon.com]
What did I mean by prayer? I didn't mean asking an omnipotent being to do favors; the idea of "answered prayers" was untenable for me, since millions of people prayed fervently for things they never received. I didn't mean reciting a formula: I loved the language of some of the old prayers that were chanted at St. Gregory's, but I didn't think the words had magical power to change things. I didn't mean kneeling and looking pious, or trying to make a deal with God, or even praying "for" something....
"When you told me to pray," [the author's friend] would remember later, "it was incredibly earnest. You said prayer was like having this intense, profound longing that you just had to be with. That you put the longing in the hands of God, in a certain way. That it was important to be receptive to the unfulfilled, and not fill it or deny it."
[quote ends]
Yes, exactly.
Finally, there are the consequences when one's liberal friends find out you've become besotted with Jesus are embarrassed by and for you.
[quote begins from "My Daily Bread" by Sara Miles at Salon.com]
[E]ven as I kept going to church, the questions raised by the experience only multiplied. Conversion was turning out to be quite far from the greeting-card moment promised by televangelists, when Jesus steps into your life, personally saves you, and becomes your lucky charm forever. Instead, it was socially and politically awkward, as well as profoundly confusing. I wasn't struck with any sudden conviction that I now understood the "truth." If anything, I was just crabbier, lonelier, and more destabilized.
[quote ends]
And then there is the sheer weariness of hearing people knock religion as the major cause of all the trouble on earth, as if human beings couldn't and didn't and wouldn't find something else to quarrel about if religion disappeared overnight. This is a position which my husband Nick actually holds and firmly believes and sometimes can't stop himself from expressing.
If after all that you want to know what a believer gets out of believing, I can't tell you. Not even belief, but faith. Faith in the sense of accepting perceptions that you can't back up by scientific proof or recourse to the feeble, obsolete arguments (yes, I said it) that attempt to attack the logic of such beliefs, as if logic were more than one way of framing perception.
The excerpts above are from a book called Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion, which I shall certainly purchase from Amazon and read for myself. The logic- and science-challenging views of other people whose minds I respect (Jesus-loving Ann Lamott, Buddha-bothering Salinger, and painfully converted Miles) have given me a lot of comfort since that strange period of my life when Jesus infiltrated my consciousness so that I woke up in the middle of the night absolutely terrified that I was on the point of having to literally see with my bodily eyes some sort of vision----I didn't know what----that would take away my choice to buy into it or not.
The world is filled with smug, self-serving Christianist christians who twist the words of Christ to mean whatever they need or want them to mean, and ignore the parts that really apply to them in particular (just as I'm now ignoring the injunction against presuming to judge them). I understand why my friends who were brought up to believe in God have rejected their beliefs: it's as much because they cannot bear to be associated with those call themselves as anything else.
I just think it's the responsibility of intelligent believers----in whose ranks I perhaps not quite as humbly as I ought, number myself----to set them an example, so they can give up their shame and recover what they've lost. Someday, I imagine, they are going to need it again.
Thanks for this essay. I found Miles' essay equally compelling. We need more voices like Miles' in the world reminding us that true people of faith get no easy answers, just more questions.
Posted by: Anna Murphy | February 21, 2007 at 01:45 PM
P.S. I like him, but I also have trouble with Bill Maher. He plays his homophobia for laughs, but it isn't funny.
Posted by: Anna Murphy | February 21, 2007 at 01:46 PM
I have the same feeling as you, so good. however, if you add some explanation below the pictures, it's better.
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