For the record, I am an atheist.
I’m also gay, skinny, adopted, diabetic and have Asperger’s – which I think have a much larger impact on my character, ethics and morality than my atheism ever could. But that’s clearly a whole different series of diaries.
I was raised in the United Methodist Church. My clearest memories of this early church experience are of attending Sunday school, which we did every week while I was young although we only intermittently attended actual services. Most of my experiences within this tradition were unequivocally positive, and I had no reason to challenge any of the instruction we received. I do remember once stumping my teacher by asking after the disposition of all the human beings who lived and died before Jesus saved everyone, but I didn’t get too bogged down in it as I assumed it was one of those things that would have to “wait until you’re older.” Fair enough.
From around the age of two until almost six, I was molested by the babysitter (also another diary). Sorry. Didn’t meant to throw that at you like that, but it cuts to the meat and moves the story along. At eight, our family moved to Greece to live. My father had been transferred to a Navy facility just outside Marathon. Greece was a treasure – each day dripped with the ages, every vista was limned with history and around every corner was an altogether new experience narrated in several languages. At eleven we moved back.
My return to the US was an unmitigated disaster. Routinely bullied for a robust list of differences, I withdrew into an ever more isolated circle that consisted of me and books. (I did not know I have Asperger’s until just a very short while ago). The first book I read which transported me from my misery was The Hobbit, and I haven’t slowed down yet. These books kept me alive, literally. I clearly remember having a negotiation in my head over whether I would commit suicide or not, and the only deciding factor was that I did not yet know how the book I was reading would end. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The Lord of the Rings. The Dragonriders of Pern. Edgar Allen Poe. Marcus Aurelius. Du Maupassant.
I discovered that a natural facility for writing existed within me, and I was hooked. The literary arts magazine was a natural place for me to alight in search of similar minds -which I found. By senior year, I was the editor-in-chief which seemed the pinnacle of achievement to me. I worked diligently and passionately to guide the creation of the best magazine I could envision. That issue of “Wingspan” was the only issue in the many decades of its existence to receive top honors from the National Council of Teachers of English, among other prestigious awards.
After graduating, I went to a small southern Baptist college in Virginia. After failing every class but English, for which I received an ‘A,’ I dropped out and joined the US Navy as an engineer. In boot camp in Orlando, I was one of two sailors to be the first to formally practice Buddhism on a military installation in the US – or at least that’s what we were told. Wait a minute. Buddhism? What happened to Methodism? Let’s go back to the thread of religious thought twining its way through my experiences.
As puberty threw me into a hormonal tailspin in the mid80s, I realized that I am gay. Well, I began the process which led to the understanding that I am gay many years later. But back in the 80s, I knew something was up. And I also knew, because I’d been to Sunday school that that something was evil. I knew I couldn’t be Christian anymore, so I stopped. I became a rather militant atheist. Not that anyone had a clue except me and a notebook or four, but oh, susanna! was I a militant atheist.
Then the suicide attempt. Then a wasted year of pointless therapy. Then a discovery – Wicca. After every miserable, desperate, lonely, bullied meaningless second to date, I found, in Wicca, a raison detre that I could point to. You see, the cycle of seasons in our biosphere is the foundation for an understanding of the cycles of our inner spheres, and that made sense to me in a way that didn’t require that I believe I was created to be worthless and damned. And I could do it by myself. I flung myself into it. I was to be the creator of my own theological context, and by doing so find a sense of temporal context which I’d never known but somehow knew existed. I wrote a Book of Shadows completely in haiku. I studied Gardner and Buckingham and the Rosicrucians and distilled what I liked and chucked the rest. It was grand and healing and fun.
I also discovered that Wiccans are like any other human. They lie and cheat and distort the tenets of their own faith. The Rede states, “An it harm none, do what you will.” But I met scores of folk who claimed to be Wiccan but discussed harmful rituals and vindictive natures. Please understand that I cannot possibly mean all Wiccans are like this. Pure nonsense. But the point I took away from this is that humans can lay claim to any moniker they wish without facing reprisals for being hypocritical about it. And so began my eventual disenchantment with Wicca which crystallized just before I joined the Navy.
As I mentioned, I read. Constantly. While I’m eating dinner, while I’m riding in a car, at the bus stop, ad infinitum. So I was roughly familiar with Buddhism when the possibility of attending services at the chapel on base was made known to me. My friend Lee and I went. And thus began a fairly lengthy flirtation with Buddha that carries over into my current atheism in small but powerful ways.
I recently had the opportunity to attend a lecture by the Dalai Lama. Incredibly moving and powerful, there were two things that struck me as unusual and telling. The first: when His Holiness took the stage, every single person in the auditorium was instantaneously silent and on their feet and remained so until he took his seat. I’ve never seen that many Americans (many thousands) so universally respectful. The second: during His Holiness’ speech, he remarked, “Lately I have begun to disbelieve the scriptures.” He paused. “The scriptures state that the Moon shines with her own light. But we know that the light of the Moon is the reflected light of the sun.” What a simple, joyful faith to acknowledge the frailty of the practitioners before him who recorded their understanding of the world without tripping over his own frailty thus incorporating a new understanding of the world. Just beautiful.
Soon after leaving the Navy, I was in Denver working as a property manager at an apartment community on Cheesman Park. One afternoon, my maintenance supervisor burst in to say, “The landscaper just fell on the sidewalk and he’s not moving!” I had the leasing consultant call 911 and hoofed it to the landscaper. I checked his pulse (weak and thready) and saw he was not breathing. I couldn’t get an airway clear, and then I lost his pulse. Sparing further details, I continued doing what I could but by the time the ambulance came he was gone. Anaphylactic shock from a bee sting. I know, right. The landscaper?! Irony is a twisted soul, and that’s no joke. This shock caused me to reevaluate my relationship with my own mortality.
I remembered a conversation with my father when I told him I didn’t believe in god anymore. He got very quiet. Then he said, “God still believes in you.” This time around it resonated.
When I moved back to Virginia, I looked up the MCC. OK, the Universal Federation of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC) is a congregation founded by Troy Perry in the late 60s in West Hollywood with a fresh nontraditional, but still canonical, view of the place of the homosexual as we understand him or her in the modern context. In other words, it’s the gay church. He’s written books on liberation theology and sparked a movement that has some 300+ churches in 20+ countries. And I went to the one where I lived in Virginia. The pastors were two Duke University MDiv graduates, and they were simply magnetic. They were both mothers and ex wives and they lived their Christianity in a way that made me think of the commitment the Desert Fathers must have held to their faith. Their stories gave me hope and faith and I even began to consider undertaking the preparation and study for ordination taking an active role in the business and spiritual life of the church.
An opportunity came up that moved me to southern California, where I live now. Once out here and settled, I attempted to continue my studies and preparation, but found that my vocation was more hero worship of my two pastor-friends than genuine worship of any deity. After reflecting on the kind of person that seemed to imply that I was, I considered all that I had learned over my forty some years, I analyzed to the furthest limit of my ability the implications that knowledge seemed to make and then, I read Christopher Dawkins. Which led to reading others. Checking out blogs, like the Friendly Atheist and Gaytheist and a host of other skeptical sites.
And now we’ve done a full circle and come back to the fact that I am an atheist of the secular humanist variety - which means a few things and doesn’t mean a few others.
If you’ve managed to endure this with me until now, (I had no clue this would get so lengthy) thank you so much. I’m getting to my point. The reason that I just spilled my story across spacetime for the universe to read is this:
No matter what you believe or how you interpret your world or what you understand to be the nature of reality, every one of us deserves the headspace to work it out for ourselves. Without being vilified for being wrong or misguided or evil or batshit fucking crazy. Go right now and look in the mirror and tell yourself you’ve never been batshit fucking crazy. Then maybe you might be justified in calling someone else out. But you and I know better. Because we all endure a life fractured with trauma and disaster and beauty and light and epiphany. How much deeper and richer would it be if we shared those disasters and that beauty instead of trying to pwn everything.
Sincerely,
A Secular Humanist
UPDATE: Community Spotlight? Wow. Just, wow. Thank you all for your comments, etc. At work and can't respond to everyone just yet. I will soon.
