Finding God Again, Sort Of
When I casually decided to drop by Episcopal church one week, early in 2017, I was just starting to recover from what had been perhaps the lowest religious point of my life. The previous year, I had lost all sense of connection to God. After years of rage at God’s apparent favoritism and feeling like God couldn’t be bothered with me, I’d hit a point where I didn’t feel like I even cared anymore. In retrospect, this was doubtless partly caused by the far too high levels of meds I was on at the time, which had made it difficult to care about anything at all. But after a lifetime of religious obsession, I felt checked out, like it didn’t matter anymore. I wondered if I needed to find a new interest where I could focus my energy.
After I went off the zombifying meds, I slowly started to feel more alive again, but I was still tentative about religion. Going back to LDS church felt like more than I could manage, which is how I randomly ended up visiting the Episcopalians. This was partly because Episcopalians were known territory (in grad school, I’d spent many years living in a dorm full of Episcopalians in divinity school), but honestly, I made this decision mostly because they had a later morning service, at 11:15 am, and I was in a sleep pattern where something earlier didn’t feel doable. I didn’t have some kind of amazing transcendent experience that week, or the weeks following, but something about it kept me coming back. Something about it fed me in a new and different way. God started to feel more real again. It’s hard to overstate what that meant to me; for a while, I was positively giddy, and everything Episcopal made me ridiculously happy.
One way of telling this story is to say that I found God again, and there’s truth to that. But in some ways, that actually isn’t the best description of what happened to me. Because there was a God that I never did find. The God who was supposed to intervene and do something about all the problems I was facing, and whose inaction therefore felt like a profound betrayal. The God who micromanaged people’s lives and doled out extra blessings to his favorites, and who cared more about worthiness requirements than about having relationships with his children. The God who was decidedly male and insisted that men be in charge and saw gay people as fundamentally flawed. The spectre of that God had cast a long shadow over my life. But even though that image of God had caused me tremendous pain, it was incredibly difficult to really let it go—I think because of its familiarity, because I’d internalized it so deeply, and also perhaps because it offered a kind of desperate hope; yes, everything was awful, but maybe I could still somehow persuade God to come back and fix the mess.
But while I don’t want to downplay the significance of changing my religious tradition—that decision was a huge one for me—there’s a way in which that aspect of it almost feels like a side story to the more significant conversion I experienced, which I can best describe as a conversion to a different sense of God. Though that’s not entirely the right way to tell the story, either, because it wasn’t as if I’d never encountered that God before. But it had been difficult to hold on to those flashes of grace, intermingled as they were with much more negative messages. What I found was a much more stable sense of God’s presence, and a God whose love wasn’t simply one of many characteristics and carefully balanced with judgment and law-giving, but who was utterly and entirely defined by love. The more I managed to internalize this, the more it grounded me. Of course, it wasn’t as if all my past fears and complications in my relationship with God were completely zapped and gone. But for the first time in my life, church consistently left me feeling hopeful, and wanting to know God more rather than to keep my distance.
At the same time, over the years since, many of my beliefs about God have actually become less settled. The LDS faith has a fairly definitive idea about who exactly God is, and while I’ve gradually let go of that, I have yet to replace it with a different image or understanding. I’ve gotten much more open to appreciating God as mystery, but I do feel like humans need images to relate to that mystery, and sometimes that loss is unnerving; lately I’ve found myself experimenting with different ways of imaging the divine, noting that the Bible actually does so in quite a few ways. I have however wrestled a lot with the doctrine of the Trinity, and am still not totally settled in what I think about it. But while I’m still very interested in these sorts of theological questions, there’s also a way in which they don’t matter as much to me. I don’t feel particularly troubled by my uncertainty about the exact nature of God, because I don’t think it’s the sort of thing that any human is going to have neatly figured out. What matters more to me are my experiences of God as someone I can trust, someone stable, someone who sticks around. God isn’t volatile, or easily offended; there is nothing humans can throw at God that God can’t handle. And for me, the decoupling of God’s unfailing presence from human worthiness has been utterly life-changing.
I often tell the story of my conversion by talking about how much I love the liturgy of the Episcopal church, or how it feels to be in an inclusive community, or my appreciation of the high tolerance for ambiguity—and that’s all true. I don’t talk as much about finding God there in a new way, because that’s a more personal thing. But in the end, if that element hadn’t been there, I’m not sure the other things would have been enough. I had a number of reasons for choosing to get baptized, but one of the deepest meanings for me was that in doing it I made perhaps the most conscious decision I’ve ever made to opt for belief in a God who is loving, who is unshakably present, and who isn’t going to be scared off by anything I feel or think or do. Of course I still lose sight of that some times, but even as an aspirational belief and only gradually an internalized one, I have no words for what a difference it has made for me.
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