Circles. If only mine overlapped, or at least touched.


St. Mary’s has what it calls a Circle Service on Saturday evenings, and I went to one last month out of curiosity. Twenty people were present, 80% of them women, and 80% of them between 55-70. The seats were arranged in a circle, in the middle of which was an altar with candles and communion elements but no cross. The service was led by a lay person, everyone hugged everyone during the Passing of the Peace, and communion was passed from person to person instead of being served by a priest at a railing. I didn’t say the words, and I didn’t sing the hymns, but I did think about how I might do what many Episcopalians do, which is to impose a private meaning onto public expressions of faith. It was a daunting task.

Communion was proclaimed as “open to all,” leaving me free to interpret it in the same way that I interpreted the hugs, that is an act of human intimacy rather than the symbolic consumption of a corpse. When I got home and told Peggy (herself a nonbeliever) that I had taken communion, she called me a phony and said that if she had been one of the communicants and had known that I was an atheist, she would have been outraged. Since about a third of the communicants did know, I wondered how they felt.

I’ve been to two other Circle Services because I enjoy the sense of community and because liturgy fills me in a way that nothing else can. It also enables me to set aside my disagreements with Christians and to meet with them at a heart level. All I require is that they want to meet with me, not as a spectator, but an equal.

Every Saturday, I ask myself whether I want to go that day, and my answer has been about 50/50, mostly because I worry about causing offense. Last week, I went. Judy—who was born in Mississippi 20 miles from my own hometown—was to lead the service, and I looked forward to the heart that I knew she would bring to it, that and her beautiful Southern accent. I first sat on the other side of the circle from her, but when I became aware that I wanted to be near her, I took the empty chair to her left. Before she started the service, Loren (my Yoga instructor) came over and suggested that, if the words of the service didn’t work for me, I use words that did. Priest X* (who also knows of my atheism) arrived, and s/he sat to my left so that I was between Priest X and Judy.

When the time arrived for Priest X to go to the altar and consecrate the communion, Judy whispered that I shouldn’t feel pressured to take it if I didn’t want to. I said that, no, I wanted to do so. She seemed surprised but also pleased. After starting the communion around the circle, Priest X returned to the seat beside me without having taken it, which meant that s/he would be the last person to receive it, and that I would be the one to serve it. I nearly laughed aloud at the thought of an atheist giving communion to a priest.

Serving the bread involved tearing off a piece of it and saying certain words as I put the piece into Priest X’s hands. That being done, I wiped the rim of the chalice with the piece of cloth that accompanied it, and served the wine in the same manner. As all this transpired, Priest X looked me in the eye with extraordinary alertness. I took this to mean that s/he was completely in the moment, although in what way, I couldn’t tell. Only two surmises came to me. One was that s/he was simply struck by the novelty of the situation, and the other was that s/he was looking for signs of disrespect. Aside from these wonderings, I was very much in the moment too. 

Someone later wrote to me that the first priest to consecrate the communion (this was over ten years ago) had wanted to specify that it was for those who were, “seeking a deeper relationship with Christ,” but that the Circle Service community had voted him down. I responded (too bluntly) that any largesse that can be granted by vote can be taken away by vote. I wrote this way because I am the leper, the tax collector, the adulteress, and the woman at the well whom the religious people of Jesus’ day condemned and whom most religious people today still condemn. If Christians believe that the invitation to Holy Eucharist comes from Christ, then I would say to them, who are you to vote anyone in or out? I have no reason to think that they saw things from this perspective, whereas I feel sure that it was hard for them to override the wishes of a priest who had been their leader for decades, and that they were willing to do so precisely because they wanted to reach out to those whom he would have excluded. Priest Y—this church has several priests and deacons—wrote to me: “…no one would be upset that an atheist joined the circle. That's pretty much WHY that service exists, for those for whom the traditional ‘father, son, holy spirit’ language just doesn’t work.”

Part II

After I wrote everything above this paragraph, I went to the Circle Service that occurred the day after the mass murder in Connecticut. I had been very upset by that shooting, and I debated whether Circle Service was a good idea for me since Christian explanations of such events strike me as worse than useless. While I knew what might be said, my growing closeness to the people left me to hope they would do something more meaningful, so I went. It was a mistake. For one thing, I get tense in crowds, and instead of the usual 20 in attendance, there must have been thirty. For another, the laywoman who gave the homily started with, “People always want to know why these things happen, but, of course, there is no answer, not really.” Then she gave a sad little smile which I took to imply that, rational thought being useless, she was ready to offer some thoughts on inner peace. I remembered an old series of Miller Lite commercials that would pose a question (what do women want? is there life on Mars?), and immediately conclude, “Why ask why? Drink Miller Lite,” and I envisioned those thoughts as Jesus Lite.

I looked around at the other people in the circle, and, rightly or wrongly, I took their benign expressions to mean that they liked what they were hearing, and I felt very alone. Then it struck me that when I started going to the Bible study at St. Mary’s, my guess was that people would be offended by my atheism, yet everyone has been supportive. I’m the one who’s offended—at least I was on Saturday—because that brief sermon seemed to verify something I had worried about, namely, is church primarily an escape into fantasy. The people at St. Mary’s are sweet, the songs are sweet, the hugs are sweet, the talk of inner peace is sweet, but the people don’t appear to ask the same kinds of questions that I considered inescapable after age eleven.

You might very well point out that I’m reading way too much into one sermon, and you might very well ask what, if anything, would have pleased me—a Power Point presentation entitled “Theodicy Through the Centuries”? Angry Christians shaking their fists at a God whom many consider willing to help people find parking places and win football games, yet allows children to be murdered? What did I want from them? I wanted something that seemed emotionally real. If they had said, “Yes, sometimes religion seems like bullshit even to us, and, no, we can’t defend it, but, whether you think so or not, we believe it makes us more loving than we would be without it,” I would have felt solid earth beneath my feet. What else would have satisfied me? Tears. Maybe silence. Maybe saying to God, “You know, trusting you isn’t easy when you refuse to do that any of us would hope we would have done, which was to stand between a mass murderer and twenty children even if it meant that we would die without saving a one of them. But maybe none of this would have been real for them. Maybe they really are okay with not asking the kinds of questions that atheists ask. Yet, to immediately turn the focus of Oregon Episcopalians toward their feelings and how they might mitigate their pain over a shooting in Connecticut! Maybe I misunderstood her intent. Maybe prejudice got in the way.

Priest Y also wrote to me: Atheism doesn’t bother me, because I consider atheism, when one arrives at it intellectually and is willing to continue to ask questions and interact with other people as a seeking person on this great journey, to be a valid form of spirituality. Atheists tense-up when the word spiritual is applied to them because they expect the next sentence to be: “You’re too sensitive [or intelligent, or perceptive, or caring, or fine a person] to be a real atheist.” I re-read Priest Y’s email to find such an implication, but when no hint of patronage or condescension appeared, I was forced to conclude that, wonder of wonders, this leader in a worldview (Christianity) that has oppressed and reviled people like me for 2000 years, validates my path. But can I validate his/her path. My answer is that I am trying to be open to the possibility that Christianity at least can lead to wisdom and kindness because I’m tired of the hatred that results from assuming—as atheists often do—that the only salient effect of the Christian religion on its followers is delusion, ignorance, oppression, and buffoonery. If I can’t find some good in Christianity in a church that is willing to include me in its communion, as an atheist, where can I find it? The problem is that, just by looking, I feel like a traitor to those atheists who spend their lives fighting to keep the forces of religious oppression at bay. Im like a person who has become lost in the Arctic and finds himself astride ice floes that are drifting apart, unable to let go of either.

* I feel obligated to keep the identity of most priests private, especially when the opinions they share with me contradict official church doctrine.

Mass murder jokes, anyone?


I had never written a joke in my life, but when I couldn’t sleep last night, I wrote these. I’m not saying they’re good; I’m just saying I wrote them.

A blonde who wanted to be a mass murderer shot over a hundred people with paintballs before somebody pointed out that she had the wrong kind of gun. She then shot herself in the head, but all it did was to turn her hair green.

Another mass murderer wannabe stormed into a Catholic church wearing a George W. Bush mask, and proceeded to shoot-up the communion wafers. The judge sentenced him to 30 days for the shooting and 30 years for the mask.

A mass murdering man and his mass murdering dog walked into a bar. The man told the bartender that the dog could talk, and the bartender said drinks would be on-the-house if it were true. The man said, “Speak, dog,” and the dog said “Woof,” but the bartender wouldn’t give them the drinks because he said it was dog talk rather than people talk. The dog and the man killed everyone in the bar, and then they had their drinks-on-the-house.

A traveling salesman mass murderer named Massey had car trouble one night and knocked on the door of a farmer who had a beautiful daughter named Lassie. Lassie and Massey fell in love, but when people laughed at them because their names rhymed, Massey killed them all, and then he and Lassie lived happily ever after, but they never actually got married, so some people say they lived in sin.

Knock. Knock.
Who’s there?
A black quadriplegic Quaker woman mass murderer.
There are no black quadriplegic Quaker women mass murderers.
Bang! Bang-bang-bang! Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang!

When you cross a mass murderer and a serial killer, what do you get? A serial mass murderer, of course.


This morning, I asked Peggy what she thought of my jokes. “Not much,” she said. “Should I put them on my blog?” “NO!” she answered. Then I got to wondering how people would react if I did, and I decided to find out.

During the first few days after the murders, I was really upset, and I’m still really upset, but now that the American press has done what it does best, which is to substitute tears for news in order to boost ratings; and now that politicians have done what they do best, which is to translate suffering into political currency, I am less in touch with grief than I am with anger and cynicism, if not frothing hatred. The major news before last Friday was all about continuing unrest in the Middle East and America’s upcoming fiscal cliff. This week, the major news consists of tearful interviews of people who knew—or knew someone who knew—last weeks murder victims, along with the expert opinions of media shrinks who had the shooter and his family psychoanalyzed before the victims’ blood had coagulated. 

As to the politcians, Obama (our Nobel Prize winning hit-man-in-chief), went four years without doing anything to reduce gun violence, and he just got through running an entire presidential campaign without mentioning it, but having discovered last week that guns are dangerous, he gave Joe Biden (his vice-president) until next month to come up with proposed gun control laws along with suggestions about how to curb the “culture of violence” in America (he’s talking music, movies and video games here, not the actual wars, assassinations, imprisonments, and bombings that he himself supports). When he was asked why it wasn’t until last week that he started supporting about gun laws, he said he had been too busy trying to save the economy. What I would like to know is when he finished with that? 

Even numerous Republicans have reversed their belief that patriotic Americans should be able to own any weapon short of a ballistic missile (a few months ago, one such Republican ran a campaign ad in which he was shown firing bullets into environmental regulations). What do these politicians know now that they didn’t know when they got out of bed last Friday? That 8,500 Americans are shot dead on their own soil each year? No, they knew that. The only additional information they have is that the political breeze has become a major storm, and that their careers are dependent upon blowing with it. 

I copied the following from the Bushmaster site (the gun used in Connecticut was a Bushmaster) because it uses the common American view that real men love guns as a marketing toolThe text refers to a promotion in which men who bought the kind of gun used in the Connecticut shooting automatically received permanent "man cards."


Proof of Your Manhood – The Man Card ... Do you have what it takes?

Windham, ME – Inspired by the overwhelming response to Bushmaster’s “Consider Your Man Card Reissued” sweepstakes, Bushmaster Firearms announces the latest part in the series; the Man Card online promotion.

To become a card-carrying man, visitors of bushmaster.com will have to prove they’re a man by answering a series of manhood questions. Upon successful completion, they will be issued a temporary Man Card to proudly display to friends and family. The Man Card is valid for one year.

Visitors can also call into question or even revoke the Man Card of friends they feel have betrayed their manhood. The man in question will then have to defend himself, and their Man Card, by answering a series of questions geared towards proving indeed, they are worthy of retaining their card.

The company is now up for sale, and many of its internal links (including the one for Man Cards) no longer work. Maybe the idea just isn’t all that funny anymore. When I last posted, I wrote of the hell that I saw in the eyes of the woman whose photograph I included. Now, Ive been sitting here looking into the hell that I see in the shooters eyes, and some of my rage toward him has been replaced by pity. There is a deep sickness eating away at the heart of my country, and I wish I could believe that it can be healed, but when the very man who has called for an end to Americas culture of violence kills causes people to die violently everyday, where is there reason to hope?

Every description of God is an excuse for his absence*


Yesterday's mass murder in America points to one of the seemingly limitless problems I have with the Jewish, Christian, and Moslem view that God has both the infinite willingness to do good and the infintite ability to do good. The problem is, why doesn't he? God knew the Connecticut shooter was on his way to that school, and he could have stopped him, but he didn't. If I, imperfect being that I am, had known, and could have stopped him, but  hadn't stopped him, what would you think of me, and why should you think differently of a perfect God?

Christians offer various answers to why God permits evil and suffering. One is that we brought them on ourselves through original sin, so God is not responsible. Another is that God has given us the power to cure cancer, end war, enact gun control laws, provide universal healthcare, develop better warning systems for natural disasters, and so forth (ironically, surveys show that most American Christians favor war while opposing gun control and universal healthcare), and so, again, God is not responsible. Yet another claim is that suffering ennobles us, and is necessary for us to achieve our full potential for strength and compassion. According to this view, we wouldn't even recognize good in the absence of evil because we would have no basis for comparison. There's also the claim that the God for whom "all things are possible" couldn't hinder evil without hindering freewill, although why freewill is considered so important, I can't imagine. And finally, a great many American Christians believe that God not only allows evil and suffering to befall their country, he wills it to punish us for such sins such as re-electing Obama, taking prayer out of schools, and being "soft on homosexuality."

If such answers appeal to you, you are probably already a believer because, like transubstantiation, the virgin birth, and talking jackasses, only the faithful can make sense out of them, and this is only because they are unwilling to apply the same standards of rationality to religious belief that they apply to every other facet of life. If you are one of those believers, and you disagree, feel free to present your rational arguments. 


While I will admit that suffering can sometimes be ennobling, I won't admit that it has any place in a universe that is run by an infinitely good and infinitely powerful deity. This is because such a deity would be able to achieve all of the the good that suffering inspires without anyone having to suffer. In other words, he could eliminate war, crime, cancer, diabetes, child molestation, cruelty to animals, and every other evil on the face of the earth while at the same time lifting us to the exalted moral state of angels. The fact that he chooses to leave us in this hellhole of undeserved misery that life on earth represents to quadrillions of lifeforms constitutes ample reason to declare his existence a fantastic fiction that has, in any measurable way, done more harm than good over the course of history.

One of the reasons I've been attending some of the events at an Episcopal Church of late is that I very much want to think well of Christians. I want to see them as being as rational and intelligent as any atheist, but then something like this school shooting comes along, and I hear their pablum about the miracles God performed in saving some while others died, and I feel like a quixotic moron for even trying to find rationality in Christendom. My only question this morning--a pessimistic morning for sure--is to wonder how self-servingly delusional religion has to be before it qualifies as mental illness?

*I have no idea who said this.

Buckets of tears


I’m in pain, I’m weak, and I’m afraid of taking Yoga (having killed a vertebra in my neck and made my shoulders worse the last time I tried), so Loren and I start our relationship with an exchange of emails about her church-sponsored Yoga class. She thinks it will help me, and her enthusiasm is contagious. (From her first letter, I saw her as bringing the kind of energy to Yoga that Steve Irwin brought to reptiles.) Then, knowing I’m an atheist, she warns me that the class will contain language about God. I go anyway. After all, it’s held at a church where she is a member, and I’m choosing to attend a limited number of events at that church partly because I want to know what religion means in the lives of mature and deep-thinking Christians. After my first class, I feel peaceful and even healthy for the first time since I dont know when, and the feeling lasts for two hours.

We continue to correspond, somedays several times. Loren gives me good advice. I know it’s good advice because I could have given it to myself. As much as possible, she says, stay away from drugs, drink lots of water, and believe that I can get better. Yesterday, she wrote, just promise me that you will pay attention to the feeling better.. practice accepting that god IS all powerful.  that Christ is god and Christ does heal..

Did she forget that I’m an atheist? No, that cant be it, so how am I to react here? Am I mad; am I offended? No. I’m just puzzled, yet my puzzlement doesn’t make me want to pull away from Loren because I believe in her at a heart level. From the time of her first rapid-fire, unedited, and brimming over with support email, I trusted her, and one or two sentences (I can’t tell which given how she punctuates) isn’t going to change that, yet I can’t ignore what she wrote because that would be to invite more of the same. In class, I have to be okay with God-language, if I am to attend, but, depending upon how such language is handled out of class, its continuation could drive a wedge between us. I want so much to respond honesty yet lovingly that I write page after page after page, most of them with tears running down my face and my hands trembling almost too much to type. I often show great emotion when I write, but this time, Im doing my utmost to reach out to another person in a way that will work for both of us, and that multiplies my usual intensity. When I’m finally done, I don’t even know what I said, so the next day I get up and, without reading it, send her the following paragraph:

“Even if I thought that such faith as you possess would help me tremendously, I couldn’t accept it because integrity requires that I live in congruence with my best judgment about the nature of reality. I accept that faith in God represents your best judgment, and I should like it if you are able to accept that unbelief reflects mine. We have two choices. We can move apart because we don’t share a spiritual language, or we can come together in a place beyond language.”

In response, she tells me that she will work with me to find such a place, and then she tells me of the good that religion has brought into her life. Why, I wondered, could I not accept being told to trust God, yet I could easily turn right around and feel a passionate interest in hearing about her experiences with trusting God? I decide that it’s the difference between “I” statements and “you” statements. No one really understands where I’ve been or where I’m going, and they’ve hardly traveled the roads I’ve traveled, and they’ve certainly not sat by my side through hundreds of sleepless nights in which I agonized over religion, so any advice they give me is bound to miss the point. But when they talk about their experiences, they are sharing with me their world, and if I care about them I care about that world, not to change it, but to understand it, and even to love them the more because of it.

She closes with, “See ya tomorrow, you wonderful and blessed little atheist you.” I would have preferred stupendous or magnificent to little, but because I trust this person, I simply take her words to mean that we—the two of us—have successfully navigated around a scary obstacle. If we had failed, there might have been nothing left for us, and my loss of her goodness would have become another wound that I would blame on religion.

I’m bleeding, emotionally. I’m also sick, and I don’t know why. I went cold turkey on every one of my many drugs without having a clue what hell the consequences would be. I had thought I had reached a place of mellowness and near-acceptance of living with pain and disability, somehow overlooking the fact that a diet of the kind of drugs that people rob pharmacies at gunpoint for will do that to a person, and when you take those drugs away, the pain is going to hit him like a train hitting a butterfly, and the physical part of it will be the easy part.

I had my second Yoga class today, and Loren asked me to stay afterwards to talk. I said I would.

Two days ago, I had my first marijuana in weeks. I ate only an eighth of a small cookie, that being half my usual dose. Yet, that eighth of a cookie put me on the floor and took away my ability to make coordinated movements with my hands. I looked, from my place on the floor, at a little statue of Santa Claus, and saw that it was alive, and that it was looking back at me with frightening intensity. Next, I heard spirit voices murmuring overhead. Then came a swoosh, and they were gone. I made my way to the computer and sat down to write the trip out (writing beats the hell out of screaming, I’m sure, not that I’ve ever tried screaming), and that wasn’t easy considering that I was weak, trembling, crying, and un-coordinated. Two days later, and I’m still not back to earth. What I am is raw, hurting, bleeding. All the pain is right on top and threatening to spill over and engulf me. So, I feared class today. The first class was incredibly powerful, and I wasn’t even on the verge of becoming a puddle on the floor then, so I had no idea what such power might do to me today. I was afraid I would cry just from walking into the room, and my belief that Loren would welcome that made me the more afraid I might do it. Still, I went. 

I arrived early and lay on the floor, placidly listening to people talk until Loren started the asanas (exercises) and, with them, the God-language. She would say God, and I would substitute Satan because that’s what the Biblical God represents to me. Halfway into the class, she said, “Let your every barrier melt,” and I responded (silently), “NO! I will NOT do that because I don’t think it would be good for me or for the class!”

As the class continued, I felt ever more centered. I threw myself into the asanas while listening to her voice with delight, because I heard in it the voice of a friend for whom no meaningful words were needed. Then, jarringly, I heard the words:

God be in my head, and in my understanding;
God be in mine eyes, and in my looking;
God be in my mouth, and in my speaking;
God be in my heart, and in my thinking;
God be at mine end and at my departing.”

and I was taken back to the 1969 and visions of a priest I loved, a priest whom many, good Christians all, ridiculed because he butchered ritualistic language (he had a disability of some kind), but whose heart was so pure that I loved him the more because he botched ceremonies that I considered beautiful. I even came to love the ceremonies more because he botched them because botching them made them his ceremonies, and I loved him. His voice then was as Loren’s voice was today. It was the voice of my beloved and was perfect even in imperfection. I became an Episcopalian because of Father Hale (I will never call him Ed nor will I ever call another priest Father). At age twenty, God was already a non-entity for me, but Father Hale took his place.

At the end of every service, he would lead us in singing the 498-year-old words that Loren was now saying, and seeing him in my memory put a small crack in my dam. Then, his white-as-snow ghost entered the reality of the darkness before my closed eyes, and I reached toward it in my heart. Yet, no amount of love and no visions of ghosts could ever make me say his words, Loren’s words, in my own heart. Then, without thinking, I took out the word God and put in The Universe, and suddenly, I could say them, and I could even be more moved by them than I had ever been moved by them before. What’s more, I knew that Loren, at least, would applaud what she, in her effusive manner, might very well call my brilliance in finding a way to make the words work for me.

The universe be in my head, and in my understanding;
The universe be in mine eyes, and in my looking;
The universe be in my mouth, and in my speaking;
The universe be in my heart, and in my thinking;
The universe be at my end and at my departing.”

I have no idea how many people saw my tears, but Loren probably did, and I think Donna did too because they both asked me afterwards how the class went for me. “Okay,” I said, and then I tiptoed from the room (nearly tripping over the threshold and thereby demolishing my attempt at stealth). I snuck out because I didn’t think I could even talk to Loren without crying, and I didn’t want to do that, at least not the kind of all out crying that was welling up within me. Again, Loren was not the obstacle, it was my sense of place and timing that was the obstacle. Putting tears on paper is one thing. Showing them to someone is at another, more intimate, level. I’ve been to lots of peer-counseling meetings in which complete strangers bared themselves, and I learned that I could emote in such settings to an extent that few women, much less men, could, but I finally concluded that sharing tears with strangers is like having sex with strangers in that both have the appearance of intimacy and both feel awfully good, but without any real substance. Loren is not a stranger, but today I just couldn’t give her my tears because I was too overwhelmed, and our friendship was too new. Beneath my veneer of reserve and cynicism, it is sometimes too easy for me to trust people, and I have learned to mistrust myself in order to avoid doing so.

I posted this piece right after I wrote it and pulled it two hours later when it occurred to me that I should run it by Loren first to be sure that it represented her fairly. She wrote just now to say that it was fine.