Going deeper
















When I lived in Minneapolis, I had a friend who collected the antique trappings of Christianity.

Lord God, heavenly King, almighty God and Father…

He didn’t go to church, and he wasn’t a Christian, yet he was captivated by statues, censers, crucifixes, and altar bells because he believed they were magical, and that their magic would fill him if he was surrounded by them.

We worship you, we give you thanks, we praise you for your glory…

I too am a dilettante and idolater. I don’t care about the poor, the crucifixion, or the Trinity, but I get off on religion just as I used to get off on women and hallucinogens.

Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father, Lord God, Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world: have mercy on us; you are seated at the right hand of the Father, receive our prayer...

It’s not the meaning but the music, antiquity, repetition, and imagery. They’re sensual just as the wine and the bread are sensual, just as a woman’s body is sensual. For decades, I thought it was women whose holy waters could protect me, and it was only the passing of many decades that enabled me to see that beauty can’t save its possessor much less me, this despite my years of work on ambulances and in funeral homes.

For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ with the Holy Spirit in the glory of God the Father.

I know that Jesus can’t heal me, or save me, or even find me a parking place because Jesus isn’t there; Jesus isn’t anywhere. But while other atheists feel bored or offended by the very mention of Jesus, I get high saying the ancient prayers .

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis…

I need them now just as I needed them during my childhood before I even knew they existed, going as I did to a church that believed them to be the idolatrous creation of Satan. Year in an year out, I heard preachers say that people who attend mass will burn in eternal hell, and when I got home, I would hide under my bed because I was afraid that the Lord would return to earth that very afternoon and send me to hell. I built my first altar when I was eleven, decorating it with rocks and wisteria. I didn’t even know it was an altar, just that it seemed more holy to me than the plainness of my real church.

Ritual makes me flower like water makes a plant flower, and I wither in the presence of dogma like a flower before a dry wind, but I am less than a “white-washed sepulcher.” Like my Minnesota friend, I really just want to get high on religion, and I do get high at times, only to, at other times, think that it is just all too stupid, that my feelings about it are too bizarre, and that I have no right to take part in anything related to it. 

Seeing Brent


I looked forward to a long Saturday afternoon of mass, class, and a talk with (Father) Brent, so I took 30 mgs of oxycodone and 900 mgs of Neurontin in the hope that I could quiet the pain enough to sleep. The pain persisted, but hallucinations of blossoming bouquets, flowery kimonos, and pullulating patterns of colors, provided a pleasant distraction. It is usually true that the more I want to sleep, the less I am able to sleep.

During our talk, three needy men came in separately. One asked Brent to jump-start his motorcycle battery, and the others consulted briefly, but I didn’t listen to what they said. I had taken enough food—for Brent and me—to feed several people, so I invited each of the men to eat with us, and one did. Along with caring for his 200-300 person congregation, Brent works with prisoners, Occupy Eugene, homeless campers, and maybe others (I learn new things about him all the time). Our talk went as well as expected, the following being some of the highlights in my own words and to the best of my understanding.

Brent opened by saying that my passion for religion is rare even among churchgoers, and that those who have it usually go to seminary.

I said that I didn’t know what to do with the questions that come up for me in catechism class because it seems inappropriate to ask for answers that I know don’t exist, but I feel untrue to myself if I remain silent. Besides, my feelings are sometimes too intense for me to trust myself to share them appropriately. He said he has no “conclusive answers,” about religion, and he made no suggestions about the class beyond saying that he wants me in it.

Brent regards Christianity and other religions as human attempts to comprehend the incomprehensible and express the inexpressible. His idea of a good church is a place where people share interests rather than answers.

He has never had what people refer to as a “personal experience of God,” and intercessory prayer makes no sense to him except as a morale builder, but after a few years in a Massachusetts’ monastery, he came to believe that those who devote their lives to prayer make the world a better place if only by virtue of the fact that other people are encouraged by their devotion.

I said that one my biggest problems with Christianity has always been that Jesus’ talk of loving your neighbor as yourself sets too high a standard, that I come nowhere near that standard, and that I have no plans to even attempt to come near it. Brent said that he hasn’t been terribly successful in that regard either, but he holds to the thought that nothing need be accomplished overnight.

By the time he went to seminary, Brent had been an officer in the Marine Corps and worked in big business. He wasn’t even a Christian when he experienced a desire to go to seminary, but he has gradually become what he does. What he does is to be a paid Christian, but he gives a lot more to the job than his salary covers. Whether he’s talking to one person or 200 people, Brent’s passion for the priesthood is evident.

He said that he wants to do everything he can to make me feel welcome at Resurrection, and then it was time for class. I participated circumspectly in a discussion of the creeds and the nature of the Trinity, and then we went to high mass. I’ve seen the sanctuary go from unpleasantly hot to unpleasingly cold during the months I’ve been at Resurrection, but yesterday was the first time that Brent asked me to pass inside the altar rail and read aloud from the Bible. I would have laughed if the reading had contained the verse about the fool saying in his heart that there is no God, but it didn’t. I loved being asked to read, though, and I loved everything else too.

Thoughts following my second catechism class


The following is a letter that I just sent to (Father) Brent who had encouraged me to take his catechism class, although, having belonged to four churches, I wouldn't join another one unless I had been going there for years. Besides, I became an Episcopalian at age 23, so I wouldn't need to join the national body, and I wouldn't have to take the class to join the local parish. I think my letter might qualify as blunt, but sometimes I just don't know how to soften things without diluting their meaning. Perhaps, if I sat on it for weeks, but I don't have weeks, and I've already worked on this letter over a period of three days.


I know you're awfully busy, so I hate to burden you with a fairly long letter, but I find it necessary.

I was surprised to hear people in our catechism class speak of struggling to believe, because in the church of my childhood, no one would have admitted as much. Is it not the case that people need never struggle to believe that which they know to be true, and that to do so suggests the triumph of need over integrity? I don’t know what I can be to such people other than an obstacle to their “faith,” and therefore an object of their hatred, and this raises the question of why you wanted me in the class.

The catechism (not you, the catechism) takes me back to my fundamentalist childhood in that the preachers I knew then also addressed difficult questions with smug authority, as if their answers were meaningful, obvious, and incontrovertible, when they were anything but. I see little difference between the fundamentalism I knew then and the fundamentalism of the catechism and creeds, although my childhood church disavowed both as “the works of men.”

I said nothing in our recent class because I could see no benefit in questioning every point—something that I came very near doing in the first class—that is unless I imagined that answers were to be had, which I did not. While I appreciate the fact that you encourage “hard questions,” I still imagine that there is a limit to the number that I, as a nonbeliever, might in good faith ask, and as you said during our last class, if someone isn’t open to learning from the material, then he doesn’t belong in church. As I wrote to you on the day we met, I’m an atheist, and as such I’m not open to learning about the characteristics of a supernatural deity except inasmuch as I can interpret them metaphorically, and I see no way to interpret the catechism and the creeds metaphorically. My attendance at church has been solely a right-brain endeavor through which I had hoped to find some peace with religion. By contrast, the catechism and creeds are entirely left-brain. 

I regard the catechism—and the creeds it supposedly elucidates—simply as the position of the side that won; the side that canonized the Bible; that wrote the creeds; that excommunicated, persecuted, tortured, imprisoned, and murdered those who held other views. As if all this weren’t enough, they did everything they could to destroy the writings and the memory of those whom they persecuted. So, I’m to be open to their writings, to imagine that men with blood on their hands were inspired by God! I’m hardly less open to the Islamic State, the main difference being that these “Christians” successfully carried on their program of control through terrorism for well over a thousand years, and are still doing it right here in America to the extent that they’re able (I write this as one who spent 37 years in the Bible-Belt).

I’m ever aware that for most of the history of Christianity, I would have been tortured and killed in the name of Jesus, and that right here in America, people whose views are considered heretical are still losing their jobs, being disowned by their families, having their pets poisoned and their children bullied. While Jesus had his faults, I never imagine that he would have approved of people who use viciousness to support their claim to having a corner on the truth, but this is what the creeds represent to me.

The creeds don’t even pretend to encourage love and acceptance, but are instead tools for enforcing propositions that never made the first person kinder or more moral. You say that they need not be taken literally, and that the word belief doesn’t have to mean intellectual acceptance, yet people were once murdered because they didn’t take the creeds literally (how easily the church forgets its crimes). When I read those creeds, I hear the screams of people being burned at the stake, and their screams are no less anguished for having happened hundreds of years ago. When I’m in church, I simply tell myself that I’m hearing the mythology of the people among whom I have come, so I will take whatever of good I can from it, and leave that which I regard as bad. It is the best that I can do, the best that anyone with integrity could do.

When you said that the creeds were an anchor to the church, I remembered the time from my childhood when I stepped on a plank and a nail went into my foot and was held there by the sole of my shoe, because that too was an anchor of sorts. Given your statement that the biggest complaint that Episcopalians have about church is the creeds, maybe I’m not alone. Since the entire class won’t be about the catechism, I would like to continue if you still want me, and can help me figure out how to make it work, because just as questioning everything didn’t go well the first time, questioning nothing didn’t work any better the second time.

Despite my atheism, you told me that there was a place for me at Resurrection, and I have tried to believe you. Now, I don't know what to think, nor do I know what you think in light of what you said about the necessity of remaining open to that which I told you from the outset I didn't believe. It's as if I'm suddenly back in the Church of Christ where the heart means little and the acceptance of authority everything. In case I have somehow failed to make myself clear, I don't accept the creeds or the catechism as having any authority. Those writers whom the church silenced produced far more profound and beautiful writings than these.

Appreciatively,