In 2000, I began discernment. Within the United Church of Canada, discernment is a formalized process that potential ministers engage to “listen to the will of God.” I should have known right from the start that I’d be in trouble. For me, “the will of God” is kind of an inside joke. When I was a kid, we used to drive to summer reunions in Maine and New Hampshire where family from nearly every state on the eastern seaboard would gather to do all those New England things white families like to do together: dig for clams, boil lobsters, have a corn roast, sing songs around a piano—and go to church. You know what they say about families that pray together.
Every reunion, there was a funny game that played itself out between my grandfather and his brother-in-law, my uncle Quentin. Who would get to preach the sermon? Somewhere in the misty past, their Puritan ancestors met a fork in the religious road, and that fork presented two wildly different routes. My grandfather’s route had taken him to a liberal congregationalism. My grandfather came complete with a doctorate and a facility with ancient languages and a talent for careful reasoning. My uncle Quentin’s route had taken him to a gregarious Pentecostalism that didn’t require any formal training—just an openness to an infusion of the holy spirit.
While my grandfather quietly contemplated the consequences of every word and action, my uncle Quentin just let things happen. Whatever the outcome, it was God’s will. Late getting to the clambake? It was God’s will. Not enough money for the groceries? God’s will. Later in life, Quentin got his hand stuck in a snow blower and it chewed off two of his fingers. I’m sure he coped with the loss by saying it was God’s will.
My parents held the two men up to me as illustrations of a life lesson: relying solely on God’s will as an explanation for all of life’s vicissitudes was irresponsible. There’s room in life for our own will too, they told me. My grandfather saved his money, invested wisely, and retired to a modestly comfortable lifestyle. My uncle Quentin, on the other hand, was not always so comfortable. Although I don’t know the details, I was led to believe that in his retirement he was sometimes forced to rely on his children. It was God’s will.
My parents had planted the seeds of a healthy skepticism, and yet there I was: an adult considering a second career and being required by a discernment committee to ask myself what was God’s will for me. In discernment, I tried my very best. I wanted to be touched by God. I wanted to feel the brush of God’s breath on the back of my neck. I wanted the certain knowledge that God was moving with me in my life.
Whatever I may have wanted, a practical matter intervened. It became apparent to everybody accompanying me on this journey, but most especially to me, that I didn’t have the emotional toughness to cope with the demands of traditional ministry. It’s a simple fact of congregational life that there will always be somebody who disapproves of you; there will be something wrong with the clothes you wear, or the words you choose, or the way you live, or the people you hang with when you’re not working. With so many expectations tugging in so many directions, you have to be tough or you’ll be ripped apart.
It’s a paradox of congregational ministry that, although one of your roles requires authentic engagement with the people you serve, you can’t do your job without making yourself impervious. I’ve seen the wreckage. At one extreme are the ministers who have burnt out or cracked up or killed themselves; at the other extreme are the ministers who have encased themselves in a plastic shell and shake your hand with an oily palm and smile through jaded eyes. It’s a rare minister who can negotiate successfully between these extremes. In my discernment, I was forced to admit to myself that I am not so rare; I would end up amongst the wreckage.
In the meantime, I had already enrolled in seminary. I had started the M.Div. program at Emmanuel College in the University of Toronto. Having discerned myself out of ministry, what was I going to do with the courses I was taking? I completed the year, then took a year off—mostly to wallow in depression. There’s something to be said for wallowing—one of those wilderness experiences that seems frightening when you’re in the midst of it, but when viewed from a distance, proves life-giving.
I resolved to go back. This was MY will, not God’s. I would switch programs. I would take the same courses that prospective ministers take, but only to learn, not as training for a formal ministry. What the hell! I’d take only the courses that interested me. If they didn’t meet the program requirements, then screw the program. This was for ME, so what did it matter? I would go back simply to learn. I was amazed at how my renewed lack of purpose invigorated me. I attacked the material. I devoured it. I chewed it up and disgorged it. As an outsider, I became more engaged with these concerns than I’d ever felt as an insider.
That is where I encountered my own fork in the road, a third route diverging radically from those taken by my Pentecostal uncle and liberal grandfather. I found myself taking the hard and narrow path that leads to atheism. The balance of my time at seminary was an extended good hard look into the heart of my religious tradition. I found there an emptiness. It was time for me to reverse the onus.
The most aggressive amongst the religious challenge us to prove them wrong. Prove that our religious claims are false, they say. Prove that God doesn’t exist. However, there are two problems with this tack, one logical, the other, procedural. 1) It is impossible to prove a negative proposition. 2) The burden of proof rests on those who make the most outlandish claims. For forty-five years, I have been yearning after, crying out for, clamouring on behalf of, reasoning to, defending, apologizing, pontificating, yammering, scribbling for the sake of those outlandish claims. But now, with my efforts spent, I find my insights reduced to a single word: nonsense.
Why the shift? Why the gradual loss of faith? When pressed, most of my answers come off sounding like hyper intellectualized rationalizations. They sound plausible, like the reasons I might offer at the local debating society:
• There were the professors who introduced me to the soft edges of this discipline called theology.
• There was the dawning recognition that “seminary as academy” is less about learning or spiritual growth than about enculturation into a professional discourse.
• There was the weight of a religious heritage more steeped in oppression than in the liberative claims it makes for itself.
• There was also the recognition that if we take seriously the demand that we apply reason to our encounters with the world (as “seminary as academy” supposes we should) then inevitably we pose questions of the world that faith can’t answer without returning us to infantile modes of being.
However, these are abstract reasons. They are meaningless without the particularity of the idiosyncratic journey which gave them life. That is why I have offered here some of my journey as a narrative. My journey has happened within a particular religious tradition, within a sometimes eccentric family context, within a relatively narrow geographic region, within an even narrower world view. But I’ve only hinted at what is probably the most influential bit of my particularity: the persistent challenge of an unruly mood.
There is a sense in which relentless acute depression is a thoroughly immersive spiritual experience. It’s like fire. It’s like a flaming coal pressed to the lips. When all that remains are ashes, there’s nothing but to speak with honesty. There are other times, too, which punctuate my life with intense creativity. I’m in such a period now. This is not the frenetic disorganization of a manic episode—more a gentle pressure. The DSM IV has a name for it, but it’s boring—and inaccurate too.
There is an obvious relationship between mood and physical factors. Affect and effect. Spirit and body. This is something everybody experiences. Too much caffeine and you feel anxious. Too much alcohol and you feel blah. Too many carbs and you have a burst of energy followed by a letdown. Not enough sleep and you feel confused and disgruntled. On the positive side, there are many physical factors that improve your affect. Positive relationships, good sex, exercise, adequate sunlight, challenges that stimulate. It would appear, however, that I’m more vulnerable than most to these things—in both directions.
I share this tiny slice of my affective weirdness merely to point out why I have come to regard theism as nonsense. Embodiment is vital to a spiritual life. The Cartesian cogito ergo sum is wrong. Thinking does not define who I am. It is embodied thought that makes me who I am. Or, to be more accurate, it’s embodied feeling: I feel, therefore I am. There is an obvious corollary when that discovery gets transplanted into theological conversation: experience shows me that a deity understood as a disembodied spirit-being becomes untenable. Spirit without embodiment is like wind blowing in a vacuum. You can articulate the idea, but it’s incoherent in the real world.
There were many occasions during my time in seminary that pointed to a growing trend amongst (Protestant) theologians to reclaim the impulses of the Reformation from the spiritual poverty of the Enlightenment and Cartesian dualism. This trend is most obvious in the rise of ecotheology which rejects the idea that human beings have been set over and against the world, and promotes in its place the notion that humans are very much of the world and so cannot abstract themselves from their considerations of other creatures, ecosystems, and resources.
However, while at seminary, I heard precious little about what such an integrative view of the world would mean for our conceptions of divine beings.
Silence is not a surprising response.