My older sister died last month after a couple of years of slowly slipping away. She was 84 and a dear devout Christian, as is all my extended family. She played the organ at her church for years and was a talented singer and artist.
“When we all get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be! When we all see Jesus, we’ll sing and shout the victory.” Over whom, we aren’t told, but hey, victory! This implies that something or someone is defeated. The devil? Or today, Liberals? When We All Get To Heaven was written in 1898. He’s Coming Soon, another old song - a total ripoff from Aloha Oe (1878) - was written in 1918. I remember eagerly pointing this out to my mom from the hymnal. “Hey, what about this? Soon?” We were sitting together, as we did, for Sunday evening services. She smiled and shook her head, a familiar gesture of dismissal for her little skeptic. By the time I was twelve and forming my own opinions, many of them quite wrong, I became a more devout skeptic, an adolescent agnostic if you will. who was greatly relieved to leave the church and hasn’t wasted a minute looking back. So, I’m a bit of a curiosity to my family, whose lives still spin in tight orbit around their religious beliefs. One huge difference from the old days is that politics has now fully intruded into the sanctuary and pretty much taken over evangelical congregations. Once pastors figured out that politics brought people back to church, it was game over. Republicans/Evangelicals love the old testament, but Jesus and his teachings became an inconvenience. The emphasis is on his role in the Rapture and little else. I’m told that my family members sometimes describe me as a loved one who has “lost his faith”. I’m sure this is sad for them because, well, I’m such a nice guy. Perhaps it is puzzling that I’m able to appear to be at peace with them and the world. Thankfully, there are no attempts at conversion on their part. My daughter told me of this - the “lost his faith” comment - after visiting with a cousin during my sister’s funeral. People think about such things at funerals: faith, eternity, mortality. Truth is, I can state without reservation that I have most certainly not lost my faith. One cannot lose something that they never possessed in the first place. I haven’t lost my World Series ring, for instance, nor have I lost millions in crypto currency. Faith? I’m pretty sure I have that, or a version of it. It’s just not attached to a rigid belief system. I have faith in morning bird songs, turtles basking on logs and sunsets. And death. The family premise is wrong regarding my faith. But if one were to dig a little deeper and ask a true believer what they actually mean by “faith” - and nobody inside their Christian bubble ever asks such things - it’s all about believing a story. The Bible is an amazing storybook. It’s a huge part of cultural literacy in these parts and worldwide. It is a fact that it contains several fish stories, all taken as truth. Faith, one could say, is about believing something that cannot be objectively proven. They are Believers. Capital B. Of what? Of the story. The creation, fall from grace, 3,000-year-old prophesies, virgin birth, resurrection, the rapture, the whole deal. It’s a lot. And it was too big a leap for my twelve-year-old self and still is sixty years later. A formulaic mishmash of ritual, wishful thinking, gullibility with heaping portions of fear, guilt and sexual repression all leading to an end-times apocalypse? No, but thanks for thinking of me. Rather than focusing on some nebulous, imaginary thing I may have lost, I wish my family would consider, just for a moment, what I may have found during all these years in the wilderness. No one has ever asked. And while my parents were missionaries, I am not. I love my family and all my dear relatives. They are, in fact, true believers, in damn near anything it turns out, if one considers their faith in Donald Trump as God’s instrument. Someday maybe we’ll sit down for a talk about what we’ve lost and found in our lives. It all ends up coming down to discerning truth from illusion and delusion, and telling stories. I’m up for that.
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