The Earth-Body Story

So I left that writing workshop exercise feeling kind of stupid and small and story-less. If I wasn't ready to write about starting to live my life without God, then what the hell was I going to write about? We participants in the workshop were about to enter into 24 hours of silence so that we could go deep into our writing. It seemed to me of course that everyone else had a story firmly and clearly in mind. Everyone but me.

My story, the one I had tentatively tested in that exercise, didn't seem ready, or ripe. Or I guess it's more truthful to say that I didn't feel ready or ripe or brave enough to start writing it.

In fairness, what I had declared to myself and my workshop companions, though I wasn't exactly clear about this at the time, was more about how I intended to live than about what I intended to write. As I said before, it only stands to reason that in order to write about starting over to live my life without God, I was going to have to start to live my life without God. To cut the cord, saw off the ball and chain that were shackled to my ankle, slash the lashings of the sack on my back, to use my own rhetoric.

But I had no reasoned or reasonable plan in mind. I loved imagining that somehow I could go back to the way I was before I got ordained, and even farther back than that, to the way I was before I decided to embrace Christianity around age twenty (I wasn't born that way!).

And as much as I loved thinking that I could somehow return to my own personal era "Before Christ," to a time in my life without theology, without doctrine, without too much thinking--was that it? Without religion . . . was it that?-- I wasn't really even sure that such an enterprise was possible. And I certainly didn't have a clue how to go about doing this, living this, or being this.

You begin to see how tangled a matter this was for me--when the "entity" I wished to live without was really a massive knotted mess whose individual strands included the human concept of "God"; the religious enterprise in general; Christianity in particular; ordination; and most particular of all, my being an Episcopal priest. I even thought I'd love to go back to a time before words or behind, beneath, and beyond words, to reclaim and to dwell simply in experience, in the realm of my senses in this very sensory and sensual world.

Wasn't that what I meant, what I had written just weeks before?

It's time to start over--
to know what I know
and feel what I feel,
from earth to skin,
blood and bone,
blossom and leaf bloom.



As I walked out of our workshop meeting space and back toward the main house for dinner, I dawdled on the boardwalk that led through a graceful grove of alder trees. It was moist and marshy (the name of the retreat house is "Aldermarsh/Marsh House" in reference to and in reverence to this particular stand of alders with their roots in the wet). I got captivated by the lush moss and the greens of the ferns and other undergrowth and by the wild shapes of foliage, many of them leaves I don't see anywhere in Maine. To me they were exotic! There was birdsong too, thought I don't remember now which birds or what songs.)

The wind stirred in the branches above me; the light shifted. And something shifted in me. I stopped worrying about what to write. I had a new story, at least one to get me through the next day! I would write about my love for the earth, my rapturous connection with the natural world. It might not have been the story that I thought I wanted to tell, but it was a place to start.

In my tendency to fall into either/or, this or that thinking, I have often imagined since that day that my story was either about "going godless" or about my love for the earth. I now suspect--no, better than suspect, I know-- that they are simply two fundamental aspects of the same story. They are not in opposition to one another, nor in competition with each other, but in on-going conversation with each other.

When I search far back in my memory for traces of my earliest "inklings" of God, of the transcendent dimension of life (though I would never have thought in such terms), the clearest moments of my harvest have to do with my place, my experiences, my responses to the natural world, often in moments remembered as happening by myself. Seeing the moonlight on the ocean, knowing the tides and their rhythms, smelling balsam firs and fresh lake water and hearing the melancholy cries of loons while visiting a beloved island in Squam Lake, seeing a skunk cross our lawn in the middle of a hot summer night.

Whether I name such experiences as being "of God" or "of godlessness" hardly matters. (Oh, taste that delicious and delightful freedom once again!) They are what I know and have always known about my "place/ in the family of things" (from Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese").

These deep earth-body connections have often and over decades seemed extraneous to, incongruent with, and unwelcome in, the church's liturgical celebrations and most of my hundreds of sermons. While this may have caused me to overlook them and to undervalue them, they remain solid, faithful, and undimmed at the core of my being.

Image: photo by David (I think!), from Kidney Pond

Really Starting Over

"The story I am writing is about starting over to live my life without God." I declared this to my partner in an exercise at a writing workshop on an island off the coast of Washington.

It was June of 2006, only a month or two after writing my two poems about feeling shackled to God and burdened by God. I was trying to be faithful to what I thought those poems were telling me.

And I was far enough from home, from people who knew me as an Episcopal priest, many as their former priest, to feel a bit more free to be honest. Since I was in the Pacific Northwest, north of Seattle, I had imagined (in other words, I had assumed) that most of my workshop mates would applaud and embrace a kind of loosey-goosey, unconventional approach to religion and spirituality and that my talk of living my life without God wouldn't raise eyebrows or upset anyone and might even find a ready and sympathetic embrace. I guess you could say I was kind of hoping for that, maybe even counting on that.

And I guess you could say I had been a tad unrealistic. Actually, I'd been really seriously off base.

My story idea went over like a bad joke, and I, already feeling very tentative about it, was hyper-vigilant for any signs telling me I should reconsider and turn back from the brink. I already wondered if perhaps I wasn't yet ready to write this story, that perhaps I didn't have the requisite perspective and "distance" that time could provide. After all, I hadn't actually embarked very far along this journey of living my life "without God," whatever that might mean. But I was seriously thinking about it, imagining it, planning it. (But in order to write about it, I was really going to have to live it. Damn! I hadn't fully considered that.)

My partners in this exercise, three different people in sequence, were invited to listen to my proposed story line, then respond with questions for me, and I was to do the same for them. My three compadres, more or less randomly selected in the course of milling about the room, all seemed to react to my story in similar ways. Each one in turn posed questions that felt strained to me, unenthusiastic, even slanted in such a way as to suggest that this idea of living my life without God was misguided, dangerous, a temporary delusional detour from which they hoped I would eventually recover.

They seemed to want to talk me back into God, to reassure me that this dark time would pass. Almost as if they were worried about me, as if this talk of going godless signaled depression and despair, maybe a sign of mental illness (that would be my mental illness), some kind of breakdown, as if next would come talk of suicide and wanting to end it all.

But nothing could have been farther from the truth! What my companions didn't seem able to comprehend or to guess was that my wanting to live my life without God was a jailbreak, a life-or-death bid for freedom! It was my best hunch of what I needed to do to shed an immense burden and to become--perhaps for the first time since childhood, perhaps for the first time ever!--simply and joyfully myself, a human being alive and awake on this amazing planet. I wanted liberation, and the best I could figure it, that meant letting go of God.

I suppose I can understand and even appreciate their response. It's not as if sane people usually speak of going godless every day, with strangers! It's not generally considered a casual endeavor, like, say, going topless or braless (and even speaking of going topless might raise eyebrows).

I could have told them, if I had wanted to pursue this line of thought, that of course I know that if there really is a God of whatever shape or form who or which is everywhere in the universe, then my intention to live my life without this God was preposterous, ludicrous, impossible even! That I could, in my limited, misguided ego kind of way, imagine myself cast adrift and free of such a being/force/entity, but that in fact my very life and my every breath would still be dependent on it/her/him. In which case the joke would be on me!

But I really wasn't interested in that kind of thinking, so so familiar to me from my twenty-something years of theologizing, preaching, and fitting life into a particular religious worldview to be packaged up and delivered for the hoped-for good of others.

Maybe that's just it: I no longer wanted to have to think and write and speak about God at all. God had become (or at least thinking, writing, and speaking about God had become)--how shall I say it?--boring to me!

I wasn't depressed; I was energized, hopeful, yet also fearful, and I was trying to be brave. I wasn't trying to be offensive; I was trying to tell the truth. And the truth was, I was sick to death of God--fed up with god, with talking about God, thinking about God, shoring up other people's faith in God or ideas about God , trying to make God (the Judeo-Christian God? any and every God?) make sense, tired of being a spokesperson for God in any way, shape, or form.

After being ordained for twenty-two years, I wanted out. I was barely able to acknowledge that truth, even to myself, but this workshop on the other side of the continent had seemed like a good place to start.

By the conclusion of this exercise I wasn't so sure. I got scared; I retreated. I decided I wasn't ready to write that story and that, at least for the purposes of this writing workshop, I'd have to find another one.

False Thinking Number One

I have no idea just how many posts about "false thinking" I could or may eventually write. Trust me, I have no interest in actually sitting down to analyze, categorize, and count up! And trust me again, we all might get a little fatigued and bored if I wrote about every last itty bitty one.

I'm sure there are lots of variations on false thinking that will crop up as I proceed, so it's likely there will be more posts related to this one.

The kinds of false thinking I'm thinking about usually relate to fear. Fear, especially the unacknowledged subterranean kind, conjures all sorts of stories, scenarios, reasons, strange logic, and the like, all designed to keep us safe and sound, and for me that usually means, stuck, hidden, playing small kinds of stuff.

A perfect example cropped up a couple of weeks ago after I saw the movie Julie and Julia. I called it "The Julie/Julia Syndrome" and blogged about it over on Trusting Delight. The basic gist of it was this, the fruit of the old, familiar deadly comparison game:

"Well, clearly I haven't got the right kind of blog to become a big hit and turn into a book and a popular movie starring Meryl Streep, so . . . why bother?" and "I keep reading and being told that no one reads blogs anymore, so . . . why bother?" and "Blogs are SO passe internet phenom, so . . . " You get the rather repetitive idea."

The current example (so, I suppose this should be called "False Thinking Number Two" or maybe even Two Thousand and Twenty-Nine) is the suggestion--no, it's more than a suggestion; let's call it a forceful, pig-headed opinion (and I mean no offense to pigs).

This particular stubborn and false-thinking opinion holds that I have no right, no authority from which to tell my "journey to freedom" story until I have gotten to the promised land. What do I know about the way to freedom if I haven't really gotten all the way yet? (Questions like how will I even know when I've gotten "all the way" are not considered relevant by the manager of the false thinking factory.) Why should anyone trust me?

Even though trusted friends as well as people who barely know me seem to agree that the real, raw story of traveling to freedom is what interests them. That is, the pitfalls and false starts and wrong turns and the keeping going make for a more compelling, real, and accessible story than if I were to write from some obnoxious higher ground of invulnerability or perfection.

And there's always that possibility that the process of writing the story little bit by little bit might also be part of the key to freedom, might even be the last little vessel or vehicle needed to cross the last bit of territory. Because writing, like most every creative endeavor, has the power to carry the creator to new and usually unexpected, or at least hard to control, "places".

"Places" such as the promised land and freedom are of course not really places on a map, places to arrive at where you plunk down your bags and set up shop and stay put happily ever after. Freedom, to state the obvious, is much more likely to be an ongoing process, a matter of personal commitment to keep facing my fears when they arise, to being open to learning new tools and practices for staring down, or better yet, befriending the fears and moving forward with them rather than waiting for a time when they cease to exist.

Moses is said to have seen the promised land from afar just before he died, but he wasn't allowed to cross over and actually to set foot in it and on it. But really, the promised land, the territory of freedom (happiness, joy, creativity, and so  much more), is an inside job, not an outside location. And that means we get to be there now, moment by moment. And that's plenty to sing and dance about right now! And now. And now.

Hallelujah!