In the film, Angels and Demons, the character Robert Langdon is challenged on his beliefs before he is allowed access to the Catholic Archives, and is response is, I think, pretty perfect. It is diplomatic, without being forced to concede anything to the Camerlengo. “Faith is a gift I have yet to receive.” Based on my experience, that reply would likely work with the Catholics. But I don’t think it would hold much ground with many Protestants, or Evangelicals.
In 1990 a friend of mine was asked to attend church with a girl he knew, but he was nervous about going with her, and asked me to come along with. I agreed to, and got one of my first experiences outside of the religion I had been dragged or otherwise pushed up in. It was an Apostolic Church in a secluded, almost coastal California town. The members appeared like a poorer version of Mennonites, almost Polygamous Mormons, sans the headgear. Married women were required to wear shorter hair, buy the nubile ones could be easily identified because they were not allowed to cut their hair, and wore it long.
The building itself was a standard church fair, though a bit run down, and while the lighting reached from corner to corner, it was dark, and stale fluorescent light that made the place feel like it was in a basement, an after thought to the house of God.
There was singing, there was prayer, and there was testimony spoken from the alter and congregants of the Apostolic Church that night. But my ears pricked when one of the ladies of the church stood in place and called out her testimony loudly, thanking the pastor for the service last Wednesday, and for tonight’s service, then thanking the almighty for the two young men who have come to hear the Word with them tonight, and then she said, “And it is my hope that these two young men will come and pray on our alter tonight, and feel the Spirit of God.”
“Did you hear that, Alex?” I asked quietly.
“What?” he asked.
“They just trapped us into praying on their alter. If we don’t, we are going to insult them.”
When the appointed time came, up to the bottom step of the stage where the pastor spoke from, we went. I knelt down, and the pastor and another man and a congregant put their hands on my back as I bowed my head and closed my eyes. I was unsure why they felt it was okay to touch me, but I pressed on quietly under the pressure they were putting on me to speak out loud as the pastor prayed aloud, “God, thank you so much for bringing this young man to us tonight, and I ask you Lord, please, give him words. Give him words to speak up unto you. Fill him with your spirit, and I implore you, GIVE HIM WORDS, oh Lord!”
I had words. I was quite sure that man did not want to hear them Mom always told me, “If you can’t say anything nice, shut the fuck up.” So I did. I was pretty unimpressed with this cultish trap to put me on the spot to perform for these people, and to give me a false feeling of ‘the Spirit of God,’ by putting so much pressure on me to speak out in the way they wanted me to.
I never went back there.
Faith was a gift I was yet to receive.
Brought up in the Mormons, I was bound to serve as a Mission for the Church, and because of that, I was invited to sit in with many other congregations, too. I have been to Catholic Mass, Pentecostal Church, and I have sat in and been called a sinner by the Baptists. I have argued down with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I have been among the Methodists and the Lutherans.
Aesthetically, nothing compared to the Greek Orthodoxy’s Epiphany celebration in Tarpon Springs, Florida, where the priest said prayer at the waters edge, then threw a large golden cross into the harbor, and the thirteen year old boys leapt in after it from a semi-circle of small boats tied together around his pedestal.
As for finding Faith in God, I never did among any of the religions. Not really even my own. And as for fruits, there were few that I found sweet enough to take with the bitter. I was in my early twenties then. I still attended Church for a few years, till I finally came to realize that I was not only wasting my time going, but I was allowing others to waste a great deal of it, imposing on it, as Mormons are prone to do with their “callings.”
“Brother, you have been called to serve as a Sunday School teacher. Will you accept?” Did anyone ever say no? Were they in the favor of the Bishop, or his congregation if they did? I never dared to find out. It is not that I did no enjoy working with kids, or that I had not found any pleasure in being in Florida as a Missionary. I had many experiences that I treasured. I got to see and do things I never would have, otherwise, and I got to grow from those experiences. But I did not grow in the way that the religionists would have had me to. I grew further and further away from them.
By the time I was 27, I could not go on doing what I felt was faking my faith. While I had given every effort to it, and I had lifted up my voice in tearful prayer for many years, and I have served and put my feet into motion as well as my heart, I could not find what seemed like a true manifestation of the Divine. Questions still lingered about things, and the answers were unsatisfactory.
“You have got to have faith, brother.” What does that mean? To the members and leaders of congregations, it meant that I was supposed to accept that God had a plan, and that I needed to be humble and find the meaning in whatever had happened.
To me, “you have got to have faith” meant that I needed to shut up and bow my head, and not question, and be satisfied without a real answer, but to look for natural patterns and ascribe those to God. It was a psychological trick to get me to shut up, rather than to ask why horrible things happen, or why Pastor Dell Rose, of that Apostolic Church in California ruled over a poverty stricken congregation, but outside there was a new Corvette with a license plate that read “Rose” on it. But that was trivial to questions about why there is suffering in the world, why children die, and why death and misery seemed so random, and yet, evenly distributed among the faithful, as well as the unfaithful. In fact, much of the misery seemed to be caused among the faithful by the other faithful.
“You have got to have faith, brother.” I am not your brother.
My ex-wife dragged me into see the Mormon Bishop about my “lack of testimony,” and the meeting which ensued was appalling to me. I had gone in expecting to meet a man who would lovingly help to guide me to find the faith I had been missing. I expected maybe someone who would speak kindly, and offer sympathy, and at least look down on me a little. What I got was a man who was angry at me, who wanted me to meet up to his expectations, and who told me that I was “a Priesthood holder, and the leader of this little family, and (I) had better get (my) testimony sorted out!” Yes, he literally shouted at me.
Funerals have been the only reason I have darkened the door of a Mormon Church since. It seemed appropriate since the death of something beautiful was represented in it. But by now, I only attend the gravesides. Funerals are used to reinforce Mormon beliefs in what they call “The Plan of Salvation,” to keep the flock strong in the face of death, and to sound like they know what they are doing to those who are not Mormons, in the face of something that even Religion cannot provide relief from. Come on, people may be clinically dead for a time, then revive, but nobody truly comes back from the dead, then stays immortal.
The true nature of a Cult is revealed in my next interaction with the Mormons, when I moved to England to live with my second wife, and one night, laid up ill in bed, I heard a knock at the door, and my wife answered, and a man’s voice asked for me by name. The Mormons had found me in another country, though nobody I knew has ever fessed up to giving them my address.
And finally, I have come back to America, and now live in a very Mormon community, because of a family situation now gone past. We have little interaction with the Mormons, though there is one who I can call a good friend. As for the rest, I might as well live high upon the mountain top, where Rip Van Winkle will not venture. While that does not meet the expectations that the Mormons themselves will boast about, being in service to their fellow men, it suits me just fine to be ostracized among them. I am surrounded my a religion I don’t have to tolerate. If any of them come to me as a person, they are welcome, but as a parson, they are not. Missionaries don’t knock on my door. Nobody drops off copies of the Book of Mormon. Home Teachers do not offer to come visit, and “see if there is anything we can help out with.” Best of all, nobody comes to collect tithing!
Well, this isn’t meant to be any kind of complaint against the religions. It is just the manifesto of where I stand with them, or rather, where they stand with me. Respectfully, “Faith is a gift I have yet to receive.” How likely am I to? Not very. I can also list many reasons why I agree that religion poisons everything. It is a fervent conversation, for which I have no fervor at the moment.
The beautiful aesthetics of ceremony or pageantry do not amend for what I have lost to religion, much of which I have not discussed here. The British have found the correct substitute with the venerable cup of tea. Life is instead celebrated in the mundane, the normal, and the everyday. Instead of devoting to religion, I devote to learning how to properly cook a steak, and how to properly work with tools. Instead of “having a calling,” I spend my time teaching my children everything I can possibly teach them. I give them every advantage I know how to. While they are young, they learn to properly enjoy a steak, and when they are older, they learn to properly cook it. Our family’s traditions are closer to Pagan than Christian. We celebrate the times of the year, not events that are completely un-provable, and are far more likely to be wallpapering over Paganism, anyhow.
This is the world as I see it. Faith is not a gift I have rejected. It does not come to me. It is incompatible with reason, and does not meld with sensible living. Non-Christian orthodoxy is equally footed with the Christian. All can pass along their way. But I will reject their impositions on me or my family. I will not accept their violence, nor their harm. They may not take my money, my time, nor my dignity. Any human is welcome, who is willing to leave their Gods at the gate.
