Annum

It's been a year. A year since I gave up on God. Remembering...

Three weeks ago I went to my ex-choir's mini chapel concert (since I couldn't make it to their real Christmas concerts). During this concert, the choir director talked a little bit about Advent. I hadn't really even thought about Advent yet this year, even though it probably started several weeks before. And the reminder took my memory back to last year.

Last year I attempted to observe Advent by nightly singing "O Come O Come Emmanuel." And it pushed me over the edge. After a few weeks of daily repeating "Come to us, O Lord," I finally started to listen to the rebellion of my soul against that request. I didn't want to keep asking; I didn't want to keep hoping. You can't stay friends with God when you don't want to invite him to be around, and that doesn't end when Advent does.

Since then I've tried to be aware of how I really feel towards God and be true to that, without closing any doors for the future. I gave up, but I didn't say that position was permanent. I still think my best option might be to go back - but it would have to be something true, something genuine, not something I can (or would want to) just make happen on my own. And despite this effort at neutrality, over the last year I've noticed my distance towards God increasing and solidifying. I'm only getting farther away.

It's amazing how much sense Calvinism and predestination make from here. God has chosen his elect, and it turns out I'm not one of them - no matter how much I wanted to be back then. The grace is that it's okay now; it's not as bad as I feared.

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The thing is, all I have is a pile of experiences, pressed through a filter of interpretations. I don't have any pure knowledge of anything; all I have are these interpretations of my experiences. Experiences can be interpreted in a variety of ways, and there are different factors affecting how we read an event: reason is one of them, other assertions (ie. Scripture) are another. Christians are told to rely on facts, not feelings, and they learn that the Bible provides a framework for interpreting experiences (and in fact even trumps contradictory experiences). For me, however, it became like pushing a square peg of experience through the round hole of this particular interpretation. I could stretch the hole to make it fit, but it was getting more and more inflexible, and eventually I realized that the square peg fits much better in a square hole. My experiences seemed to indicate the opposite of what the Bible promised.

It's possible that the Bible's promises were true, and all my experiences have simply been interpreted incorrectly. But these experiences are all I have. I can't have an experience that isn't filtered through me. All experiences must yield to interpretation. Eventually I had to believe them, and to believe the most likely interpretation of them. I had to listen to his silence that indicates his lack of concern; I had to acknowledge my sense of abandonment, even though he suggested he'd never do that. I couldn't fight against the most likely answer any longer. I had already been fighting for so long.

Additionally, inner experiences don't come with a label of origin. So how can I possibly know what's God, and what's just me? How do I know if an urge was a push from God or just my own inclination, whether a powerful moment was the touch of God or just a contrived emotional situation? You can look at it through the eyes of faith, but then there is not much left when that faith runs out.

For years already I had been saying that I wanted to give up, I just didn't know how. I found out how, and I did. I ran out of hope. I ran out of faith.

Somehow everything hurts less when it's not supposed to be any better than this. The problem of evil isn't such a problem when you take God out of the equation.