Tuesday, April 2, 2013

A Faith that is Born of Ambiguity

Photo Credit: Morguefile by cooee




I am going to tell you something that will sound very strange coming from a confessed atheist: I have never lost my faith.

Since the days that I first darkened the doors of a twelve-step fellowship hall twenty years ago, my life has been a daily negotiation between myself and that entity that some people call God. I am writing a book about this journey and where it has taken me, so I won't tell you the whole story here, but suffice it to say that, at eighteen years old, I was ready to give the care of my life over to an entity much larger than myself.

I grew up Unitarian Universalist. God had nothing to do with it, really. The subject of God at church was like the subject of politics at Thanksgiving. (Don't go there, or be sorry that you did.) I went looking and found God myself, later; I called Her the Goddess. I was still a teenager, and I said I was a witch; the taste of rebellion was like chocolate on my tongue. There was something real, though. At seventeen, I felt, I knew that all life was sacred, that nature was the lived Eden—the brutal Heaven of my heart. I fell on my knees in awe, the spirals of my DNA an echoing answer to the petraglyphs of old.

And I became a bulimic while waxing poetic about the Neolithic fertility goddess with her curves and breasts like hills of warm and earthy clay.

It didn't matter what I believed in. I had no relationship with God.

Unable to stop purging, I was afraid I would return to the life I had known months before the Goddess—a life of drugs and heartache, a life of reckless danger and hurdling pain. I went to the meetings where strangers talked about God and said the Lord's Prayer. Those meetings where I did not belong.

And in those meetings, I was saved.

Finally, I realized that I did not have to try. I did not have to force a will as thin as paper against the juggernaut of my addiction and my pain. I let go. I stopped trying. I walked to the edge of a cliff and fell, arms forward, into the arms of my salvation.

My head rung with the notes of "Amazing Grace."

And for seventeen years, the grace carried me. It carried me through an unplanned pregnancy. It held me through a terrible divorce. I knew God had me. It didn't matter who I said God was. God was what I knew when I woke up in the morning and promised my life to the care of the peace and stillness that would come. God was the answer I found in my self-reflection. God was the urgent need I felt to right the wrongs I did. God and I were fine.

And then something happened.

Finally, unexpectedly, something occurred that was beyond my capacity to hold inside the reason of God's Plan for My Life. I didn't know that I believed God had a plan for my life until I realized that this wasn't it. This wasn't the plan, and this wasn't the right life. I seemed, by mistake, to have ended up with the wrong God.

I was bereft.

In the end, though, I was saved again, just as I had been saved before. I stood before the Universe holding the God I'd had and, just like before, I found that everything in my hands was made of Self. It was small and imperfect, a reflection of me—limited by my imagination, crushed and warmed by the tight grip of my insistence on my will.

I let this small God go.

What came next was Nothing. And Everything. The multitude of laws and forces all greater than myself. The stillness, the emptiness, the complexity, the solitude, the fullness and togetherness of Life Itself. Forced again to my knees by wonder and joy, my heart was full again; full of the Everything-Nothing that is Life.

I called that Not-God and I called myself an atheist.

And every day since that day, just like every day before it, since the day I walked through the doors of that twelve-step room, I have worked out my relationship with that Everything-Nothing, with that power that is greater than myself. I believe not that there is a plan for me and not that life will leave me un-mauled, but that life is beautiful and worth living and full of the beauty and fire and meaning that we add to the experience of breathing in and out. I believe these things because I have to, and because my living makes them true.

I remember not that I am destined for happiness, not that I will meet my reward in this world or the next one, but that I have been saved from the monstrous power of addictive self. I am saved today, and I was saved yesterday, and perhaps—if I remember—I will be saved tomorrow. To ask more of life is perhaps to ask too much.


I have been an agnostic and a believer. I have been an atheist, a pagan, and a prayer of daily prayers. In all these ways I have set my feet on the path before me: the path of spiritual growth. I am unafraid to change my God if I have to do so to continue on my trek. There is no other way I want to live but this, with my whole heart seeking, my commitment deepened by my doubt.

And that is how an atheist can say that she has never lost her faith.


Note: I want to make it clear that this post is a personal statement and in no way reflects the experience of other self-proclaimed atheists, others in recovery, or the way anyone but me might choose to use the words "God," "atheism," and "faith." I share it because it is meaningful for me to reflect on. It is also meaningful for me when I read other people's heartfelt accounts of their spiritual journeys. I hope that something of what I shared may be meaningful for you, whether you are a believer, an atheist, or someone to whom the question has not mattered at all.

17 comments:

  1. This is stunning, Tara. How do you do this? It is such a convoluted and personal topic yet I get it. I get what you are saying - or what I think you are saying - and it rings of truth. I need to read your book.
    Thank you for this.

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    1. Thanks, Gracie. I'm glad you get it, because it is convoluted in the extreme. I think these things happen to us outside intellect and language and, because of that, are very hard to explain. I always appreciate your comments.

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    2. "outside intellect and language" - Ironically, well-said. Thank you for your post.

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  2. Fascinating read. I've journeyed down some of the same roads as you and I've ended up in a place that is perfect for me, but completely wrong for others.

    I sit on the local board of the Humanist Association and I have made my peace with god. Some would say I stand with my legs in two camps and that it impossible to be a Humanist and believe in god. I don't know, my personal belief works for me. It may not fit any official religion, but that is fine by me.

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    1. I can imagine myself in that exact position, Cara. I often find common ground with both humanists and religious folk, and periodically I puzzle both groups by being somehow different from either of them. Some days I might find it useful to say I believe in God and other days I don't want to use that word to describe what I mean. The truth is, I just don't have the language to express what I mean! So, I think it is definitely possible to be a humanist who believes in God.

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  3. Tara, what a beautiful sharing! I showed it to my wife Cathy, who in her own spiritual journey has become intensely Catholic. Yes, when she read it just now, her reaction was "that is so right, so much what the mystics say". She recently began her own blog on Google. She is now subscribed to your blog. Thanks again for sharing so beautifully, and I think your spiritual path book will be a blow-away event! Tom.

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    1. Thanks, Tom. I am delighted to have been able to express my own personal journey in a way that meant something for Cathy. :)

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  4. Ah, Tara! You and I could have such an interesting discussion, although I don't think a blog is exactly the place for it. I'm a spiritual humanist, and I want to say to Cara that I don't think it's an oxymoron to say you're a humanist and yet believe in god (maybe in the god of a specific organized dogmatic faith, yes, but the possibility of the existence of an unknowable spiritual entity? Sure! You should both read my Mythmaker posts at http://termitewriter.blogspot.com (scroll down and click on the label Mythmakers and start from the oldest post. Right at the moment I'm having a discussion with another atheist, so you might want to start with my posts from 3/26/13 and 4/1/13.) And Tara, I never went through experiences like yours - I was never an addict, I never felt lost or felt I needed saving, I never had a mystical experience, and I could never figure out what fundamentalist Christians meant by being "reborn" (I was raised Catholic.) I believe we draw on our inner selves to find the Right Way; that's why I call myself a humanist. But even so I don't think you and I are that far apart.

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    1. Thank you, Lorinda. I will check out your blog :)

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    2. It's funny, although not altogether surprising, who ends up hanging around my blog. :) No matter what they believe, I find them my readers to be open-minded, interested and searching people. I feel tremendously lucky that way. I called myself a spiritual atheist for a while, and I'm not surprised to find a spiritual humanist among my friends.

      I could as easily concede that what I draw on that I once called God is an inner self of some kind. My husband has a similar belief. The truth is that I really don't know. What I do know is that it never went away, no matter what type of church I did or didn't attend or whether or not I said that I believed. What mattered seemed to be the kind of life I chose to live.

      In Goddess religion, they say that the divine is immanent, which would make this Right Way self both me and something larger all at once. Being a writer, I like synonyms and I choose them based on which gives me the connotative effect that feels truest to me at the time: so that same experience might be God, inner self, or the laws of nature, the goddess, or the void, depending on my mood. I think it may be that we are all talking about essentially the same thing.

      I'll have to check out that discussion of yours...

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  5. Like I told Masked Mom, I'm so grateful to the two of you for opening my eyes and helping me understand something that has been so foreign to me.

    "but that life is beautiful and worth living and full of the beauty and fire and meaning that we add to the experience of breathing in and out. I believe these things because I have to, and because my living makes them true." So beautiful. Thanks for sharing your beliefs. They truly enrich my life.

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    1. Yours is one of the blogging friendships I treasure the most and not just because you make me laugh or because you're like the good neighbor who always arrives with a casserole when needed. I treasure you especially because you celebrate your very different faith, and you still listen to my beliefs, and we respect each other. This is perhaps a rarer *jewel* than it should be in the world, and I treasure it.

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    2. Ditto what Jewels said and ditto what Tara said. I have been encouraged and enriched and outright fascinated with getting to know the inner workings of faiths different than mine in a community of caring and support rather than reflexive judgment. Thanks to you both.

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  6. I wish I had something useful to contribute to the conversation. I don't think I do, but I had to let you know I was here, I read this, and I was moved.

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    1. I find that to be a very worthwhile contribution indeed.

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  7. Tara, when I spoke with you at the Erma Writer's Workshop last year, you were quietly compelling. And everything I've read of yours since then has set my head to thinking, often in directions I've never thought. We are so very different. Yet not. I'm glad I met you.

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    1. I'm glad I met you, too! I think the biggest compliment anyone ever pays me is when they say "You made me think." so thank you for that boost!

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Faith in Ambiguity by Tara Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License