I woke up early this Sunday morning, and with a new dress hanging in my closet, I felt a peculiar echo of my Protestant upbringing. Sans any new-found religious stirrings, I nonetheless discovered a latent impulse to go to church. Having spent last Sunday begrudgingly attending an Easter service with my in-laws, as always, politely skipping communion, it’s admittedly incongruous that today I have an interest (if still the queasy sort) in filing into a pew.I am not on speaking terms with God (or even the less demanding, generic god), but recently I have become aware of a certain feeling of absence, a lack of community, a deadened spiritual sense, that religious gathering tends to mend. While last weekend I found myself twitchy during hymns and spoken prayers (careful not to mouth the words of creeds to which I do not subscribe), today I feel lonely and untended to. Reticent though I am in a Christian congregation, I am an active mental participant. I read along with the Biblical passages (ticking off failings in contextualization, pronunciation, and divine ill-humor). I find myself sweating nervously when the minister mentions salvation, and I salivate at the thought of grape juice and a good loaf of French bread. Pre-transubstantiation, this is an excellent mid-morning snack. Post-ritual, it becomes something I can’t swallow. My lack of belief excludes me, and I still have enough respect for believers to exclude my unbelieving cynicism from their ranks.
Yet I still feel like there is somewhere I should be right now. This could easily be blamed on my mother’s training me to be a church-goer from infancy. Despite her own stolid agnosticism, she insisted we attend church each week. Like brussels sprouts and safe-sex talks, church was good for me and I was going to have to accept it, no matter how uncomfortable it made me. But as a child I enjoyed church—as an acolyte, I was allowed to play with matches (something I could never do at home), my Bible was a very large book with pictures, and if I sat quietly through the service, I was often rewarded with a Happy Meal for lunch. Until my teenage years, a time of much proselytizing, hell-fire, brimstone, and anxiety, church had just been another place to sit (and play with fire). Once I discovered church as a spiritual outlet and place to fit, a community, it became home.
Without this sense of home, the tragedy of my falling out with God would not have been such a betrayal. Actually reading the Bible (instead of scanning illustrations and taking isolated passages a bit too literally) transformed me. Campus crusaders for Christ managed to kill my faith and make me antagonistic to the entire religious scene. I felt empty, angry, and slowly accepted that there was no One to blame (let us all not forget either the god of lower case letters).
Like believers, there are various kinds of atheists. There are the intellectual sort who insist there is no god—who cannot prove a negative, but are pissed off, wear black, and worship their own dark imaginings instead. There are atheists who claim disbelief, but are truly angry at God, loath God, avow no-God, but in turning their backs forever feel the presence of something rejected, lurking behind them. There are sad atheists, who (like me) would find things much easier if reason, or feeling, or faith could incline them toward belief. It is this sort that pepper Unitarian churches on sporadic Sunday mornings.
And I have attended those Unitarian services, but I leave feeling emptier. Metaphysical nonalignment is one thing, but weekly celebration of non-commitment is something else altogether. Toying with religion friendly to the unbeliever has never been satisfying. During my last craving for spiritual togetherness, I found myself in a suburban Buddhist temple, in lotus position, trying to ignore the fact that my foot had fallen asleep. We had three hours of meditation in which I alternated between finding myself and my surroundings to be ridiculous. In a room full of new agey white folks and friendly Black Muslim converts, we stumbled over Japanese and Tibetan syllables that meant nothing. I hobbled (with sleeping foot) during the walking meditation, but as the prayer leader asked us solemnly to repeat the holy word “Mu” my Buddhist wonderings bubbled into stifled giggles. I understand Buddhism. Things change. Things are impermanent. But a girl (and a divine fat guy) have to laugh at a roomful of Ohioans lumbering around a temple mooing.
While I don’t have the nerve to go to church today, I somehow lack the energy to sit still for hours, even if it ends in a whole-hearted moooooooooooooooooooo.
So what remains for the atheist? Are we alone and left darkly in this world? I’ve got no divine text, no testament to get me through dark nights (or Sunday mornings) of the soul. Lacking this, I’ve found a magician as prophet for a kinder, gentler atheism.
Penn Jillette, of Penn and Teller fame, is oafish, crass, and offered one of the smartest submissions I’ve heard on NPR’s This I Believe series. In the essay, entitled, "There Is No God," the Dancing with the Stars reject works out the most inspiring description of atheism I have encountered, or rather something beyond atheism. The belief that there is no God is freeing—without looking for more than this world, we find that we have just that—this whole world.
There are mooing Buddhists, Hare Krishnas, well-behaved Methodists, family, limited time, a fragile Earth and if there is loneliness, there is no God to be blamed. We are here, and there may be no good answer to the infernal question why???, but alive we are. Days are short, precious, and communities can be made wherever we are lucky enough to find them. Happenstance may be unsatisfying, but there is no omniscient being to offer satisfying answers, and so when a person manages to affirm anything on his or her own, this is fortunate, if not something miraculous.
So on Sunday morning, as I sit on my couch with curtains closed (still weary of the well-meaning Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses who frequent our neighborhood), I get solace from an internet link. That words can soothe, even those of a clownish behemoth like Penn Jillette, proves the serendipitous nature of a world filled with randomness, chaos, and creatures that can so often be thoughtful and caring. We exist here, tenuously and necessarily bound to one another. And that, my friend, is something worth mooing about.
