Intro. The past few weeks I’ve been working through journals and essays I wrote in the 1980s and 90s as part of a larger writing project and every once in a while an entry pops out at me as worthy of revisiting. I was asked a few years ago by a dear friend to explain my change in life-directions from Evangelical Christian to Non-believer and, at the time we were driving to a concert in Santa Barbara, and I felt like my answer was rambling and mostly incoherent. I like the story that I tell in the following entry. 

When this was written I was working on my B.A. in Journalism at CSUF (after getting my first B.A. in Biblical Studies at Biola and then working on/but not getting a Masters in Theology at Fuller Seminary) and I had just attended a private screening of an upcoming movie (here’s the link to the published movie review). This left me contemplating my role as a professional journalist, that led me to thinking about persons I’d love to interview and that somehow led to how I’d explain my “faith experience” if I were to be asked… Believe me, this is probably the shortest version of the story. And finally, because this is my personal confession, I’ve changed the names of those mentioned because they didn’t ask to be part of my airing of dirty laundry. Enjoy(?).

1989-09-08. I went to Beverly Hills last night to review a new movie, “Sea of Love” starring Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin. Good flick (how’s that for a succinct review). Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this writing game and my place in it since leaving the theater. For the life of me I couldn’t see myself being out of place in this company of supposed movers-and-shakers. If my talent still lies primarily in the “Potential” category or “Unrealized” bin, I feel that that is more in terms of any recognition and not whether it exists (ah, the confessions of a cocky young writer).

I started thinking about some of the people whom I’ve wanted to interview, such as Sam Phillips or Mark Heard. Now, it just so happens that these two artists were of the Christian music profession (Phillips under the name Leslie Phillips) and that got me to thinking the inevitable status-ing of my own Christianity. I mean, it’s a very basic question. It’s a thing that can be a starting point or at least a referential point when talking with artists such as Phillips and Heard. But the point is lost or at least clouded as long as I leave my Christianity in the “I Don’t Know” category.

So I started thinking about how I would address the question of my faith, if it were turned around to me by someone whom I respect and who might be able to bear my explanation. Because the intellectual questions, while very important, tend to be evasive and cyclic, my first impulse was to deal with my gut feeling about what has happened to my faith and my feelings toward God. It didn’t take long for me to come up with how I feel about God.

Much like the other intimate or potentially intimate relationships of the past I find myself in a position of disappointment and half-remembered anger. Like the question about whether I’d receive Justine if she said that she’d made a mistake marrying Pete and wanted to try having a relationship with me, or if Dana said that she’d be willing to go to counseling with me—because of the hurt I’m not sure that I’d want God back. I realize that I’m probably not the one to define the rules under which one should have a relationship with ones creator, but that doesn’t change the way I feel.

In my imperfection and faltering humanity, I am convinced of one thing: while I called myself a Christian I was sincere and reasonably dedicated to living the life of a Christian and putting my energies into having a dynamic relationship with my creator. I realize that this was certainly not an effort made with 100 percent of my being, that I was quite often motivated by my selfishness and blinded by my emotional immaturity. But given the person that I was, that was the attempt that I made.

And the fissures began to appear when I made those efforts to have that Christian relationship with Colleen and then saw her go off and marry Brad, when I went to Biola to become that minister and found myself isolated and not understood, when my music fell upon deaf ears, when I went from college to marriage to seminary all the while looking for those course corrections from my supposed co-pilot that never arrived. I was told if I had a pure heart, if I had an open mind, if I had a willing spirit, ad nauseam. Jesus Christ, I eventually came to the place where I thought that if I were living in a concrete building, twelve miles inside the earth, in a sensory-depravation tank that God should be able to get through to me. I mean, he’s God, he should be able to speak to me. But in the beginning this was hardly my concern.

As with every great love-relationships there was that period of consuming passion and self-doubt. To know the thoughts of the beloved, to embrace from within, to be complete in the oneness—but this could never really be.

“As high as the heavens are above the earth, so are God’s thoughts above man’s—-” Isaiah

So what begins with great emotion slowly falters out of a sense of not really communicating. What begins with a flush of actualization stalls in the silence of fuzzy interaction. Why does Oz hide so behind the curtain? If it’s because we cannot bear to look upon him then why give us the consuming thirst for it? Why give us something that we cannot access except in a pre-conscious half-state? Life is full of enough puzzles to not put one at the center of our being.

Didn’t he know that the communication would become refracted and twisted until finding the original voice among all of the other voices would become impossible. Who really needs that? I eventually decided that I didn’t. JBB

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Tags: 1980s journals, bad relationships, in bad faith, journal classic, meditations on

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