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At the risk of severely dating myself, I must confess that I remember a time before Christ. One of my earliest memories is of my mother and me saying a prayer before going to bed sometime during my first four years of life. I remember her exact words, as she spoke them in an antiphonal manner, me echoing her good will and adding my own: ‘…god¹ bless Daddy, god bless Grada [my great-grandmother] and Grandpa and Grandma; god bless Uncle Mike and Devin…’ and so on, down the roster of our loved-ones. Our religion was Love: our good will and hopes for others. I was raised with this always in mind, to extend my compassion and sympathy to all. There was never any specific awareness of ‘God;’ never a name or group outside my immediate family with whom I shared this notion. I was alive and thankful, glad I had others with whom I could share the feeling. Our society’s myths are far-reaching, however, and soon they threatened the sanctity of my own beliefs.

Eventually as I grew and time progressed, Christ was born. I was not directly aware of the exact moment of his birth, nor of his death, ascension, or his ultimate sacrifice. This all happened separate from me, but as I was baptized in the mainstream beliefs of American culture, I came to think this was a name synonymous with the god to which I prayed as a toddler. I never ‘accepted him into my heart’ ­ as I so often hear as an imperative for ‘salvation’ ­because I assumed he was already there. I remember my mother’s patience and encouragement of my interminable questioning regarding the whereabouts of god and the extent of ‘his’ power. She always told me ‘he’ is everywhere and in everything. ‘Even in the trees? Even in the paved streets? Even in the toilet seat?’ ‘Yes, child, everywhere.’ Thus, he must have already been in my heart as well; and if Jesus was god, then he was there, too.

I did not question this notion of the deity at first. This Christian myth was the only explanation I had been offered living in a rather affluent, predominantly white suburb of Seattle. Leyna, my best friend, was Jewish, but that meant nothing to me at that time ­ in my ignorance, I assumed we all believed the same thing because it was the indisputable truth.

Eventually, I learned that Leyna’s faith lay not in Jesus, but in God. ‘But I thought Jesus was God.’ ‘How can there be different gods if Jesus is the "one true god"?’ ‘How can she not believe in Jesus if Jesus is God?’ Amidst the pacification of Saturday morning cartoons, Nintendo, and t-ball, I somehow slipped past these inconsistencies and moved on with my pre-adolescent life.

Until then, I had not realized that church was there to define the religion of Christ: I had never been exposed. Upon this realization, however, I became very interested. I asked to go to church, but that never panned out for some reason or another. When my mother gave me a copy of the Bible², I soon lost interest, due to the severe lack of illustration. Ironically, however, what I lacked in formal education on the subject, I recompensed in spirituality. I prayed in what ways I knew how: I colloquially yet silently spoke to god every night before bed, thankful for my privilege and loved-ones, reminiscent of the prayers I uttered with Mom at age four. There was no formality to it. I did not even say, ‘Amen.’

At age twelve, I went to live with my father in California. Moving away from my hometown ­ my comfort zone ­ inevitably brought profound thoughts to my young mind, and I once again turned toward church. I longed to understand this story of my ‘creator,’ curious as to the explanation church would offer. I asked my father to go, but again, that mysteriously never panned out. It would be years before I understood my parents’ lack of Christian fervor.

Eventually, my stepmother, Trish, indulged my curiosity. She said the church we were going to was not too serious, not too strict; it would just help me to ‘look at myself in the mirror every morning and think, "I am a good person".’ So sparse was my knowledge of church at this time, I panicked and asked for reassurance: ‘They’re going to talk about god, though, right?’ (It was California, home of the weird new age philosophies; I needed to be sure I would learn about ‘my’ religion ­ the one about Jesus). She laughed and promised it would.

So we went, and I felt painfully out of place. My stomach churned at the thought of going to Sunday school apart from Trish. Even though the moisture of my throat fled to my palms, leaving me physically and emotionally uncomfortable, I braved the new experience. Sitting off to one side, listening but not speaking, I noticed everyone else seemed to be good friends already, which made me feel even more an outsider. (Such cliques were a trend I later found in every church I attended.) The room was too dim, the wrong temperature. The chairs were too hard, an ugly unnatural orange plastic. Sitting in such a chair, I first encountered the ever-popular Sunday school catch phrase, ‘Don’t open your mind too much or it will fall out’ ­ a line that plagued my pondering mind for the next decade. The curriculum of this class was entirely meaningless to me: we started in the middle of the Bible, discussing people about whom I knew nothing. What I needed was a ‘Beginning Christianity’ class. Unfortunately, I was starting religion too late, alone to deal with the consequences of such sin.

After an hour, we were released to our parent(s) back in the ‘sanctuary,’ where I was entirely unprepared for the Communion. ‘Eat the body and blood of Christ? Gross!’ But I couldn’t not do it; it’s part of what I had unknowingly come for. I waited in line with everyone else, slowly loping pew by pew up to the altar where the priest placed the thin wafer soaked in grape juice onto my dry, nervous tongue. Somehow I got through the ordeal, completely ill-at-ease throughout the whole encounter, and after what seemed like the entire eternity they said my soul would survive in Christ, church finally ended. Learning nothing at this church, we soon stopped going. I still considered myself a Christian, though; what else could I be?

Life went on, and as I grew older, I noticed more people rejecting Christianity. In order to understand why (or should I say, how) they could do such a thing, I finally read the Bible. I started with Genesis, which seemed preposterous, but pardonable. I let it slide because I was, after all, dealing with the defining text of ‘my own’ infallible religion. I read Exodus, then Leviticus, but soon tired as they were not discussing Jesus. Skipping ahead, I read the New Testament straight through, finding myself surprised at the difference between the New and Old. Again, I let it slide, as it was allegedly ‘God’s³ word’.

I read the Bible every day. When I was old enough to drive, I drove myself back to church (a different one than before). I tried to get involved for a year or two, finding it every bit as intimidating as my first attempt. I hated to sing the church songs: they weren’t my kind of music; I hated the social scene: I was unenthused by the activities. I disagreed with the politics and opinions espoused by the church authorities, but was too young or perhaps too blind or insecure to go my own way.

At church, I sometimes sat with Emily ­ a girl from my high school. She would encourage me to go to the church socials, held after Sunday services. In a desperate attempt to conform, I went on several occasions. To my dismay, I only found meat-covered pizza [I was vegan] and terrible songs played by terrible guitarists on dissonant acoustic guitars they could not tune. I did not know the words everyone else in the room was singing. I only knew Emily, and though she knew countless others in attendance, I could not make another acquaintance while she was invariably engaged in someone else’s conversation. But still, I tried to fit in. After all, it was ‘my’ religion.

Another incident in church that significantly shaped my opinions occurred around the same time. I befriended a Christian girl who went to both a different school and different church than I. Her name was Sandi, and to her I voiced my complaints about the church I attended. She responded by urging me to try her church, which was ­ according to her ­ completely different. Sandi claimed it was free from the cliques I had encountered everywhere else, and was extremely spiritual. Skeptical, as I had never experienced a church that was anything like what she purported of her own, I complied. The sermon was conducted by a man who insisted the congregation should proselytize the religion to anyone and everyone. He told us of how he would wear a rubber band around his wrist for the simple fact that it might elicit a question from a stranger, granting the preacher an opportunity to shove his religious beliefs into the unsuspecting victim’s face. This seemed ridiculous to me, especially because I found religion to be intensely personal, believing it was not to be forced onto another.

After the sermon, he called for those in the congregation who were ‘suffering’ to come forth and be healed by a member of his team of faith healers. To my amazement, almost everyone in the room ­ save three (I counted) ­ got up and walked in an orderly fashion up to the front. As they approached the ‘healing’ figures of religious authority, those alleged bastions of divinity, they cried and convulsed and fell on the ground, gently lowered by the faith healers. I was incredulous, but even Sandi took her turn at the ‘healing.’ Horrified, I watched as her face ran with tears and she was eased, in a seizure-like state, to the feet of the others crowding around her, among the bodies already there. Faithful as I was at this time in my life, this spectacle repulsed me. It mocked my faith, much like the televangelists (viz., Benny Hinn et al.) who floor rooms of people with their over-exaggerated ‘spirit.’ Author, David Bradley, discusses a similar situation, and tells of his reasons for not going to the altar: ‘But the real reason I never went up was that I didn’t feel what they felt. I wanted to go, but didn’t have the emotion to make it legitimate.’⁴ I certainly didn’t feel what they felt, but it was not because I lacked the emotion to legitimate my faith. This display of hyperbolic faith deeply offended me, and contributed to my later conclusion that religion is not defined by religious institutions, which (like this one) have the potential to trivialize the faith I held so dear. (Some time later, I met Danielle, another girl who went to that same church, and she told me of another such spectacle of ‘faith healing’ when she went up to be healed. Refusing to voluntarily fall backward, the ‘healer’ forcefully pushed her head back to continue the charade, demanding her compliance. They finally succeeded in knocking her down, and the ‘faith healing’ left Danielle with another affliction: she suffered a sore neck after the incident.)

In 1997, I was seventeen, living again with my mother in Seattle, traveling to my father’s house for the holidays. For Christmas, I felt obligated to go to church. Wanting the whole family to go, I was disappointed when Dad refused. I couldn’t understand why. ‘He is a Christian, isn’t he?’ Finally it came out that my father was repelled by the idea because divorce had excommunicated him. This fact was a major blow to me: How could my own father be cut off from what I then regarded as ‘salvation’? This definitely set some internal wheels into motion. I knew my dad, I knew he was a good person; the church had no right to disregard him this way. If his ties were severed, then so would be my own. ‘My’ religion was dictated by what was right: love and life ­ not human laws, even if they were made by religious authorities. I didn’t need the Church to be a Christian. Therefore, I made it my practice to study the Bible even more diligently and spent much time in prayer.

Oddly enough, I came across a verse in the Bible discouraging the Christian from asking God for knowledge or understanding: faith alone was to subsist; ‘extracurricular’ advice was to be obtained through a church official. Ghostly reminders of that saying I had encountered in Sunday school haunted my mind, discouraging autonomous thought. But if the church could be so wrong as to incriminate and condemn my father, then I needed Jesus to tell me what was right, as religious authority had failed me. I needed to open my mind wider, but such was forbidden. Desolately, I trudged on in my faith, praying and reading religiously, never asking for divine understanding.

By seventeen, I was quite formal in my soliloquies to God, reciting the Lord’s Prayer, speaking silently in Biblical jargon: ‘…Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us…’ I was scared to open my eyes or be disturbed mid-prayer, leaving a transmission incomplete without that sacred word of closure, ‘Amen,’ lest I incur the Lord’s Wrath or even Displeasure. I had become afraid ­ something I had never felt before Christ.

That year I went to college. In a class focusing on the early literature of our civilization, we dissected the book of Genesis. Our approach was wholly academic in nature, setting aside everything we had previously been taught by our respective religions regarding the subject. The goal, according to the professor, was not to refute what grandma had insisted as truth; we merely sought an historical understanding of the text and its implications regarding the early periods of our culture.

We inevitably considered the source: Was it in truth a man named Moses who composed the text, inspired by his encounters with God? Our studies suggested it was not. We learned of the Wellhausen theorem, which asserts that the book could not possibly be written by ‘Moses;’ rather composed by four different writers from various eras, a conclusion founded upon the study of the original texts. Specifically, the uses of particular words vary throughout Genesis: the word for God takes the shape of several distinct lexical symbols. The first twelve chapters refer to God as ‘Yahweh;’ subsequent chapters have God as ‘El’ or ‘Eloheim;’ the word changes later on, as well, implying that the text is attributable to several distinct writers who presumably lived at different times in different tribes, separated further by dialect.

This information shook the foundations of my understanding and interpretation of the Bible. ‘How could I believe that the text is God’s divine word if it had actually been written by countless authors, each putting its⁵ own fallible human touch to it?’ By following the scriptures as laws, I had submitted my life to the dictation of these ancients who had no right to have any hand in my life, let alone to define my faith. I thus rejected the Old Testament in its entirety, as it is based upon this premier book. I still, however, clung to the Christian dogma dictated by the New Testament.

Unfortunately for my Christian identity, I faced a serious conundrum: I was unable to trust the Bible as a guiding light as it had been crafted by the hands of humans, while at the same time, I could not ask Jesus for guidance regarding the subject, having been forbidden in the New Testament. Rapidly, I acknowledged the fact that it is illogical to ground my faith in the New Testament if I were to reject the Old. The potentially underhanded motives of the ancient human authors of the Old Testament seemed eminent in the text of the New, nullifying its trustworthiness. Time progressed and Jesus died, as I soon realized the book through which he lived, having been written by humans, was the one thing obstructing my spiritual quest for absolute Truth. The warning from opening my mind was a ploy to keep me submissive to the Shepherd who had extensive access to such enchanting wool to pull over my eyes.

Refusing such seclusion from the truth and the delusion of another’s fairy tale, I gathered what was left of my courage and asked the big unanswerable question: ‘What is right?’ In an answer’s stead, I received another question: ‘What is wrong?’ The Shepherd and his wool quickly vanished, as I am hereby able to search for truth by divulging what is not true, reminiscent of the Via Negativa of the Mystics. Ironically, instead of bolstering Christian devotion as it had for the Mystics, I found that my Via Negativa nullified the religion entirely. Upon welcoming the truth to my eyes, I found blatant flaws and interstices in the cloth of this religion. This perforated fabric is not enough to hold my faith.

M.C. D’Arcy writes, ‘It comes to this, that we must surrender all that is dearest to us in the enjoyment of the senses and go through a dark night in which we live without their help and comfort.’⁶ I also came to this point in my life, but ­ contrary to the Mystics ­ I surrendered what I had previously been taught about spirituality through organized religion (maxims which I had until now held intensely dear) to go through the ‘dark night’ of my spiritual quest. Instead of sacrificing my perceptions, I abandoned the inculcations of organized religion in search of Truth. Instead of submitting myself to the ‘death’ of ‘making nothing of all that we are to ourselves,’⁷ I contrarily killed what others had relegated as my Self through religious texts, opting to rely on my own perceptions in place of what I had been instructed. After all, it is perception that Ginsberg hails as the root of modern accomplishment.⁸ Forsaking the common way of the Christian Mystic for a path lit by perception has led to an unrelenting abhorrence of all organized religions. Interestingly enough, my ironic version of the Via Negativa has, however, established a delightfully iconoclastic relevance of St. John of The Cross’s poem, ‘Verses written after an ecstasy of high exaltation,’⁹ to my quest, as I am indeed transcending knowledge like the Mystic in the poem; my accomplishment, however, is achieved with my own thought in a way quite contradictory to that discussed by the clergyman who, "knowing naught," offers all to blind faith.

Abdicating the Christian faith temporarily left me at a metaphoric loss for words: I could not subscribe to the Christian doctrine any longer, but I still held a firm belief in God. Without Christian mythology, viz. the Bible, to provide me with a set of God’s demands in black and white, I was unsure as to how I was ‘supposed to live.’ My search for God, as described above, left me with an interminable list of what it¹⁰ is not, but I was at a loss when it came to what it actually is. Until this point, I was always of the obtuse persuasion that God was a conscious male spirit ‘in the image of man.’ I kept with this notion even after the death of Christ, as I knew not where else to turn for my understanding. I kept praying ­ every night religiously ­ but now knowledge and comprehension became my goal. I petitioned that conscious male spirit named ‘God’ for an understanding of the truth of this universe. Each time I asked, however, I moved farther and farther from the notion that a conscious being named ‘God’ would answer.

In time, I questioned the fact that my concept of divinity bore any semblance to the Christian deity: there was nothing to lead me to believe that there was in fact a singular conscious entity named ‘God’ out there in the murky expansion of the unknown. To answer this pernicious question, I pondered exactly what it is that ‘God’ does. ‘Well, the existence of all life is attributable to God; the universe was made, stars blaze, planets orbit, trees grow: all because of God; I eat sleep & breathe according to God…’ Apparently, ‘God,’ as I have been calling it, is synonymous with Nature ­ not just the ‘Dark Cloud of Unknowing’ of the Mystics, but the light clouds as well: the atmosphere, the stars, the soil, the water, the foliage, ad infinitum.

‘But nature is always characterized as feminine ­ "Mother Nature".’ While gender is always in the description, consciousness is not. Trees grow and give oxygen: unconsciously; wind blows and circulates our breath: unconsciously; the oceans’ currents reshape the earth over the millennia: unconsciously. I noticed the fact that only conscious beings are characterized according to gender. The unconscious are free from that burden. What, then, is there that leads me to believe that ‘God’ is vulnerable to such classification? Nothing ­ though there is plenty that leads me to believe the opposite. If God is Nature, then clearly there is no specific consciousness as we recognize the term, with specific whims and fancies, with autonomous will and a sense of justice. ‘God’ is Nature is the essence of Life. Existence. Energy. A Life Cycle. Part of everything in natural existence: certainly in trees; probably not in the paved roads, but definitely in the soil directly below them; and in toilet seats? Depends on what they’re made of. Since I am alive, then it is certainly in my heart, as well ­ not only where I had once thought Jesus to have resided (the compartment for organized religion), but enshrined in the whole apparatus, as my heart is a natural biological composite of a carbon base, an occurrence of nature. As my definition of divinity transfigured itself from a male entity named ‘God’ to the existential spirit of existence and life, I felt myself truly a part of all existence and life. Divinity is life, which I clearly and blatantly manifest with my own existence. Divinity is in me as I am a vessel of divinity. Proof? I am alive. Finally! After years of blind faith, I have some empirical support to my theology!

Eventually, I incorporated this new theology into my everyday life. Living as a Christian for so many years had left me addicted to prayer. In this aspect, I was left destitute. Every prayer had fallen on deaf ears, as divinity has no ears. On the bright side, however, all guilt was in vain as divinity has no eyes with which to judge. For a time, I would instinctively pray ­ for insight, for luck, for the good of others, for the blessings of those dear to me. As time progressed, however, I became acutely aware that all my silent words were for naught. I realized that my prayers were simply expressions of my hopes, so instead of asking God for something, now I will just consciously hope for it. Life will take its course as it may ­ unaffected by the will of an entity who is supposedly conscious and autonomous and privy to my specific wants and requests. This being so, I therefore became available to control my own life. I now have only myself to answer to and to depend upon.

Soon I considered the implications of this unhindered life. Christianity taught that my individuality would exist forever ­ several decades on earth, then eternity in heaven if I were good or hell if I were bad. This contradicts my empirical evidence, however. Indeed, much like Mary Gordon, ‘The religious impulse unmediated by reason terrifies me,’¹¹ as well, which keeps me referring to proof. Upon examination, I found that what I definitely do have is today. There is no evidence of forever, no reasoning for eternity. I will live until I die. Deliberating on this concept of visible life versus eternity, I had what I regarded as an epiphany: I came to acknowledge eternity as the cycle of life. Here is my reasoning for this religious impulse:

Embodiments of life are symbiotic. An example of this is the way trees give off oxygen for us to breathe; we in turn exhale carbon dioxide, necessary for the trees’ photosynthesis. Another example is the way we are sustained by consumption: something dies for us to live, such as a vegetable, growing until we pluck it from the earth and eat it, that we may sustain ourselves. Yet another example of this symbiosis would be the way our remains decompose in the earth to provide fertile soil from which more life will exude. Life is a cycle: death begets life, which in turn faces imminent death. To me, this demarcates an obvious interchange: Life is energy that passes from one vessel to another. This interchange is, in essence, Eternity. Individuality transcends no bounds in this realm. A soul is this energy, nothing more. Once dead, a vessel that had once contained the soul relinquishes all individuality as it is integrated into its new surroundings ­ the aforementioned vegetable is absorbed into the digestive system, providing fuel for the sustenance of the body of that which consumed it; the carcass decomposes into the earth to provide added fertility from which life stems in a new manifestation. The life energy one may call a soul goes on to proliferate life in other ways, as opposed to the mainstream belief that it goes on to heavenly bliss or to rot in the inferno.

This epiphany afforded me an entirely new perspective. No longer would I waste the precious limited time I have as my individual self, heeding the archaic and superannuated scrawlings of an organized creed in fear of a fiery purgatory. Without any authority dictating divine justice, I need not waste away, living according to another’s will. I owe no allegiance to any but myself, and can forge my own way without fear of eternal damnation. I am free to make the most of the autonomy afforded to me by my divine existence. There is no need to quell the self in wait for divinity, as divinity is omnipresent. On earth, a life form is not deficient of the divine; it is divine. Therefore, I mold my life like clay into the antithesis of St. John’s ‘Coplas about the soul which suffers with impatience to see God,’ where the poet proclaims ‘I live without inhabiting / Myself,’ (lines 1-2).¹² Ironically, I inhabit myself to make the most of my own life as homage to the divine, not to spite it. I live without inhibiting Myself.

Inevitably, however, as this epiphany overruled previous notions of morality, their passing bequeathed a moral dilemma. There was no definition of ethics directly applicable to me anymore. Since I would not live according to another, I was compelled to define morality according to my own perceptions (probably not art according to Ginsberg, but definitely an accomplishment in its own right). In light of my conclusions regarding the nature of divinity and its intertwined existence with life, I dissected what I interpreted as right and wrong, arriving at this postulate: Morality is dictated by a modified Pleasure Principle, as follows: An action is moral so long as it elicits a positive reaction from its agent, within the limitation that it does not negatively infringe upon the limited time that others have as their own individual selves. Simply stated, do whatever you can to live happily without infringing upon others’ abilities to do the same.

I have come a long way from the wide-eyed child who had sheepishly accepted the opinions of others into its heart at a young and naïve age. In retrospect, however, I cannot see how I got so sidetracked: my religion had always been about love and appreciation, about Life. I do not need more than that. Though some positive aspects may admittedly be found in organized religions, there is also much inherent in them that I find better to avoid. A specific example is the flawed creation myth Christianity promulgates (a reading of the first two chapters of Genesis will reveal blatant contradictions). Another point of dispute is the fact that organized religions often promote a host of sinfully repulsive behaviors (homophobia, sexism, racism, authoritarianism, blind faith, cruelty towards animals, human supremacy…). In the violent push for blind faith (or is it the blind push for violent faith?), Christianity and other organized religions maintain a power of thought-control over their adherents. They secure a specific mindset and lifestyle that not only causes division amongst us, but also robs us of our autonomy in promise of a future for which no proof even exists. What is known is that we are alive, and that we will someday die. There is no guarantee of heaven or hell. Who is to say that pleasure awaits us in death if we forsake the pleasure of life? There’s not enough evidence to flush our lives away in wait for death. We possess Life ­ are a part of the divine ­ and it would be the ultimate sin to waste such a privilege as that. Crossing out St. John once more: I will not die that I do not die.

Notes:
1. Lowercase, because at this time it was not yet a name, rather just an abstract lexical symbol.
2. I italicize Bible, as it is just another book, and logically should be subjected to the same literary rules the titles of other books are subjected to.
3. Capitalized, as by this time, it was without a doubt a name - a male name.
4. Bradley, David. "Bringing Down the Fire" Spiritual Quests William Zinsser, Ed. Houghton Mifflin. Boston 1988: 65.
5. As mentioned in the preface, it is my practice to employ the neutral-gendered pronoun, "it", when referring to an entity whose gender is non-specific.
6. Campbell, Roy. Poems of St. John of The Cross Grosset's Universal Library, 1967: 6.
7. Campbell 6.
8. See Ginsberg, Allen. "Meditation and Poetics" in Zinsser 147. 9. See Campbell 31.
10. Here, I refer to God with the gender nonspecific pronoun, "it", to dispel the myth that God is a gendered spirit.
11. Gordon, Mary "Getting Here From There: A Writer's Reflections on a Religious Past" also in Zinsser 28-29.
12. Campbell 35.

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