An Introduction

Wasn’t it Leonard Cohen who said there is a crack in everything… that’s how the light gets in? It was 1990 that I found the crack in the Christian religion. It wasn’t deliberate—the searching, I mean. It came, by the way that fractures always do… a hard blow.

I will be clear once again, I’m not writing in religious terms. When I point out that, in my opinion, things aren’t like they should be, I am not trying to say some people are not Christians or are going to hell. I’m not even trying to say that I am somehow better than others, as the religious person says to me. I am giving my opinion, based thirty years of careful study and contemplation– and I could be wrong. I welcome factual corrections to any points I make, but I do not welcome the religious who personally attack me for not conforming to the traditional way of thinking.

In this episode, I will tell the story again of how I got here. I will take some poetic liberties as I write, a little mixing of metaphors, to help others understand what I am trying to say.

How I Got Here

I had grown up in the Bible Belt, but, like most of us there at that time, it was only window dressing. Then, at age eighteen, I thought I had found the true Christian path, so straight and narrow that you could thread a needle with it. We were above the mere mortals around us, those silly church people who only knew God on Sundays, who needed rest, slumber, and tears. We needed none of those. We were better than them.

Twenty years later, I found my own tears, my own mortality, while a missionary to Muslims in a hardened place. But it wasn’t the Islamists who brought the tragedy, as a good Christian American would assume, but the hands of our own tribe. The scary call was coming from inside the house. Friendly fire. We all dressed ourselves as saints, over the skin of sinners. We were fools, cloaked with the cape of wizards. Zealots… but without knowledge. Rebels, without a cause. Hold your tears for me, as I wasn’t a victim but a participant.

The crack I fell through didn’t let the light in… at least for a while. It was a godless place outside, the worst kind of darkness, darker than black, darker than being diagnosed with cancer and given the death sentence thirty years later; I know this for sure. As the French philosopher Albert Camus wrote, “But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.” It was that kind of place.

But I did eventually find the light; it started like a beam in a barn coming through the spaces between the weathered boards, illuminating the dust in the air, the dust of my previous life. A few years later, I found God again… for the first time. As similar to the previous God as hot is to cold, rain is to drought, as peace is to war, as light is to dark. A transcendent but profoundly rational God, the antithesis of the irrational God I had been taught before. A God more mysterious than quantum tunneling, the author of reason and the math that holds the cosmos together. Not the magician who does fancy tricks with a sleight of hand or marked cards, the Genie who just grants wishes, the psychedelic that gives us experiences, not Santa Claus who blesses us when we are good, not the valet who finds me a parking spot at Costco, and certainly not the psychopath, who holds grudges, burns you in hell for saying, “shit,” or hates the way you were made, or… the list goes on exhausting mere language. But religion incarcerates God into a small box of our liking, who does all the above. A Bronze Age God.

If my mother were alive, she might roll her eyes and say, “Here we go again,” but this time, these past thirty years have been totally different. Before, the world I lived in was all about pretense and conformity. This round, it is authenticity and nonconformity. The first time around, it was fueled by acceptance and praise through a crowd of friends; this time around, it has been defined by rejection and vilification, them of me. I’m nobody’s hero, barely anyone’s friend, and that is of my own making. A smoother operator could have kept his nonconforming course without alienating others. My ignorance and social awkwardness.

My Purpose with this Blog

My pursuit is now of factuality and genuineness, of showing my mortality, my cowardice, my unfaithfulness, my vulnerability, and my doubt. It was an epiphany that if there is a God, that God must live within reality, not within our imaginings, pretense of being better than we are, and parlor tricks. If God created a rational universe, that God itself must be rational.

The Mike Show

The crack that found me was more like a door, like Truman’s exit from the show he had been living in. Plastic clouds, robotic birds. A sun on a metal track. Once outside, the dark side of the Christian religion was exposed, gears and pulleys, cables and wires, from where the puppeteer controls the performance. The show must go on.

The Common Feeling of Not Fitting In

If you don’t fit into Christianity, or anywhere anymore, you are not alone. It is more common than we think that some of us feel misunderstood or as if we belong to a different civilization. Since being on the outside of religion, that’s how it feels.

I just saw a book cover, The Gift of Not Fitting In. I think I’ll buy the book; it sounds intriguing. Again, I’m not blaming anyone but myself. But most of my religious friends want to drag me back through the crack into the dome, where, for me, the flowers are plastic, the smiles, Teflon, the positivity is toxic, the disc of the sun on a metal track. I cannot go back. More likely, I would become an atheist than believe in that kind of God ever again.

As I started my pursuit, I did not see myself inside Truman’s dome, pointing to the crack… the door and saying, ” Hey folks, that’s the way out.” Maybe I tried that in the 1990s, but definitely not now. And I do not hold those inside accountable, the way I would for myself. Inside, that Christian religion didn’t work for me; I’m not saying it couldn’t work for them. In other words, I’m not evangelistic in my approach. The inside was less for me, maybe it is more for them. While truth is not relative, experiences are.

The Catcher in the Post-Christian Wilderness

The reason I write is that I see myself as a Christian Holden, a catcher not in the rye, but outside the crack to catch those who are falling through and into the darkness, the wilderness outside of the Christian religion, and spare them from a prolonged darkness. That’s my purpose and my calling.

Going forward, I will follow my pilgrimage, what I have learned, which makes sense of everything, and introduces the bigger and more rational God. Some don’t see it, but America is in turmoil in its political and religious life. There is a reason, and I believe there is a way out. Honest to God.

In Peace, Mike