The great philosopher, Dante Alighieri, opened his epic poem Inferno with a line that would eventually haunt me: “In the middle of the journey of life, I found myself in a dark wood... for the straightforward path had been lost.” That description held a powerful resonance as I approached the age of fifty, thanks to having become adrift in a similar wilderness. Spiritual light of any kind remained not only illusive but out of my reach.
At such a life junction, one is inescapably forced to take stock, especially if the reflection in the mirror appears incomplete if not distorted. During that personal assessment, I faced a new self-awareness. I no longer believed in God. Finally admitting this to myself left me in a quandary.
Making that admission suggests that I previously had believed in God. With hindsight, I recognize the term “belief” can mislead. Whatever previous faith I held was strictly based on the possibility of God. At no point did I ever feel tangibly tethered to a Supreme Being. As a result, whatever faith I might have possessed never settled into actual belief.
My mother loved telling the story of the childhood difference between my brother and me when it came to God’s existence. When she said to him, “God loves you, Davey!” he would eagerly respond, “I know he does, Mommy!” But when facing the same declaration, my five-year old’s response came as a sober question, “How do you know?”
I grew up under the influence of Christian Science (CS), one of Protestantism’s fading lights. Not just raised as an orthodox Christian Scientist, I attended a Christian Science boarding school during my teens and later matriculated to the same institution’s four-year college. In fact, my uncle was the head of the Church for many years. That complete immersion into CS’s institutionalized thought had its blessings but also led to rather grave psychic harm.
In my opinion, the problem with Christian Science as a religion is its central focus on prayer being the exclusive remedy to achieve healing. As I understood it, that restriction included meeting the needs of the body when exposed to illness or injury. The use of any form of medical science is shunned. Even taking an aspirin is prohibited.
When a physical issue arises, an adherent’s principal option is to engage a Christian Science Practitioner to assist with directed prayer, what the religion refers to as “a treatment.” The overall goal between practitioner and patient, according to CS, is to overcome the fallacy of sin, disease, and death. Healing is the intended result.
A serious problem can arise when a Christian Scientist wants or needs to pursue medical assistance. The religion’s rules require the Practitioner to immediately cease prayerful treatment if the medical path is taken. The ill Church member then faces the impossible choice between honoring religious purity versus saving one’s life through medical support. I have watched many orthodox CS friends choose to forgo medical treatment, then perish.
To me, that was the ultimate form of religious sacrifice, dying as the result of a strict adherence to one’s spiritual beliefs. Given its historical practice of medical avoidance, Christian Science has become a faith without modern appeal. Not using medical treatment defies common sense to most people.
Looking back, I regard my institutional training as designed to ensure my personal behavior reflected a codified set of imperatives. Adherence to orthodoxy would determine my spiritual fitness. Such a set of religious handcuffs bore no relationship to spiritual progress, not based on my adolescent experience.
By walking away from the religion of my youth, I freed myself from institutional control. However, the writings of Christian Science’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy did serve as a personal cornerstone to Grace’s larger edifice. Her views on divine metaphysics, later amplified by a separate treatise, A Course in Miracles , played a key role in my spiritual redefinition. I guess my spin on the old saw holds true: You can take the boy out of the religion, but you can’t take the religion out of the boy .
Although freed of religious restriction, I still very much believed in the idea of God as a young man and that I, presumably, remained His/Her beloved child. However, over the next twenty-five to thirty years, my faith in God’s presence gradually wore away, primarily due to having never made God’s acquaintance. The concept of a monotheistic deity remained a theory lacking proof. At the age of fifty, I finally abandoned my lifelong search for God.
As an author’s note, I should mention how God was defined for me as a child. The reference was always gender inclusive, Father/Mother God . I therefore did not grow up thinking of God as my father. Rather I saw the concept as spiritual parenting that required as much input from Mother God as her male counterpart. Each was making a specific contribution to my spiritual wholeness. When I reference the concept of God today, I perceive a Supreme Being who represents humankind’s Grace fully realized, our collective spirits as One.