A Purple Hooded Sweatshirt is Good to Wear in the Dark Night of the Soul if You are at the Beach

The night I miscarried my faith in God was a beautiful June night, and the breeze was just enough to warrant a sweatshirt. My bare feet carried me down the two blocks from Aunt Sharyn & Uncle Tony's beach house in Oxnard to a beach glowing under the face of a full moon. I paced in the cool sand for hours, trying to understand what had happened.

The Presence I had always felt in my gut had suddenly expired that day, the way a baby might die inside of its mother. Except there was no blood or fainting to punctuate my loss. I wasn't even sure if it was a loss [maybe rather the end of a blindness?], but it was definitely a shift. What would I do with this life/world/night if I was alone? Cosmically alone. If all I could know is that I am alive and I will die?

In college, when discussing who and what we might be if we were Godless physicalists, my friends and I would spin wild scenarios (and actually believe them to some extent)... but it became clear to me that sandy night that I would not be capable of becoming the "un-Christian" drug-addicted Wiccan prostitute I had intended to be. Even with the hope of God drained from me, a feeling of emptiness making the canopy of stars more desperately beautiful than ever, I knew I could never stop sincerely worshiping Goodness, Truth, Beauty and the Love that is described in that weighty 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians. Even if there was not a God, there were these humbling Platonic ideals that seemed incapable of being ripped from my gut the way He was. It seemed that way. I was glad of that rosy conclusion, though it worried me that a feeling of liberation was swelling heavier than the expected terror. Was that a bad sign? Did I want this new conviction to persist? I couldn't undo it, that was for sure, any more than I could revive a dead body or bench press a semi truck.

And so, I called my roommate Miriam who had been flirting with atheism (regardless of my advice to the contrary) with no avail for months, and I confessed (still pacing in the surf). The timing of this conversation was shortly after our neighbor's similar confession to us. This neighbor was terrified she'd one day have to tell her [pastor] husband that, in the years since their wedding, she had somehow transitioned from evangelical faith to complacent agnosticism. Would he still want her, she worried. I worried too. Could I still respect myself (surely my friends wouldn't - and there was NO way I would be telling my parents) if I lost my resolve to trust in and honor the God of the Bible with my heart, soul, mind, strength?

That disorienting weekend was one of the most significant turning points of my life. The three years that followed were shaped like a question, asking... Can I live with this? What are the alternative approaches to life, if not a disciple of Jesus? If you are real, God, will you please make yourself known to me? In the meantime, I was resigned to wearing the conviction that life is only what a person makes of it - there is nothing to do except try to make this world a better place and find some enjoyment before we die. Motherhood (art?) may be the only point of access for transcendence, but approaching it with that heavy longing seemed dangerous and foolish. Serving and loving people more generally seemed to be the best consolation. But I despaired of the results. It was so difficult to care for people without needing to see the fruits of my labor when there was not a Co-Laborer, making possible joy and contentment when kindness was unappreciated. If my self was all I had, and not a Creator and Storyteller, the weight of the world was heavier to bear. In the end (middle?), it proved too heavy in fact.

But I feared nothing more, in that season, than the possibility of falling back onto the crutch of a false religion for dread of the unknown. My guiding principle was this, by Thomas Jefferson: "There is not a truth existing which I fear... or would wish unknown to the whole world." If the physical world were all that existed, so let it be. If an Eastern spirituality or philosophy was better suited to the human race, so should it be. If the nation of Israel or Islam were truly preferred by Creator over the rest of us pagans, why shouldn't the be. These are not conclusions simple to shake out, and my decisions to date about what realities to lean on remain meager. But whatever it is I believe or don't believe tonight, question or let alone - it is so because I faced the void that suggested, maybe there is no God, and I allowed it to make a case.