She is clothed in strength, and dignity, and she laughs without fear of the future ~Proverbs 31:25
I heard the term backslider whispered when I was a child. The rebel daughter.. the prodigal son… the wayward wife… the lost husband. You heard of them when they left. Not so often if they came back. Maybe they often didn’t.
I have said many times that the point at which I used the term atheist to describe myself had not come easily. I often would describe it as a light switch on a very slow dimmer. Lights going out so slowly that your eyes adjust to the darkness and even in total darkness you are able to see at least enough to navigate. And while that process was slow, and the light died in miniscule increments, I remember vividly the day that all of the sudden the world went black. I know the location I was in, the situation that pushed me over the edge, and the moment I gave up. I had had enough.
I tried so hard, for so long, to find something. Anything spiritual that could feed this soul I supposedly had. Yet I failed, time and again. I longed for the magic of my childhood when Sunday school was something I looked forward to. I wanted to feel that holy spirit, or something like it again.. I was so in love with God back then.. and then it just slipped away.. and when the emptiness and the unanswered questions again became too much, I went in other directions. I was seeking. I was trying. All of the gods. The goddesses. You name it, I tried it.
Eventually none of it made any sense… the dimmer switch was doing its thing.
So, as of the summer of 2010, I decided I was done. Done with every single bit of it. Religion. Nope. I’m too logical for this nonsense. There is no proof. Life is a series of things you have no control over. Famine. Disease. Abuse. Murder. Love yourself, you are all you have. Intelligent design my ass. Put your herbs away. Snuff those candles. Science! That I can understand. That will explain it all. I had it all figured out. I was an atheist. Good without gods. And I was angry about it. Angry that it came to that. Angry that there were no answers that made sense. Angry that life is just empty after all. I’d find myself lashing out at people who offered prayer, or who spouted religion at every turn. I pushed away my Christian friends, my pagan friends.. they were all the same. I was so damn smart, how could people be so damn dumb?!
And then there was darkness.
Eventually I wasn’t angry any more. I was just here doing my thing. Apathy towards it all. That’s the ticket. Who cares? Not me. Do your thing, leave me out of it.
Fast forward to my youngest son’s first deployment to Afghanistan. While along this way, and thru those years, I had secretly wondered what it would be like to have God, religion, prayer, comfort, ritual etc back in my life, I never acted on it.. I am an atheist, after all. No fate. No destiny. Just a bunch of parts and atoms flying around the universe. Nothing. I was scared. So scared I would lose him forever. And I had no comfort… even if it was all in my head or all in my heart..even if all it was was bullshit, it would have helped.. I had to just go with logic. Statistically speaking, he would come home. That’s just the simple math of it. Math isn’t quite the comfort I needed, but it was all I was allowed. I was on a diet from nonsense and all.
He made it home. And then he went again. I was a few thousand miles from both of my other kids… my baby was leaving again… I was hollowed out. I again secretly wished I still believed in something bigger than myself… I would have dropped to my knees and begged for some relief. But I was still on my hope and comfort diet… still restricted from the nonsense like a fat girl avoiding dessert.
When my husband’s retirement went through, some things started to change. I said, out loud this time, that had I been a religious woman I’d have said that prayers were being answered. We were leaving Texas and heading to North Carolina and I was gonna have my old little farm house and my land and chickens and goats and a simple life and I would only be 6 hours now from one son, 3 hours from my daughter and my baby would be home soon. And he was gonna move east as well… Wow, I’d have even said I was blessed, but that’s nonsense. So I didn’t.
Some things fell through. Big things. I ended up in a way different situation than I thought I needed or wanted and had to make the best of it. See, the universe doesn’t shit on your or bless you.. it just is what it is.. so suck it up and drive on.
I was grateful for lots of things.. but grateful to whom? To what? Nothing. Remember, I’m just accidental parts and cells… the universe not only doesn’t think I’m special, it doesn’t think at all because that’s nonsense. No fate. No destiny. No answered prayers. Just life on a molecular level.
Towards the end of his deployment, I asked my son if I had screwed up. Had I let him down by not giving him a more spiritual foundation or outlook on life because I wanted to know if he thought he was missing something by not having religion or prayer or what not.. He said no. It almost made me sad. Probably because I had hoped that he wanted hope, even in its nonsense, that he was going to come home.. that things really meant something. I also knew I had let him down. My older two kids at least had something to go on.. a place to start from..but my youngest was there for that dimmer switch and its plunge into darkness… He was cynical and logical like me. That felt like failure. I stood in the shower and cried that day, and said out loud “I may be wrong and if there is a god and I have screwed this up I am sorry because its not me I worry for, its them”. I think that was a prayer. Which was nonsense, but I did it anyway. I didn’t do it again.
I felt a lump in my breast in October of 2016. I told no one. It was still there in November. I told my husband. It was still there in December and I was scared. So scared that I again wished I had someplace to go with the fear. Scared that maybe I was wrong and this was my punishment. Scared I would die. Cancer. I was so scared that I was paralyzed with fear. It would be January before I snapped myself out of the fear enough to see a doctor. It was February before they could do the biopsy. By then I had resigned myself to preparing for the worst. I sat once again wishing I was connected to something outside of myself so that I at least felt like I had help.. felt like I had hope.. because I wanted to feel something other than abject, lonely fear.
It turned out to not be cancer. When I got the call, I was just leaving work for the day. My ears were ringing badly when the doctor spoke to me and I had to ask her to repeat the results of the biopsy.. because surely I did not totally dodge such a bullet. But I had. I wept. Tears of relief and joy. Fear left my body in breathless sobs. Little did I know that in that moment, the dimmer switch was moving back the other way.
My son made it home. My son got a great job. He moved closer. My other son had come to visit now multiple times and I had easily gone to visit him. I was able to hold my little granddaughters and hear them laugh without a long airplane ride or logistics that seemed impossible. I was literally now down the road from my daughter, who had for years now been without her mom for vital and life changing moments that ended up leaving her scared and feeling alone. I could make up for so much. I wasn’t dying of cancer! Things I thought I wanted and needed hadn’t come to fruition because instead I was possibly actually where I needed to be, doing what I needed to do. The list of things that didn’t work out was seemingly long.. But the list of things that did was even bigger and now that I am not dying I could almost see that. Almost.
I would now often sit in the dark, literally and figuratively, thinking about who I am. What I am doing. Where I am at. Why was I ok? I wanted to be grateful, once again, to something more profound than what I could see with my own eyes and understand with my small brain… Because this was a second chance at life, right? Nonsense. You simply dodged a bullet that lots of people dodge. You aren’t special. You don’t do anything for the world that makes you worthy of such a gift. You are nothing. We are all nothing.
Months passed. And because I had sat in the dark, fully convinced that I owed nothing to the universe for my dodge, I felt dead inside. I may not have been dying of cancer, but I was dying.
Even when things, one after another, were working out perfectly for me and my family… I sat dying. I sat ignoring messages of hope, signs of grace, and opportunities for gratefulness. The light was coming back, but it hurt my eyes. So I was keeping them closed. Shielding them with my hands. Burying my head. If someone could just take my hand please and take me back to the dark place I am used to… Where in the darkness my heart could be hard and nobody would notice. Where the armor I pieced together since I was a child could easily be worn and not seen for what it really is. In the dark where I could stay angry, cynical, hard and hopeless. Where I could tell people that when I am nice and soft it’s an act and they will believe me. Where I can pretend that being vulnerable is a sin but being strong no matter what is a virtue.
But He wouldn’t let me sit there any longer. No more subtle hints. No more dimmer switch. He knew I wouldn’t go alone, so He gave me a guide. He took my husband, and showed him things to show me. He let me give myself permission to be vulnerable and unsure. He had my husband tell me that yes, indeed, I am special to the world. Because to a handful of people I am the world. I am allowed that grace, that hope, that place to be grateful. Faith is understanding that you won’t understand, and that gets to be ok.
I see now that it was never an accident that I described my fall from hope, grace, and faith as going dark. I thought it described me being enlightened and above nonsense. Switching the light off in a room I wasn’t using any longer. Walking away. Too smart for a heart. Too smart to have a soul. Too wise for faith, grace and hope. Too impressed by the logic in the world to need things that cannot be explained. Darkness isn’t any of those things. A tomb is dark. A coffin is dark. A cold and empty home is dark.
And then there was light.
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