I have been walking away from institutional religion for half my life now, fifteen years dismantling what the first fifteen built. But I’ve always been glad that I grew up the way that I did. The Repentagon trained me to feel at ease in odd, insular, extreme environments, and Christianity formed my deepest instincts. It gave me a leftist world view—a desire to follow leaders who feel themselves inseparable from the hungry, the imprisoned, and the sick. Years of auditing my own conduct in prayer gave me an obsession with everyday morality. And Christian theology convinced me that I had been born in a compromised situation. It made me want to investigate my own ideas about what it means to be good. [...] for years, I retained an intense hunger for devotion. [...] As the narrator stares at the woman she loves, she becomes greener, and the line becomes an expression of ecstasy in its original sense. Sappho steps outside herself. Love has caused her to abandon her body. The green grows greener. Some essential quality deepens as the self is removed. The word “decreation” is Weil’s term for the process of moving toward a love so unadulterated that it makes you leave yourself behind. “Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy,” she writes. “For in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying ‘I.’ ” She dreams of vanishing, but this fantasy reinscribes the dazzling force and vision of her intellectual presence. It’s a “profoundly tricky spiritual fact,” Carson writes, describing Weil’s quandary. “I cannot go towards God in love without bringing myself along.” Being a writer compounds the dilemma: to articulate the desire to vanish is to reiterate the self. Greener, not paler. [..] reaching the logical end point of her philosophy of devotion—an ecstasy that is not so different from death. To grasp at self-erasure is to approach a total annihilation that can be achieved only once.I have wondered if this is part of the reason that many evangelical Christians seem eager for the Rapture, the prophesied event in which they’ll depart the earth and ascend to Heaven. When you love something so much that you dream of emptying yourself out for it, you’d be forgiven for wanting to let your love finish the job. [...] “I can process nothing right now that does not terminate in God’s presence—this revelation I seem ready to have forever in degraded forms.” [...] "The situations in my life when I have been sympathetic to desperation are the situations when I have felt sure I was encountering God.” [...] I don’t know if I’m after truth or hanging on to its dwindling half-life. I might only be hoping to remember that my ecstatic disposition is the source of the good in me—spontaneity, devotion, sweetness—and the worst things, too: heedlessness, blankness, equivocation. [...] There are feelings, like ecstasy, that provide an unbreakable link between virtue and vice. You don’t have to believe a revelation to understand that something inside it was real.
Jia Tolentino, excerpted from 'Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston', in The New Yorker
