A Pilgrim’s Digression

“Wherefore Christian was left to tumble in the slough of despond alone…”

At the end of church services on Sunday, instead of the pastor making his usual request for people to come forward who wish to profess their faith before the assembled church, he brought forward a boy about twelve or thirteen and the boy’s grandmother. The boy’s name was Sammy. He was a cute, skinny little boy with crew cut, reddish gold hair and a sweet smile; outwardly, he was as near an example of American, boyish perfection as could be found in any Norman Rockwell painting.

“I’ve been talking with Sammy privately for some time,” the pastor said, “And he has decided to profess his faith in Jesus Christ, to accept baptism and forgiveness for his sins, and become a member of the church.”

The grandmother had her hand on the boy’s shoulder; she was smiling as she looked at him. I could not figure out why she was there, unless she was becoming a church member, too. For some reason, I felt steady resentment and dislike of her rising within me.

The pastor continued, “Next week, we will hear Sammy’s profession of faith and vote on his membership into the church…”

Did I hear that right? Vote? Maybe I didn’t hear that right.

“…as with Deacon elections, only church members may vote…”

He did say vote.

“…now let’s all honor Sammy’s desire to commit himself to following in the path of Jesus Christ.”

The congregation clapped, and the boy, still smiling sweetly, sat down, followed by his grandmother.

The remainder of the service was lost upon me, as I thought about what I had witnessed. Maybe I had just witnessed the sudden, swift demise of my interest in continuing to attend this church. It did not occur to me in quite that way, at that time; only later, as I have probed the wound it opened, have I thought this might be the snapping point.

I have been feeling for some time that I am starting to become entangled with people at church in small ways. There is one stranger, a man perhaps a little older than myself, who insists on greeting me every Sunday and shaking my hand. I’d rather he just let me be, and if I can avoid him, I try my best to do so. Furthermore, we’ve been attending this church about two months now, and people have started to make invitations to church dinners and outside social events.

For example, this Saturday evening there is a cookout and bonfire at a church member’s house, and we have been invited; my wife accepted the invitation, and I gave my tacit assent by not complaining. I haven’t told my wife how much I am dreading this affair, how much I am hoping that by the time Saturday comes around, she will decide she doesn’t feel like going, either. Ugh, I just don’t want to do it, to go there and have to talk to people and try to be cheerful while inside I am just waiting for the torture to be over. “Hell is other people,” Sartre said, and oh how right he was. Yet even Sartre was supposedly a fairly affable guy. There is nothing affable about me. At social events, I try to be invisible. I have survived such an event if I can escape sooner than expected having said little more than “hello” to anyone.

Maybe I should ask my doctor about Effexor.

But what has this to do with Sammy? I see his sad fate as my own eventual fate, the end result of all this social entanglement in the church life. Eventually, inevitably, I am going to have to stand up there and make a profession of faith in order to be “voted” into this church. I may even have to be baptized yet again.

As I stood there and watched Sammy benignly smiling, I saw not only my future but my past. My spiritual life began in a non-denominational Fundamentalist church where through fear of Hell, I was coerced into accepting Jesus Christ as my personal savior. My private joke is that I was born again via Cesarean Section. Now I attend a fairly liberal Baptist church; but in between, I converted to Roman Catholicism. I am not so presumptuous as to equate my own troubled past with this boy’s apparently untroubled present; however, I found myself doing exactly that in my feelings, if not my thoughts. Whether or not I was projecting onto this boy my own warped memories and feelings, I found myself thinking, “This is not an exit. Whatever you’re running from, this is not the way out.” Maybe I was directing this thought at Sammy, maybe myself.

There is no absolution through the church. It does not work. I’ve tried that way. I’ve tried it again and again. I converted to Roman Catholicism in college because I thought, “Here is a church that knows something about guilt. Catholics have a whole highly evolved sacrament centered around guilt and absolution. Surely I will find peace here.”

As long as I live, I will never forget the surprise I felt when my first formal confession before a Priest yielded no relief whatsoever. The guilt was still there; the feelings of extreme despair and self-disgust were still there. I thought to myself, “Well, I’ll just confess these sins again and see if I don’t feel better.” So I started going to confession as often as possible, nearly every Saturday in the first months after I was confirmed Catholic. I compulsively confessed the same sins over and over, some of them fifteen or more years old. When I was four or five years old, I put a live frog in a jar and buried it in our yard. I confessed to that sin. I confessed to killing many, many animals during the years I hunted with my father and grandfather. I confessed to manifold cruelties and crimes committed against other human beings. Most of these sins were nearly ten years old. I could rarely think of any recent sins to confess, aside from a mostly generalized list containing lust, pride, vanity, sloth, avarice, envy, and anger (thankfully, gluttony was never a real problem for me, or I would have had to add some gluttonous sins, too).

Finally, one day during my usual confession, a Priest said to me, “I’ve heard you confess these all before, why are you confessing the same sins over and over?”

“Because I still feel guilty,” I replied.

“Do you realize you are rejecting Christ’s gift of forgiveness by continually confessing the same sins? Confessing sins you’ve already asked forgiveness for is itself a sin.”

“Thank you, Father,” I said, “Now I have to confess that sin, too.”

I recognize that I have a problem. Because I reject Christ daily, in thought, feeling, and deed, I am most likely damned. Yet the certainty of my damnation only increases my guilt, which is itself a rejection of Christ.

Atheism is no solution, either. I might have thought it was a solution for a brief period in my teens, between the Fundamentalist and Catholic stages of my journey. I think Christians take the wrong attitude toward atheism anyway. Christians often try to refute atheism using the chief tool of atheism: Reason. The stake through the heart of atheism is not some rational proof that God exists. Atheism is disproved by its emotional dishonesty, not its rational incoherence. Atheism is reasonable and correct: why should anyone believe something for which there is no proof that is obtainable in this life?

Thus the problem with atheism is not that it is illogical, but that no one really believes it, deep down, which is in its own way a kind of disproof. In our hearts, we are still children, afraid of the dark through which only God the father can provide light. I cannot imagine that on his deathbed, an atheist won’t feel fear; does he think silently, only half-admittedly, “What if I’m wrong?” I think that is exactly what an atheist thinks, in his heart, in the darkness of night or when the soul is darkened with despair or when life and reason itself are slowly ebbing from the body.

So I reject atheism. Though I know it is imminently reasonable, it is not and could never be true to what I feel. What I feel is no more provable than the existence of God, but there you go, the central paradox of all human existence: I can’t prove it, but I feel it, therefore it must be true.

What then is the alternative? If I reject atheism, but I cannot find any relief for myself in the normal practice of religion, what is left to me? I have my belief in Christ. I do not say “faith,” because it is my lack of faith which damns me. I don’t have any faith in Christ’s power to love me, forgive me, and release me from my guilt. So because I lack Faith, even my belief in Christ is no Help to me in the mire of despair that is my spiritual life.

I don’t think I will ever find either a church in which I feel comfortable, or the peace that supposedly comes to those who put their faith in Jesus Christ. “Peace” is probably just a myth, though, another of those empty words Christians use, little more than an advertising slogan. There is too much of the Puritan in me to ever be at peace.

I don’t mean that I am a Puritan in the sense that I am a prude or a bigot. I don’t wear buckles on my shoes, dark clothing, or a peaked hat. Before they deposed King Charles, cut off his head, and assumed power in England, the Puritans of the early seventeenth century were a peacefully contrarian bunch. At home in no church, they made their own churches in people’s homes or in the street. They dared to question orthodoxy on all its premises. John Milton, the most well-known Puritan, believed in polygamy and divorce and claimed that there was no Trinity. Even more radical Puritan sects, such as the Levellers and the Diggers, promoted what today we would call Christian Socialism.

I don’t know whether internally, a follower of the Levellers would have felt himself outside the mainstream, alone, despairing, as I do. Perhaps followers of a religion, even the strangest religion, even atheism, ultimately tend to view themselves as the normal ones and everyone else as the misguided damned.

However that may be, I know I’ve discovered that pilgrimage is terribly lonely, and rarely does one ever come to a full stop anywhere. Stopping is usually a sign that it’s time to move on. I hate it; I hate never resting, never finding any peace, neither peace of mind nor body. There are times I don’t want to go on. I’m like Christian’s friend in The Pilgrim’s progress, Pliable, who turns back the first time they meet an obstacle. Pliable isn’t a bad person; he just wants the road to be a little easier.