Warning! The following is covering religion. I’m going to discuss religion for the next three days. If you want to skip these posts I’ll see you on Saturday.
A bit of background. I was raised Catholic. I went to church every Sunday. I went through twelve years of Catholic Catechism classes. I went through the Holy Sacraments – Baptism, Confirmation, First Communion, Confession, and eventually Matrimony. I was secure in the knowledge that I was right in the eyes of God and everything was fine.
That changed one day in high school. I was walking to class when I had to get around a group of students. That was when I was verbally assaulted by a blonde girl. “You’re going to Hell!”
What? I am? I don’t think so. I didn’t have time to confront her as the bell rang and I had to go to class. She was probably one of those born again, well-meaning Young Life Christians that were so popular in the late 1970’s / early 1980’s. (Yes, I’m old.)
That declaration made me start questioning things. What was causing me to go to Hell? What was Hell? Do other religions have a Hell? What are those other religions teaching anyway?
This lead me into a journey of searching for answers that still goes on today. I still identify as a Catholic (not a very good one) but I also have leanings towards Buddhism. If nothing else, Buddha’s Four Noble Truths is an imminently practical system for dealing with the crap Life throws at you day-to-day.
Which brings us to the present.
Sunday. The wife and I are at church. It’s a Pentecostal church.
The Pastor is on fire. He has been leading the song worship and preaching. People all over the church have their hands raised in praise, worshipping. There is a current of energy in the place. Everyone seems to be tied into the same frequency, united in their belief and worship.
Everyone, except me.
I stand stoically, not wanting to be disrespectful or disruptive. I’m all for freedom of speech and religion. Everyone is allowed to believe what they want. If it is different than what I believe I’m willing to discuss it and see if we can find some common ground.
There is a saying – those who dance are thought crazy by those who don’t here the music. I’m well aware of this from being on the side of those who dance while being thought crazy by those who can’t hear my music. This is one of the times I can’t hear the music.
It seems that the entire church is dancing to some Euro indie thresh metal Viking polka that, despite my best efforts, I am unable to hear.
I want to. I want to be able to hear what they do. I want to know what it is they know. But I’m not tuned to the right frequency or something.
Then the Pastor sits in a chair near the pulpit, spreads his arms wide and says “The presence of the Lord is in the house today.”
Everyone else seems to accept this as gospel truth (no pun intended). It could very well be true. I’m certainly open to the possibility that it is and that the Lord is truly there.
I can’t perceive it. I do not feel anything. No presence, nothing supernatural. It is simply a building. The Pastor is just a man. I do not know what to make of this.
Are they in on the experience? Is it mass delusion? Does everyone else feel the presence of the Lord? Is the Lord there and he just doesn’t like me? That would certainly be a direct contradiction of what the Pastor preaches every week.
What am I missing?
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My thoughts on God:
Creation happened. That’s obvious. So that means someone or something made it happen. Okay, there’s one other explanation, but Creation is so many orders of magnitude above awesome, that the chances of it happening spontaneously are vanishingly small. So someone or something. If something, then that just kicks the can down the road—who/what created the something? That leaves someone. How ignoble—God by elimination. 🙁
I won’t blow up your blog by asking who/what created God.
Maybe you should instead ask who created you as in the introduction of Zardoz –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezT7P970Bw4
My husband and I used to go to a Pentecostal Church. I enjoyed the enthusiastic singing and some of the guest Preachers or Evangelist/Prophets. I don’t think anyone there from the Pastor and his wife and the congregation were bad people. But they’d have these spells where someone would burst into tongues. Then someone else would too. It was usually one of five people and they always said the same thing. Phonetically it is: E kooh dee uh soon dee A.
Now see, I was speaking or typing in tongues. And if anyone, especially among the leaders/elders of a church, should know; when one person speaks in tongues there is another present to translate it to the people or person the message is intended for. THAT NEVER HAPPENED. And that was the start of a my sliding away from the faith I once had.
One day I was walking to work at the crack of dawn and a man across the street from me walking in the opposite direction I was walking in, jerked then looked like someone had hit him in the middle of the back hard enough to send his arms flying out away from his body. He yelled something I didn’t understand. I figured he was a drunk. Then he did it again. But this time a guy on my side of the street shouted back at the ‘drunk’.
I don’t judge; you do you, I do me….off to work I go, you two go work off your drunks….
The guy on my side says to me: “He was speaking in tongues. He said if you apply for a job two doors down you’ll get hired by a man named Woody and will help many people and make enough money to get an apt.”
I said ok, thanks as I shot a look across the street but he was already way up the street. When I looked back at the man that had translated he was going into a store. I continued walking and went two doors past where my job was. It was a place called We Who Care. I went in and asked if they were hiring. They were. A man named Woody Stevenson interviewed me and hired me on the spot, at twice the pay I was getting at the Girl’s Club.
I mention this here because this experience happened when I was fifteen and my idea of God was he was a bastard who, rufied a woman, got her pregnant, then didn’t have the guts to tell her himself, then abandoned that child. God was, at best, an absentee father and, at worst, a selfish Prk. I had NOT been saved…though I’d been going to the Nazarene church on Sundays for years…I think so my parents could have some quality alone time. 😀