Dear Christian,
With all the sincerity in me I apologize deeply if you have felt hurt or betrayed by my anti-Christian stance over the last few years. I know that my outspokenness has likely come as a surprise, and possibly made you feel that I’m against you. Or that I’ve lost respect for you or for your beliefs. Maybe you’ve felt that I have created an unnecessary separation between us by publicly decrying the very faith that once bound us together.
Without sounding arrogant, I want to say that I understand; if I were in your shoes I would feel exactly the same way. I would wonder “Why does Joe feels the need to proclaim his new beliefs? Why he can’t just let go of his faith without trying to bring down everyone else’s? Why can’t he show some respect to his friends, his family, the people who love him?”
If I were you I would feel disrespected and betrayed and hurt.
And I’m sorry for that. To be honest it really, really hurts me to have caused you pain. While I don’t regret what I’ve been through or what I’ve done, it really bothers me that I’ve potentially created a separation between us because of my path.
I was meditating on this thought this morning and was struck by what felt like an important insight: that deep down, you and me are not separated.
We are on the very same path.
I’m not talking about leaving your Christian faith. I’m not saying you are going to follow in my footsteps. I am saying that we still share an even more fundamental bond than our religion.
I believe that we are still connected, still bound tightly together by our shared desire to know and understand the Truth: The Truth of Who We Really Are. The Truth about our purpose here on earth. The deepest, most important meaning of our lives. At our very core, we have pursued God because we are seekers of Truth. Truth, for us, is more important than anything else. We can’t settle for the world we see around us; we will never be satisfied by the day-to-day activities of life. We want (need) to experience the full-on Truth of Who We Are and why we’re here.
At a deep-down, core level, we have an innate knowing that there is something more. There’s no logical proof for this — there likely never can be. There’s just a deep sense of knowing.
“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” ― C.S. Lewis
I want to make it abundantly clear that this knowing is still very present for me, even outside of a belief in a religion. It is perhaps one of the most powerful driving forces in my life and it’s something that I think about a lot. That sense of ‘something greater’ has never diminished and in fact, especially in the last year, has become stronger than ever.
I am now realizing that maybe those years of begging God for faith with no answer, the time I spent reading, researching, trying to understand my place in the world, the difficult ‘coming out as atheist’ conversations I had with my friends and family, and the hands-on lessons I learned about self-worth, self-love, and self-trust, while oftentimes extremely difficult, lonely, and painful, were each necessary steps in my lifelong spiritual development.
I am realizing that in order to see the Truth, I needed to greatly expand. I needed to let go of my small, human-like understanding of God as a punishing, jealous, easily-offended judge. I needed to allow myself to seek Truth in all places, not just from a single, closed source. I needed to have my faith structure completely disassembled in order to begin to rebuild it on a more expansive, more loving, more fluid foundation.
The breaking down of my faith was really difficult and painful, and was not something I ever wanted to go through. I did not want to become an atheist. I wanted to stay Christian and be a faithful servant of God for my whole life. I did not choose to leave Christianity.
However, I now wonder if my leaving Christianity was the next step on the spiritual path for me — and that by leaving behind my understanding of God, myself, faith, purpose, etc. I am now moving closer to the Truth that I have been seeking all along.
I don’t claim to have the Truth, and I am incredibly skeptical of anyone (or any book) that arrogantly claims to have a sole claim on Truth, but I feel deeply that this process I am going through is moving me forward, closer and closer to the source of what me and you both are seeking.
I am not a Christian. I am not an atheist. I am not anything. At this point, the fewer labels I place on myself the more open I am to discovering the Truth for real. I seek to eliminate faulty, clouding beliefs about myself and others. I seek to remain open and humble. I remain willing to have my mind changed, and changed again, and changed again. We are fluid, organic, growing and expanding beings and I want to embrace that in every moment.
So, all that being said, I want to end with this: I love you, Christians. I deeply respect your desire for the truth, and your commitment to seeking it out, and I’m right there with you.
Be open, be love, be light.
So much love,
Joe
(and if you ever want to talk about life, spirituality, purpose, etc. I would love to talk — as long as you’re not trying to sneakily convert me back to your religion. I see right through you 😉)
