I never found my “purpose” in life. I’m sure I’m not alone in that.
My earliest memory is sitting in a pew in church in the middle of nowhere Alabama listening to a sermon about how people go to Hell. I didn’t want to go to Hell. It sounded bad to go to Hell, and fairly permanent. That night I ended up in a fit of tears worried that I would soon die and be thrown into a fire forever and be all alone. My parents noticed and dutifully walked me through “The Roman Road” of salvation. I asked Jesus into my heart and was soon Baptized. I’ve been weird ever since.
It’s not my parents fault. I was predisposed to being socially in-congruent by birth and genetics, which, I guess, is my parent’s fault, in a way. At any rate I was an abnormal child and would’ve been no matter who was parenting me. I doubt seriously that that pastor (his name was Brother Ray, good man) was even going overly heavy handed on the fire and brimstone stuff. If I had a recording of that sermon I wouldn’t be surprised to play it back and find it extremely tame. I was just that sort of kid. A hypochondriac. Worried about everything. Monsters in the dark. Car crashes. The bug-man used to come and spray bug spray around the house and I was afraid I might touch some residue of it somewhere and hand my mom a sandwich or something and she would die. My mother took me to therapy a couple of times for anxiety and OCD, but it’s hard to do anything psychological with a child, they change so rapidly. In any case one might see my fear of Hell as simply another manifestation of the same anxiety driving my fear of bug poison or dying in a car crash. Maybe it was. From the time I was 5 until the age of 15 I was baptized 6 times. This isn’t kosher for any branch of Christianity. People obliged me because I was insane. I never felt that I did “faith” right, or “well enough” for it to count.
Time passed. At some point in my teenage years the switch in my head flipped to the opposite pole and I became somewhat fearless. I was still extremely socially awkward but I also would go sky diving and get in fist fights with the biggest guys at school and go for long outings into the woods alone. I think I had become saturated with fear to the point I could almost no longer feel it. I no longer worried at all about getting sick, or accidental poisoning, or dying in a car crash. I still had a vague wariness of monsters in the dark though. And I still thought a lot about God.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that I’ve thought about Jesus for at least a half hour every day of my life. It’s something of a problem and not something, I think, that most people do. One can never know the interior life of others, but I get the sense that, in general, most people just go along, thinking about the spreadsheet that needs updating at work and what they’re going to have for dinner. There’s not a lot of “depth” to their thoughts. This isn’t bad, it’s the way you’re supposed to live, I’m the one with the problem here, nonetheless, I could never understand how people were not haunted by God, all the time, forever.
There was so much that didn’t make sense. The whole of the holy book was something of an enigma, full of contradictions and impossibilities. People would pray for things and they wouldn’t receive them, and yet they still kept on praying. Good people would get sick and die. Horrible people would get wealth and fame. I remember being most upset and confused about animals, why they should die. The animals seemed innocent and yet they mostly died with teeth inside their necks. All this happened, and yet people claimed that God was Love. It would have been fine to ignore it all except I couldn’t. It felt true. It really felt like this Jesus character mattered and mattered quite a lot. But if you asked hard questions about God to the adults it was obvious nobody had any answers, so, I suppose I was always destined to try and find my own.
For the better part of 30 years now I’ve been “searching” and I’m not sure I’m any better off than when I started. Well, that’s not true. I am better off. I’m more at peace, more capable of love, more courageous, I think, than I would’ve been otherwise. I’ve built, over the years, an esoteric and highly individualized form of faith that doesn’t fit into any category well but which nonetheless helps me. The problem is I don’t know what good it is to anybody else.
What I have is not really something you can give away. It’s difficult to share. One’s place in the world is determined largely by what you can give to others, either for free out of friendship or for payment in commerce. A builder has skills he can give away, making a house or a new bathroom for someone. A musician can give people the joy of hearing a new song. A financial advisor can give people stock tips. But what do I have to share?
In another time perhaps I would’ve been a priest or a missionary. Those are the sorts of professions where one can “give away” God. But I could never in good conscience be such today. There are too many questions. The piles of dogma are too high to see over. Were I a Catholic priest I would rightly be expected to agree with all the Catholic dogma. Were I a Baptist preacher I would be rightly expected to teach Sola Fide from the pulpit. I can’t do those things. I can’t sign on, whole cloth, to any system of belief. How can you? None of them work everywhere. There comes a point where everyone’s dogma falls down. Not that it would matter anyway. People don’t care about God anymore, if they ever did.
So I find myself in the strange position of having a life’s work nobody needs. That’s okay I guess, but sometimes I do wish I could’ve just gotten into something useful instead.
Full recognition here....
This really spoke to me. Your words often do. When I heard a siren in kindergarten, I was sure my mom was burning up in our house. Guess I'm just a weirdo too. Keep being you please. And don't try too hard.