New Jersey
From my time spent in New Jersey, I know that glorious
east coast nook for three things in particular: aggressiveness, having to turn
right to turn left, and diners. I
would add the jersey shore to the list, but unfortunately, that has a different
meaning altogether these days.
My experience with diners- more specifically, 24 hour
diners- in New Jersey had two purposes. One was for a midnight snack (choose
diners or Dunkin’ Donuts, your choice of inevitable diabetes). The other was
that it was the ideal hub for late night conversations with friends over some
cheap greasy food.
Dave the
Drummer
I had this really good friend, Dave, who I played music
with while I was at a small community college during my east coast tenure. He
was a brilliant drummer (and still is, I believe) and every so often we would
hang out at diners, discussing everything from jazz to family to girls to more
jazz and so on and so on, way into the late night. We’d also discuss religion
and more specifically, the validity of it. Now Dave wasn’t religious and I was
about as religious as it got, so of course, this made for some interesting
conversation. And thus, this was the important function of New Jersey diners
(that is, a place to have interesting conversations). But this blog isn’t about
New Jersey diners.
Ok, where was I? Off topic. Taking my ritalin. Moving on…
Now I had the underlying pressure of my religious faith
to bring Dave into believing in the same God that I believed. This was called,
as many of you know, “evangelism.” I could not just have “interesting
conversations” without a larger purpose of getting Dave saved. I wasn’t stupid
enough to get into intellectual debates about theology (remember, I was going
to a community college. Oh, chill out my community college friends… I’m just
kidding!). So I had to figure out another way. And I did.
I decided that I would try to go to Dave’s level and
completely abandon all of my beliefs in order to understand where Dave was
coming from (as though, Dave had no beliefs and better yet, on a lower level)
and inevitably, figure out a way for him to get to the place where I was (my
spiritual utopia). This was a scary move because abandoning my beliefs was
essentially playing the role of an atheist and that of course meant that I was
going to be spending time with Hitler and Oprah after I die. But I knew I was
supposed to sacrifice my ultimate knowledge of God for this greater purpose of
salvation.
And… Scene!
And so it goes, we began having diner discussions as me-
Rob the atheist thespian- and Dave, the soon to be converted drummer. But as I
began to shed my religious beliefs, a funny thing started happening… I felt
invigorated on the inside. Of course, Dave couldn’t know this was happening
because it would ruin everything. But asking questions like, “Is there really a
God?” was becoming less of a line in my Dave conversion play and actually a
very real question to me. I hadn’t actually asked that question as an adult
before. Is there really a God? And
then the questions just began to roll out more and more, as though I was
playing a John Coltrane melody in a complex jazz standard…
If there is a God,
is this God a loving God?
And if this is a
loving God, why does the world seem horrible?
And what about life
after death?
Do people really go
to hell? Is there a hell?
And is Oprah really
the devil?
Ok, I admit I probably didn’t ask that last one. But I
found myself caught in this unrecognized euphoria that came in asking the
questions I always had to have answers to. It was like that feeling that you
get when you take off a backpack with 4 thick textbooks crammed inside it after
a two-mile walk from the bus stop to the house. It was an exhausted freedom to let
go for even just one evening.
Well, so it goes… I put that backpack back on about as quickly
as I took it off because I knew that I couldn’t abandon my religion (oh, I
called it Christianity at the time, by the way). I functioned in a Christian
environment and in this environment; there was no room to ask questions without
getting quick answers. The greatest sin I knew of was walking away from God and
the greatest fear I had was being eternally tormented. Those conversion driven
conversations with Dave didn’t last long and soon enough, I had moved to a
different state and tried to convert others.
Freedom in the
Unbelief
It was only until the past two years as I stepped away
from the evangelical church that I had room to explore the deepest questions
that have ruminated in me since even before my diner days. I married an amazing
woman who encourages me to let questions-rather than answers- move my compass
needle. I climb less up the religious insurance and answer ladder and fall more
into the bottomless ocean of mysticism (mystery of spirituality). And although
it is terrifying to turn the answers into questions, there’s a deeper
experience of peace that one cannot feel until doing so.
I do not believe that you have to abandon the evangelical
church to go to the space of the mystic. I just believe that God is not
contained in our little controlled ideas and answers that we have made of her.
And not only that, I believe God is waiting for us on the other side of those
prison walls we have built called religion; waiting to embrace us in the
shedding off of religious garments. Unlike before, I no longer feel like I am
with God but rather of God. It is now
that I see God in those who do not profess to believe in God and I see God in
those who do profess to believe in God. As a rabbi once said, when we believe
that we are the divine, we no longer play the divine (religion).
My greatest understanding is knowing that I don’t actually
know much at this point in my life. But I have never felt a deeper sense of
peace in that belief and I believe that peace is waiting there for all of us. Even
Oprah.
