The history of my life as it pertains to religious faith runs as follows: I was brought in the Episcopal church by my mother, then became an atheist like my father, then a Christian again (Metaphysical Church of God in Christ Jesus), then Wiccan, then atheist again but continued to practice Wiccan ceremonies, then Unitarian Universalist, then Episcopalian, which brings us to the present.
That I ultimately landed in the Episcopal Church contains a certain poetry:
“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
…
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
This last re-embrace of Christianity came about in a completely non-rational way, that is, by means of a profound musical experience. They say music can change your life and “they” are correct. My education renders me perfectly capable of explaining away such experiences on the basis of neuro-chemistry. In fact I was in the process of doing so when I brought myself up. “Wait a minute,” I asked myself, “why not see where this leads? While I can certainly explain it on the basis of neuro-chemistry, why explain it away? I might miss out on something!”
When I knew I was becoming a Christian again, I also knew that I did certainly not want to become one of those jerk Christians. The Episcopal Church in the US, I realized, not only contains a familiar liturgy but would serve to prevent my becoming such a one. We welcome people from all over the continuum of gender identity and expression. The important thing is that I made a choice — a conscious, willful choice to allow a strange and powerful experience lead me onto a spiritual pathway.
What is less rational than choice itself? One is often confronted with people who insist that choice cannot exist, that free will must be an illusion, and who make perfectly rational, science-based arguments in support of that position. I would point out that the present state of science allows for emergent phenomena, and that this category can include consciousness and free will.
None of this church-going, this consummation of the Eucharist — unlike many Protestant sects, the Episcopal church has not drained away the mystery from what is after all a Mediterranean mystery religion — is rational, but I do it anyway. I didn’t come to it in a rational way, so I don’t feel obligated to justify it on the basis of reason. In the words of Dostoevsky,
“…reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses.”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, Part 1 Chapter 8
