Foolishness, suffering, curiosity and truth
On crashing through confusion, finding clarity and gaining cultural awareness
This week I want to share a more personal story. I’m always toiling in this newsletter between sharing personal anecdotes and communal truths, but I think there is a place for both. And of course, any personal story inevitably contains some communal truth(s)—we’re all made from the same stuff.
One of the feelings I love the most is when someone shares something—a story, a few words, a description, anything—that creates an articulation for an experience or feeling I’d been experiencing. I love gaining words, definitions and clarity from others; so maybe you’ll find something in here that you can relate to.
Today I’m writing about an early experience I had with culture—about how foolishness and curiosity in my youth led to both suffering and discovering truths about the world that serve me to this day.
In the beginning there was the word
In 1996, I was ten years old living in a small farm town, deep in Alabama. During that period, church was at the center of our lives. Going to church, believing in every word spoken at church, having ‘faith’ and belonging to a congregation was a crucial and core part of everyone’s identity. We were able to size each other up—where you lived, what tax bracket you were in, how educated you were—based on the church you went to. I believe this is still true in some parts of the deep south.
As a child, I loved information, and found a great deal of satisfaction reading through the towers of encyclopedias that my parents and grand-parents had acquired. I loved reading about ancient egypt, greek mythologies, native americans and renaissance artists. This exposed me to different ways of thinking, different cultures, theologies and philosophies that were in contrast to the one I was experiencing every day.
I quietly developed senses about the world that were on the periphery of the expectations of the micro-culture and micro-society I was in. The strong, literal adherence to a religion as a key and core part of one’s identity was baffling to me, but I went along with it expecting to be pleasantly surprised at some point when I received a little more information and experienced the realization myself. Plus I really enoyed the community aspects of church, so generally I didn’t mind going with my family.
But then there came a point where I was asked to submit a claim of “realization” in the form of a movement in church called “confirmation.”
Confirmation is when you are expected to take an oath in front of a congregation to state that you believe, whole-heartedly, in everything the bible says as truth; and you swear your life on this because the consequences of not believing meant going to hell, which was a fiery dungeon-prison where you would be subject to torture and bad things for all of eternity.
I faced a real crisis when called upon to partake in confirmation, because I hadn’t had that magical moment of realization yet. I geniunely thought at some point that there would be some information that would come to me that would help me to receive the knowledge and belief that those around me seemed to be completely bought into. But that magic information never came, and I started to develop real doubts about the way in which everyone around me was believing.
One day at church, after handbell practice, I quietly pulled the priest aside to ask, “When you say we must believe… what do you mean by believe? Believe as if these [stories in the bible] are all facts? Or…” before I could present an alternative, he quickly responded, “Yes, facts. We accept everything in the bible as it is. This is our faith.”
My heart sunk to depths I’d never experienced before. I felt lonely and terrified and full of doubt and confusion. I was faced with something like Pascal’s wager. My ten-year-old brain could only summon the following logic:
If I agree and go to confirmation, then I am lying, because I don’t believe in my heart that all these things are true; but…
if they happen to be true (but my action at confirmation was still a lie), even if I become a believer at some later point, I’ll still go to hell because of my initial lie; also
if I tell the truth, and don’t go to confirmation, and therefore indicate that I do not believe in god in this way, then it’s also possible I’ll go to hell (because, again, I could be wrong! Maybe I just haven’t received the information yet!)
The above logic should indicate to you how much we talked about hell and going-to-it in my community. Even when I became an adult, people would sometimes inform me, kindly and quietly by pulling me to the side, that I was going to go to hell. Like, people would just tell you that as if it were a sound and sincere fact if they found out that you didn’t believe the same way they did. True story. I’m sure it still happens.
As a ten-year-old, I wanted to believe that hell didn’t exist, but my doubts were multi-dimensional—I doubted every single thing and struggled to find any sensible grounding anywhere in the teachings from the church. I knew some of the parables contained wisdom (still believe that); but I really couldn’t make heads or tails of anything else—and I never quite understood how or why the adults seemed to believe that every word in the bible was fact rather than something to be interpreted.
It seemed like there was no beginning and no end. I was sure of nothing, not even myself. As this was also the point in my life wher I first developed crippling self-doubt.
As much as I wanted to believe that I had developed my thoughts fairly through reasonable injestion of information, the following thoughts started trickling in:
“Maybe it’s just you, you’re not wise enough to get it.”
“Maybe you’re too stupid to understand what everyone else is getting. You can’t see the truth.”
Nonetheless, I yielded to my encyclopedias, a dictionary and also asked my mother to purchase me a number of books about Christianity to try and understand (as best as my young brain could) how to answer the call to confirmation.
Then one day, there in my dictionary, I found a couple of words that I related to: “Agnostic” and “atheist.” But these were not words that I had ever heard in the vernacular of my community.
Somehow I leaned into the word “atheist” rather than “agnostic”, because I was naive and had no idea how powerful and damaging referring to myself as an “atheist” would be; eventually, far down the line, I capitulated and in some desperate acts of conformity leaned into “agnostic.”
But the first word, once spoken, led to suffering.
I committed the horrible sin of thinking and then finding a word outside of our accepted vocabulary in which to express myself. I also “voted with my feet” by refusing to continue going to church at a time when this was the only expectation of me outside of going to school. This led to years of public shaming (my name getting spoken aloud on prayer lists in multiple churches without my consent) and—following the shame and distress of these initial events—getting thrown into the wash with the mental health system, which meant also getting drowned in pharmaceuticals (that I did not need) in order to cure my distress and, seemingly, my inability to simply accept and conform to the things happening around me. This led to years of unspeakable suffering. In retrospect, it was a form of hell. So it goes.
Foolishness, truth and curiosity
My foolishness was my youth. My mistake was completely missing the point that conformity can just be an act at times, and doesn’t necessarily determine one’s fate.
Although, when conformity comes with the threat of an eternal residency within a fiery torture dungeon, I have a great deal of compassion for ten-year-old me for not simply and blindly opting to conform.
The truths that I learned from this series of events was that it is possible for a culture, a society, the seeming adults-in-the-room—a body of humans—to act irresponsibly and / or unintelligently and still consider itself just, righteous and correct. Flawed group mentalities lead to many atrocities. War is easy to spot, as are cults and gangs, but sometimes a culture has fangs that are pretty well hidden. It’s simply a truth.
Even relationships between two people can go bad—the micro-culture within a single relationship can be constraining, toxic, or negative. This can also happen in organizations and companies too.
Of course cultures—between two people, 2,000 people or 200,000 people can be filled with positivity as well. The thing about culture is it is extremely dynamic, it ebbs and flows an coalesces in surprising ways.
And the other truth I learned is that one can leave, evade or otherwise opt-out of bad cultures. It is within our power, and acting on it is worth doing because through action we can find more freedom, happiness or whatever it is we desire.
For a period of time, due (again) to my youth, I couldn’t physically leave the culture I was in, but I would ‘opt-out’ in different ways. I rode my bike a lot. I spent time in nature. I read books. And in one book I discovered the phrase, “This, too, shall pass,” and I wrote it on a piece of paper and posted it up in my locker and in my bedroom, knowing that one day it would all pass.
If it weren’t for my curiosity, I wouldn’t have stumbled upon any of this—I would have conformed without question. But no matter how much pain, suffering and sheer confusion I experienced through that period, I’m grateful now for the perspective and the strength I have on the other side of it.
The other truth I picked up was that no one group or culture on this planet has an angle on divine truth—on absolute truth. Frankly, I think quantum physicists have a much better perception of the greater forces of the universe than any religious group. Neurologists and buddhists seem to have a sensible understanding of the mind, and the higher consciousness that connects all of us (as do mycologists!). The ancient Greeks were definitely onto something—their wisdom was broad and surprisingly modern. The Native Americans were holistic thinkers who understood everything was connected. And yes, within some passages of the bible, there are truths about humanity and nature. But one of the beautiful aspects of exploration is that truth and wisdom is peppered throughout everything generated by humans—there isn’t a single group of people on the planet who has captured it all.
For me, the curiosity continues—I find joy in pursuing ideas, mental models, histories and ways of thinking because in it there are patterns and nuggets of truth. There’s no greater joy to me than breaking through and gaining a new thought or perspective. The suffering I experienced in my early years has yielded to a sense of adventure, curiosity and freedom I enjoy now.
Let me know if you can relate to this story in the comments below :)
If you’ve read this far, thank you. I appreciate you being here with me.
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What a vulnerable and open share about such a sensitive topic as religion. I did go through confirmation as a 15 year old protestant and had a catholic friend who did hers at 10. It is such a long time ago but I had a vague memory of the catholic ceremony being somewhat more stern. We on the other hand went to summer camp and had fun and there were never a question of going to hell if your did not believe in the 'right' way. Most of us did the confirmation because that´s just something you did, and you got presents from your parents and a party and yes if you ever wanted to get married in a church you had to be confirmated. So even if I belong to the Evangelical Church I do not consider myself a Christian.
In Finland we have a state religion and somehow I feel that is one of the reasons we have a more relaxed attitude to religion in school, in congregations etc.
Evidently there are the adventists and several odd so called free churches, and yes we have a christian party but somehow religion which is a subject at school is not as inflammable as it seems to be in the USA.
Not even the theological scholars at my University would say that everything in the Bible is facts. And the whole notion of whatever was written so many thousands of years ago, that that would all be facts, well it is very strange to me.
I really really appreciated what you opened up to in your article, beacuse it also explains what is going on in the US and how deep religious beliefs ran from hundreds of years back. The Calvinists, the Catholics, Adventists, Pentecostals... phew...
I remember in the 1970-80 we had young men (probably pentecostals?) coming to visit our school and how odd we all found them. But them being Americans they were also kind of exciting to us in post war Finland.