To be fair Steve Carell, who I believe is a Roman Catholic, just helped me make sense of a long journey of seeing my faith slipping away. Yes, Steve Carell from The Office. I am pretty sure I have loved everything he’s done but I am especially fond of his rom-com stuff and it was a movie I saw the summer of 2012 staring Carell that brought a sudden clarity to a long-time confusion I had been feeling about my faith and all things religion. I suppose it was Carell’s character, Dodge, in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World that spoke to me deeply. The movie is about the end of life on earth as an asteroid named Matilda is on a collision course that will hit in three weeks. The plot moves quickly to a road trip in search of lost love but ends with newfound love (Keira Knightley, who can’t be helped but loved), with both in each other’s arms, assuring each other as the world ends. As asteroids crash in the background, the screen brightens to white and then fades to back. That’s it. Life is over… no one is saved.
That evening, after a fun date night, we drove home, and I wept long and deep in the car, confusing my husband. I was only a couple of years away from an empty nest. Life as I had known it had changed many times and would continue to change. The church had disappointed me repeatedly throughout my life—specifics are meaningless I think at this point. There was something about how the movie ended that made me realize that is what happens. We live, we die and that’s it. No one is saved. I lost a lot that evening and it was painful, deeply painful and so I wept for a very long time. Oddly, it was like the last straw that broke me. Interestingly, my spiritual journey had been primarily experiential while my husband’s intellectual. What I find amazing is that today we find ourselves at the same place. We took very different paths and timelines from strong theists to agnostics to atheists.
I once argued with my dad, a fundamental Christian Calvinist, that since he and I believed I was truly saved in my youth, that I could not lose my salvation. I knew he believed in the perseverance of the saints and for a long time, I was hoping for a change in my thinking. My mom told me I had been beaten down by the hypocrisy of too many Christians and excused my refusal to attend church, but she too trusted in my eternal security. It was important to me not to disappoint my parents. I knew coming out as an atheist would grieve them. When visiting them, I would warn my kids not to take god’s name in vain, and to not watch anything unchristian like on TV. Once both of my parents had passed, I knew I was free to openly believe however I wanted without fear of familial consequence, yet their dying failed to give me any comfort.
There are Sundays I pass churches on the street and feel astonished that the parking lot is full. It informs me that my journey might be unique and certainly is not universal. After attending a yoga fest last week, I had several odd experiences. One, while walking back to the main house looking up to the sky, I started singing How Great Thou Art—an old church hymn I have not sung in years (decades). I realized many of the spiritual experiences at the festival, all very Hindu in nature, I think, were triggering my past religious experiences. It made me realize how very universal spiritualism can be. People need a deeper experience. Certainly, fading to black is not the way we want our stories to end. Ironically, I have found life is incredibly more meaningful without the trappings of an afterlife. If this life is all I have, then I want it to be as long and loving as possible.
