Why would someone who WANTS to believe.... not belive? I have always had religions and spirituality as special interests of mine. It has long confused for me what I "ought" to believe on account of my "salvation", which was based on the idea that Truth with a capital T is found in the literal interpretation of religion, and it's only a matter of me figuring out WHICH religion is the actual, true one. What I finally figured out is that there is SOME truth in all the religions, so if I choose to focus on those truths, I get tunnel vision and start to feel convinced that I ought to convert because "I have found the truth!" But after several of such experiences back and forth, taking into consideration the whole of each religion and realizing that none of them are totally true, I finally became OK with the idea and started to imagine what life would be like if indeed none of the religions were true.
1) So the first reason I've lost my faith (this time around) is that I've given myself permission not to force beliefs onto myself if reason and gut instinct don't let me.
Simultaneously I have been reading up on Taoism and that world view absolutely resonates with me 100% and there are no doubts at all in my mind regarding what the philosophy teaches. I can observe the world for myself and come up with the exact same conclusions as the Tao Te Ching. I don't need faith. I don't need to put my trust in a book, place of worship, nor prophet to arrive at the truth. I can get there directly myself.
2) So the second reason I've lost my faith (this time around) is that I've found an alternative world view that actually makes a lot of sense and with which I am very comfortable and have no lingering doubts about.
In the last couple of years of my spiritual journey, I have tried the usual suggestions of surrounding myself with people of faith and hoping that their faith would rub off on me. I took my family on a church hopping journey to find a church where I felt the people were reverent "enough" for my taste. I sought out spiritual direction and retreat leaders. I sought out Bible studies. None came to fruition. One priest never responded to my inquire about spiritual direction. I met with another twice, but he never followed up with me after I stopped coming without notice. I asked an older friend in the faith to serve as my spiritual mentor, but she discerned that it was not for her to take on such a role. I inquired about doing a Bible study with a new friend and her husband, but after what amounted to a couples date via videochat that must've been a vetting interview, she pushed me to attend her church instead of meeting with us 1:1 to study the Bible together. My husband and I attended for several months a small group of people from one of our previous churches to discuss matters of faith (not a Bible study per se). It ended, a new baby was born, and we stopped meeting. When one of them reached out to us after noticing we weren't at their church anymore, I responded with my honest reasons (which were faith-based), and I never heard from her again.
3) So another reason I have lost my faith (this time around) has been that my efforts to draw closer to God via surrounding myself with faith-filled people has shown me that people either don't really believe what they claim, or they don't think it's important enough to share with me. Maybe they saw my genuine questions and concerns as proof that I was beyond help and they didn't want to waste their evangelism on me. But it showed me that if these people actually represented "the truth", then my efforts would've been welcomed and met with some measure of success.
I also have come to realize that I have a bit of an obsessive personality. I was technically diagnosed with mild OCD, and I personally think (if at all) that it was specifically scrupulosity. As such, I have tried to keep my obsessive compulsions under control by talking myself through the urges to "do" more intense religious stuff.
4) This is another reason that I have lost my faith (this time around); perhaps my "faith" was never actually faith but rather an obsession all along? Or merely an autistic special interest, that could easily be replaced with some other interest that doesn't claim to have my eternal life in its hands.
Turns out that my "loss of faith" is NOT based on any anger I have towards God. I love God. God is awesome. I don't really understand God, which I think is the most authentic and honest commentary on God there is. I'm still trying to figure out what it means to believe in God without religion. There are no neat pre-packaged rules or dogmas that come in tow. It's just that - God is, as God is purported to have said in the Hebrew Bible. We can't know God the way we know another person, and that's OK. God can still be "personified" or talked about "as if" God were a mere person, because God is "supra-personal" - personality is included in God's being, but it is not sufficient to describe God.
I'm certainly not "faithless" due to a recent loss. My dad passed away nearly a year and a half ago. It was sudden and unexpected, but it was also bitter sweet on account of his having been mentally distraught with his quality of life for a long time, along other issues. So I'm grateful that my dad is "in a better place" now.
Speaking of gratitude, I hear that's another reason people lose their faith - they forget to have a gratitude practice. Well, that's not me, either. Every evening during family prayers, we go around thanking God for something we're grateful for. Sometimes we pick a theme. And every morning, I read the prayers I have written both expressing my thanks and interceding for my closest loved ones (another thing often said to be a reason for losing faith - being too focused on self and not enough on others).
So I believe in God. I love God. I'm grateful to God. The only think left that I can think of is forgetting God's prior work in my life. If I take the time to reflect, I remember how God has walked hand-in-hand with me my entire life. I have often said that I lead a charmed life. That's not to say that it's been a life without challenges, or even at times suffering.
God saved me and my mom from carbon monoxide poisoning.
God sent my dad abroad and convinced my mom to join him and bring me.
God safely landed our plane when we were experiencing an emergency.
God protected my father when he'd fall asleep behind the wheel coming home from working overtime.
God did allow my dad's motorcycle accident to result in permanent, irreversible brain damage... but God did save his life. God did return his mobility when doctors thought he'd never walk again. God did give us 23 more years with him after his accident, which opened up countless other life lessons.
God helped me find my husband early in life (at age 20).
God kept me safe in the Army. God kept my husband safe in the Army.
God answered our prayer for children....eventually. Again, the long wait and heartache served to teach priceless life lessons that we can only understand with the gift of hindsight. But the bottom line was: God did bless us with two wonderful children!
God kept my daughter safe in spite of her having an undiagnosed velamentous umbilical cord insertion, and her cord having been wrapped twice around her, bolero style.
God even soothed my anxiety by providing me with an official autism diagnosis that has helped me to better undersand (and therefore) accept myself.
God has been active in my life, as you can see. God is not in question. So what do I mean when I say I feel like I've lost my faith?
I've associated my faith with an organized religion, and it's been difficult to let go of the neat albeit limiting belief system that provided all the answers and prevented me from ever having to do much discernment. It fed into my codependent need for external validation. I didn't know a thing was true or right until I knew others thought so. God has peeled that crutch away from me, forcing me to stand on my own two feet of faith, if you will.
So maybe this lack of faith is actually just another thing to add to my list of things I'm grateful to God for?! Maybe instead of saying "I lack faith", I start saying that I "lack religion". That's not quite right, though, because I'm still a religious person, in that I still attend church and include other Catholic/Orthodox/Christian-generic practices in my spirituality. But I don't have faith in my religion. I don't practice my religion because I believe it's literally true. I practice because it's such an ingrained part of my life. It brings me comfort. That's probably the autism talking. I like knowing just what to expect from a liturgical form of worship and pre-written prayers.
But I actually experience God outside of the context of religion. I experience God in nature, in silence, in solitude. I experience God late at night, with a spiritual book and journal in hand. Or on a retreat where I look around and notice the symbolism of everyday objects and occurrences. Or when I catch myself living in the moment, mindful only of the joy found in the here and now.
So why do I say that I "lack" faith, when clearly it's all around me? It's only a matter of picking it up on a regular basis. I have to make the time to sit still and meditate. I have to make time to go away on retreat. I have to make time to read and journal my thoughts. I have to make time to be in nature in an unhurried way. I have to make time to surround myself with beautiful, uplifting music or poetry. I get a little hint of it at our Byzentine Catholic church. The interior is fantastically beautiful. It's warm and pleasant and I love bathing my sight with the red/brown/gold tones that surround me during liturgy. I love that we sing, even if the singing is superior at the Orthodox church where we go for homeschooling co-op. When I go there, I easily slip into the role of Orthodox Chrisitan woman, even though I'm not. I wear a headscarf like many of the women there. I wholeheartedly perform the metanoias to venerate icons or express physically what the spoken/sung words of our corporal prayer say. Sometimes I get distracted with the disappointing thought: "I wish I believed what they believe". But why?
What difference does it make if we all believe the same things? Shouldn't what matters be that we all value the same things? The same virtues?
Yet even here, I know we diverge at times. I lean conservative, for sure. Which is why I've never been able to feel comfortable in a Unitarian Universalist church or with unprogrammed Quakers, both of whom tend to be quite politically active.... on the left. Yet I can't say that I agree 100% with my conservative Christian friends who disagree about marriage between same-sex couples, or divorce, or birth control. Most recently, transgender issues have arrived on my horizon (the fact that my children were finally at an age where they didn't require as much of my attention as before allowed me to really tune in during the pandemic to the trans grievences and all the issues that came with it). I recoiled because the idea of stepping outside of a gender binary was so completely foreign and thus uncomfortable for me that I sought solace in a community where not only we agreed there were women and men, but we also knew which was which.
But now that I've had three years to process the idea, I'm slowly coming around to the idea and drawing comparisons between identifying with the opposite sex, or with both, or with neither, and my own experience identifying with the "Ms" social title in spite of being a married woman (and thus a "Mrs.") Or with my neither feeling fully Polish nor fully American. Or even - full circle - belonging to any of the religions that I've so desparately tried to fit in with.
Maybe the point is that life isn't as black and white as I thought, and this is what I'm experiencing. This is what I need to mourn - that certainty that used to come from a religious worldview.
