Atop a sad pile of post-drafts: an update

I need to tell you more things now. 

Mainly, it's because I'm in a very different state from where I was in the last post, and I want to correct the record. Incidentally, there are some mechanisms I want to try to map out about my interior life, and I find that takes place a lot better in written rather than spoken form.

Recently, three things have happened:

• my Dad died suddenly just before Thanksgiving,
• I lost my faith, and
• my immediate family and I are basically emotionally estranged. 

These are all related. In particular, the second is closely bound to the first. The third is like the icing on the bummer-cake -- not a lot to unpack there, but it makes me feel really sad and so it seems worth listing.

But anyway, starting with Dad seems like the right place. Losing him turns out to have changed my inner landscape in unexpected ways. 

Though gentle and joyful at heart, Dad, a mechanical engineer at the same oil refinery for 40 years, was in many ways the stereotypical old-school, old-church, repressed British Protestant. Long ago, as a tiny child, I once had a genuine emotional connection with him but then lost it forever one day -- a typical event in family life (cf. the demise of Goofball Island in Pixar's Inside Out) very much in keeping with his inability to acknowledge his own emotions. I'm pretty sure one major cause of my religiosity was that little girl's enormous store of pained, thwarted desire for connection with her religious Dad, since that would please him so much. (Also, good grades.) 

Although I was aware of this causality while Dad was alive, I don't think I would have predicted his death would cause me to lose my faith. But I think it's safe to say that's what happened. 

I since have begun to recognize certain key concepts like faith in Jesus Christ and Church membership as so many APIs cemented in my interface with my dad. So long as he was alive, if I budged those APIs -- if I were to bring them "to the surface" to examine them objectively -- I would see that their position in my mind was outdated, the position would move, and by the same action I would lose a connection to my dad. This I simply could not do -- I could never abandon my dad. Our mutual reliance on each other's support and spiritual-pseudo-affection was too foundational. I could hardly lift a finger to push one of those concepts up toward the light before a pang of terror that originated in a roughly two-years-old (and therefore stupidly strong) version of my emotions stopped the procedure. 

This strikes me as in keeping with the deeply relational origin of words -- words as communication -- an origin so drastically (and tragically, and infuriatingly) at odds with the nature of reality, the thing they purport to describe. When as a child I went about setting down the whole irreversible edifice of my knowledge of all things, I wasn't building a picture of the world that my dad fit into: I was building a picture of my dad. I learned about the world inasmuch as it helped me reconstruct the thing I most longed to see, the affectionate version of his face.

When he died, the experience was almost mystical. It may sound odd, but in my search for a proper "goodbye" the evening of his death, I considered myself to behold him again the way I did a few moments after I was born (I had been told we'd given each other a big long stare). And from that place, I said goodbye, with all the enormous joy and sorrow, and much longer period of loss and longing, accounted for. And I at last felt closure. The two-year-old gripping those words so tightly, so that she could catch a glimpse of her Dad, finally loosed her grip.

And so it seems to me I lost my faith and saw the stakes involved in the same stroke. 

What I actually mean by "I lost my faith" is difficult to encompass. In those first few weeks, I had thought my felt-connection to God had died with him. But I think now, that doesn't seem true; there still seems to be some sort of sense of God in my emotional landscape. 

Nonetheless, his death did cause an odd sense of relief that had very much to do with religion. The relief felt due to the end of the semi-subconscious mental process that was expending an extraordinary amount of energy stretching my identity across a version that could maximally interact with James, and one that could maximally interact with Dad. 

Of those two rivers of truth-intuition I spoke of earlier, it appears that when Dad died one's "lowest point" began to vanish,  eventually leaving one river much plainer to my heart and mind. So although I currently feel more interior peace as an agnostic, the experience of having seen those two rivers has left me in deep skepticism of the validity of any river at all. I don't feel myself to know more now that this happened; I may know even less.

But knowledge of these rivers does have a certain usefulness that I can work with. I can embrace the relational aspect of this river, and be true to its flow. After all, the presence of another human being in one's life is a sort of truth, if of a different kind, which can be respected for its own rules.

Although there remains in me a contradiction -- the emotional part of me still senses what I've called God, while the rational part acknowledges little to no evidence he really exists -- I know now for sure that "agnostic" is more true of me than "Catholic". I'm agnostic in my gut feeling because I'm with James. I'm with James because I assess his influence in my life to be deeply healing and positive. If it weren't for that, I would have likely called myself a Catholic if it meant I could have stayed in the same tribe as my mother and brother. But this is not possible -- My efforts to communicate failed in a definitive way after Dad's mediating powers no longer applied, and they've made plain they consider my current state to constitute a betrayal of God. I'm so emotionally kicked-out-of-the-nest I'm not to even mention my upcoming wedding. So I find my membership in the agnostic tribe to be an accomplished fact.

This surely comes off poorly, to admit that I'm liable to switch teams whenever it happens to suit me. But I can now clearly see the process of my self-labeling, whatever that may imply about me. 

It's freeing -- it would even have freed Carmelite-me years ago, realizing (in a moment in the library one summer evening I clearly remember) that for all my appearance of holiness, swathed in toque and veil, I was actually -- no, really actually for real -- nothing but a sinner. Even as far as my deepest convictions, I was never doing anything but looking out for myself. I even remember trying to think up a scheme for manifesting my sinfulness if I were dismissed: the leading idea was to spend all the rest of my days as a Wal-Mart cashier wearing a T-shirt that said "SINNER". Pretty brilliant, eh? 

But it seems the surfacing has happened in a much more authentic way, and I can't help but appreciate that. Can't really expect any kickback of virtue-signaling credit upon becoming an agnostic. It even nullifies that enormous pile of Carmel-credit that I was most definitely attached to. Elegant, really.

I have to add -- for whatever the above is worth -- things are still confusing.