0. Exit Interviews with God
It’s a strange feeling leaving a faith knowing full well you may very well return to it, but needing to leave anyway.
It’s different than the feeling of leaving your house in the morning. Scanning the dirty dishes and making a note to clean them up when you get back, the mental notes of the things you want to maintain about the space in which you live, intermingled with the the occasional burst of pride for the beauty you have managed to create.
It’s different still from many of the other departures in life: graduation. Leaving the house you grew up in. Breaking up with a lover. Because in each of those instances, you know that even if you return—to your school, your house, getting back together—they will be fundamentally different than when you left them. The back yard you grew up in has new mounds of dirt, new plants, new boxes, new biomes. It is not what it was before. The hallways you spent so much time in your youth are smaller now, and the students who fill them look at you quizzically.
The only analogs for leaving the faith that make sense to me for lay in story and myth. Because it feels like setting out on a journey, but one with no destination. I know of no great dragons in the West, no great treasures under mountains, no kingdoms to be restored, people in need, or quests to undertake. I don’t have a damn thing mapped out. I just have the last 10 years of my life, a feeling gradually coming into focus that I cannot stay where I am, and that whatever well of water I found under the bedrock of the Christian Faith I grew up with was not that of everlasting life. And that perhaps that well may exist, but not here, not now.
It’s funny to think of the great Christian writers who I looked up to, many of whom I still admire deeply, to hear their stories of leaving the faith and returning to it, and thinking that I could somehow be better than them in that regard. To think I could finally be the one to solve it, the one who had faith without walking away, the one who found resurrection without first having to die.
Instead, I offer this final prayer. To do something I thought I would never do, and take up the oldest of all human rights: to have it out with their creator. I’ll lay aside any complaints I have with those who worship him—those I can readily excuse. It’s the man upstairs I want to have this conversation with: the gripes, real and petty, that come between me and my faith, that force me to walk away from it now.
These are my exit interviews with God.