After three years in seminary, three years in ministry and three months unemployed, tomorrow I am starting my first day of a regular 9-5 job. I hope I can remember how.

I am so nervous it is not funny.

The job is full-time, but only a three month contract. I want to work for these guys again, though, so I want to make a good impression.

I’d better get to sleep.

I was an ordained minister for almost three years when I asked to leave because I could no longer see any reason to believe in God. I have now moved out of the house I was living in (provided by the parish I worked for) and into an apartment. It’s made for a very painful period of time.

I boxed the birthday card the Sunday school had made for me, telling me, “Yu are a good Minster”. I packed away the photos of the confirmation class I taught, and the farewell gifts presented to me by the congregations I ministered to. I also found, and carefully packed, gifts I had been given at my ordination: from my family, from the congregation of the church I interned at, and even a a few from some of the dear women who had taught me Sunday school decades previously. They were all so proud and so happy for me at my ordination. I felt like such a disappointment as I put their gifts in boxes to go with me on my move. I couldn’t throw these things out, though. Not yet. It would hurt too much. It doesn’t matter that I have no practical use for greeting cards, angel statuettes, or portable communion kits. I look at these things and think about the people who gave these to me.

Then there are the things I’ve bought myself, with God in mind. Shelves full of books I bought, knowing that I would be in rural parishes and would have access to no theological library other than one I brought with me. Shelf after shelf of books on preaching, pastoral care, ethics, liturgy and the Bible. I had to decide what I wanted to do with these now. Do I try to sell these to other clergy, or keep them, in case I find some reason to believe once again. I can’t think of any reason to believe in God, but years ago, I couldn’t imagine not believing. How can I say now, definitively, that I know whether or not God is out there? It appears I’ve been wrong on this subject before.

I end up deciding to keep the books, and the Christian videos too. The videos are of Rob Bell and Veggie Tales, for the most part. My wife is still Christian and enjoys watching these.

CD’s of Christian music go into boxes, and I find myself wondering if I even know what sort of music I like. I bought Christian CD’s because I knew I could trust the lyrics, more than any actual appreciation for the music. It’s not that I don’t like the music, or didn’t, but what do I listen to now?

One of the most personally disturbing moments for me is packing away my clergy vestments: those black shirts with the white, plastic collar tabs; the long, white gown (albs) and colourful scarves (stoles). My mother made me those stoles, and one of those albs was a gift from the church I interned at. And now the whole lot is packed in the same box as my tie-dyed lab coat and purple zoot suit. How long will it take before these vestments which told people who I was and what I stood for become simply costume pieces like the clothing they are being boxed in?

I respectfully burned the holy oils, returned the dried palm branches to the church, and poured the holy water into the garden, but there is so much I have left. Books, CDs, DVDs, shirts, mementos… I am finally moved into my apartment, and have been for a week, but there are boxes I do not want to open again. At the same time, I do not want to throw them out. They are part of who I was, and helped make me who I am. They are gifts from loved ones, or investments into a future I no longer expect to have, but wish I did.

Over the last several months, I have seen many metaphors for deconversion on different websites. Lately, the metaphor that resonates most strongly with me is divorce. My friends and family still claim to see God, continue relationships with God, invite God to gatherings and grow nervous about offending me by mentioning God in my presence in case I am angered by our recent separation.

I am not angered that God has left me, or abandoned me or betrayed me. I don’t feel that is the case. After all, God has a perfectly understandable reason for not being a part of my life. God does not exist. I just can’t bring myself to take that personally. So, I am not angry, but I am sometimes very depressed.

The divorce metaphor is underscored for me in that it seems I have been allowed to keep everything but the house, and almost everything I own reminds me of God and the relationship I thought we had.

This is what I’ve been up to, and part of why you haven’t been hearing from me recently. And it leaves me with a question to those of you who have travelled similar paths as I am now.

When you deconverted, what did you do with all of your “stuff”?

Well, I did not intend to drop off the face of the earth for a month, but it seems I did. I am now moved out of the rectory and into an apartment back in the city my wife and I grew up in. I have a full-time, three month contract with the public library, starting next week. My friends and family have not disowned me and it has been good to spend some time with them, even the awkward bits where we dance around the subject of theism. Packing up, tying up a bunch of loose ends, and moving hurt. I’ve been in a lot of emotional pain and unable to come and speak coherently about it here. I’ve also been offline for about two-weeks as I had to leave the rectory a week before I could move into an apartment. Apartment-hunting, job-hunting, packing, moving and unpacking also take up large amounts of time, and I’ve had to make sure I dedicate time to my wife who has been such a strong support through all of this.

So, there are my excuses, offered to anyone who might still drop by occasionally to see if I’ve updated. Things are picking up for me, and in many ways I feel I am moving on into whatever my next chapter is. Thank goodness.

We’ll see if this results in my spending more time here, or less.

When I was in grade one or two, kids made fun of my laugh. I was also informed by several adults that “big boys don’t cry”. So I did my best to stop laughing or crying. By about grade eight, I decided that I needed to do something about this. I was tired of bottling myself up out of fear of ridicule and rejection. I had few friends. I was small, scrawny, and stubbornly liked what I wanted to like. I had no desire to be cool or popular, yet I was still letting others control how I would or would not express myself. It was time for a change. When I started high school, I decided to also start expressing emotions.

Now, you can’t control what emotions you feel, but in grades six, seven and eight, I took an acting class after school. I learned how to portray emotions, and that portraying emotions can cause you to begin to feel them. I decided to start with laughter. Happiness is a desirable emotion, and laughter is a sign of happiness. It wasn’t easy. Most people don’t laugh, so I couldn’t copy someone else. I tried to force laughter out in appropriate situations, but most of the time I made little noise while my shoulders shook like I was trying to fly. Over the next few years, though, I worked on it and now have a loud, boisterous laugh that people recognize me for.

There have been some problems with this. I remember attending a local play, and the woman beside me glared at me and asked, “Are you going to laugh like that through the whole play?” I swapped seats with a friend during intermission, but still could not shake my self-consciousness enough to laugh again during the show. But I wasn’t stopped for good, and I had positive experiences as well. Another show I attended, the director came out and found me during the intermission. He said, “Everyone is so glad you’re here. You should hear them backstage. They know when Quester’s here, someone will actually laugh at all the jokes.”

Having performed in community theatre, I know how important that can be.

Just last year, after a movie, a young woman approached me and said, “Are you Quester? I’m your cousin. I heard you were living in town, now. Your laugh sounds just like Grandpa Bill’s.”

Her grandfather and mine were brothers. I had never met “Grandpa Bill”, but found this encounter amusing.

Crying was harder, but I worked at it. I cry, now, during certain movies or while reading certain books. I cried at the end of The Dance of Time and Echoes of Honour is often good at jerking some tears out of me. Sometimes, though, I need to remind myself that I am allowed to do this.

Sometimes, I find myself crying at sad things in my own life, or that of others. This is harder for me, though, and rarer, too. I sometimes try to force the tears through breathing techniques I have learned in acting classes, with the thought that expressing emotions is healthy.

Anger can be the hardest one, as it seems to be least accepted by people. Try to express a little anger, and people get afraid and offended. Most of the time, I find that when I express anger, what I feel is fear. I do get actually angry, sometimes, but I don’t always know what to do about it. I often find myself simply trying to work it off through physical exercise.

Mostly, I tend to be rather phlegmatic. I worked at expressing emotions for years, trying to engage in human behaviour and express how I feel. Most of the time, though, I don’t know how I feel. I don’t know how to express it. Some people say I come across as passionate, but I wonder if that has more to do with twenty-five years training and experience in public speaking. People aren’t accustomed to others speaking clearly about anything, so when I do, it sounds like I’m taking special care to get my thoughts across. I don’t know.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot with all the accusations and declarations about and from “angry atheists”. A lot of people have a lot to be angry about. Maybe I, too, will become angry at theism or theists for a period of time. Maybe I would be now, if I was better with the whole anger thing. But as things currently stand, unless I see something that will directly hurt someone I care about, someone demonstrates to me that I have hurt someone I care about, or someone tries to put me in a position where I will hurt someone I care about, the main emotion I tend to feel is mild amusement.

Is this good, bad, otherwise? I don’t know, and (amusingly enough) I don’t really know how I feel about it. It is who I am, right now, though. If nothing else, that’s somewhere to start.

So, to what extent am I sexist? It is hard for me to say for certain. I expect that I have blind spots in this area keeping me from knowing for certain. Yes, I have links to Feminist groups in my blogroll, but that doesn’t mean I’m feminist, so much as that I enjoy reading interesting articles by intelligent people.

I have often adopted the awkward grammatical structures of how God reveals God’s self and God’s purpose or how one might reveal what they think by how they act, in the attempt to avoid gendered pronouns. But when I want to make sure I am clearly getting my point across, or just get sick and tired of the grammatical circumlocutions, God becomes He, and our random example of a hypothetical person becomes a man. I’ve preached sermons on God’s lack of a gender, and on the male and female images of God in the Bible (these sermons raised more controversy than any other), but I’ve refused to change the words to the Lord’s prayer to gender-neutral.

I told my wife that I’d like if she took my name when we got married, but that it was her choice. I had no intention, however, to change my own. I’m not saying she couldn’t have persuaded me, but that I would have had to be persuaded. She has hyphenated her last name.

I knew I had these issues. I don’t apologize.

When I read articles like the one on Feministing about a NYT write-up on summer dresses, though, I think about attitudes I have and actions I perform that perhaps I should apologize for. Maybe. I’m not positive. Put simply, I find women physically attractive, and I can’t figure out where the line is between looking at attractive women, and objectifying them. I like sitting in the park or at the beach and watching attractive women walk by. I don’t make a big deal of it. I don’t yell, whistle or drool. I don’t follow people for the purpose of staring at them. I may have elevator eyes, but I will fight the temptation to do so while in conversation with the woman in question. I will not, however, always win that fight.

Now for the turned-tables anecdote: one Hallowe’en, my wife and I dressed in a “couple’s costume”. She was Little Red Riding Hood, and I was the Wolfman. She got a friend of hers to make her costume and absolutely loved it. I went for a more minimalist costume. I have head-to-toe shag carpeting and don’t have to exert much effort to look like a werewolf. As part of the costume, I wore a button-up shirt unbuttoned more than half-way. A few of my female friends stared at my thus-exposed chest, which I found mildly amusing. I resisted the temptation to say, “Yes, that is real hair, not imported.”

We wore the same outfits at DragonCon where there were crowds larger than I’ve ever seen, and I saw many people, mostly female, staring at my chest. Some were sitting or standing nearby. Some were passing by. And the thought that struck me was, “That is completely unsubtle. I never realized how utterly unsubtle that is. It’s bleeding obvious these women are staring at my chest.” Now, this didn’t upset me for my own sake. I considered myself to be in a position of power. No one was in a position to force any attention or action upon me. But I did begin to think of how a woman might feel in a similar situation. Frankly, I don’t know if my empathy is up to it. I might need actual telepathy to guess correctly, here. I also don’t know if I’m going to change my actions. But, it’s got me thinking.

And, no, I don’t expect a gold star for that.

While I was reading this article over on Skepchick and the ones that it linked to, and the ones linked to in the comments, and the ones that they linked to, I had a lot more thoughts than I shared in my last post. I chose not to write it all out as one ginormous article- for your sakes and mine- and wasn’t sure if I was going to add my other thoughts.

But it looks like I will.

As I was reading about racism, sexism and privilege, I reflected on some of the privilege I have, but hadn’t realized was privilege, as well as on my own sexism (a later article, perhaps), and some of the ways in which I am a racist.

It’s not something I like about me, but I am a racist. Sure, I was able to avoid the obvious “all these do this” sort of bigotry, or feel a great dislike to members of any particular race. Instead, I have simply been oblivious and ignorant that anyone is different than I.

When I was in seminary, a classmate commented on how she’d heard one of the pastors back in my hometown was black. This surprised me, mildly, and I had to think about it. It actually took me a minute to remember that one of the pastor’s who I had worked with on different youth events and had car pooled with me to a distant event, was black. Worse, it wasn’t his skin colour that finally reminded me of it; it was remembering stories he’d told me of growing up in “nigger alley” (his words, not mine).

A minute later, I said, “Wait, isn’t Esteban* black, too? He isn’t white, anyway. Blast, I’m not sure. But I think he said he’s from the same country as Julia* and, wait, right, she’s black, too. I think. Isn’t she?”

I couldn’t remember. You see, I’m the guy who, when asked to describe a friend, will likely be wrong. I’ll get the height, body shape, hair colour, hair length, and fashion tastes completely wrong, and if their skin isn’t pale white, I’d have no clue as to race. Heck, Julia actually has dark enough skin to be considered black, not dark brown, but it hadn’t clicked into my memory with any degree of certainty.

I’d be a horrible witness to a crime. And I used to be proud of that. I saw people as people, and treated them as people.

But I didn’t. Not really. I treated them as me. I treated everyone as if they shared my cultural background, my tastes, my modes of expression, my standards of behaviour and expectations of what is and is not courteous, my body language and sense of personal space, my taboos, traditions and all the rest. It’s like being proud that, no matter what your race, culture or religion, I (as your employer) will give you Christmas and Easter as holidays to spend with your family. I’m sure that people with high holy days that occur during different parts of the year are just ecstatic about that.

And, I have no real idea on how to fix this. How do I ask people, “Are you a different race than I?” or “Do you celebrate different holidays?” without becoming actively, instead of passively racist?

What the bleeping bleep do I do now?

*not their real names.

I was looking at the Skepchick blog, particularly at this post about feminism, racism and skepticism. I followed some of the links in that post (and the comments to that post) to other sites, where I found other links to other sites. Basically, I ended up spending a few hours reading about feminism, racism, and privilege. As I read, I recognized some parts of myself that I don’t particularly like. I also faced the question of whether I am actually going to change.

When I created this blog, I hesitated in calling it One Man’s Journey. I like the anonymity of the Internet. I don’t often refer to my own gender, race or age. I don’t say what country I’m from. Over at the de-con blog, I’ve stated that I’m not from the United States of America, but that doesn’t really narrow things down. Sure, there are clues in my post that let you build an image of me, but with the facelessness of the Internet, people are forced to judge people by what they say, rather than any other criteria. You may or may not have noticed that I only refer to my time and training as a pastor when speaking of my own struggles. I don’t bring them up in the midst of a debate to give greater weight to my words as if my formal education means I’m more likely to be correct than someone who’s simply read a lot of books or otherwise taught themselves with information available on the Internet, in libraries and in conversation with other people. I try to respond to people on the basis of what they say. I try to judge arguments on the basis of the argument, not on who presented it.

I’d never thought about how, even in that, I come from a position of privilege.

Let me say it now: I’m white, male, somewhere between young and middle-aged, and overweight. I own a car and a computer, have a Master’s degree, and am not particularly worried about being currently unemployed and having to move (somewhere) this month. I don’t tend to think of myself as privileged because I don’t ask for things I’m not willing to work for. I also don’t value much of what I am and have. But, on the Internet, I judge people by how they write, as well as by what they write. And I have done so without recognizing my own advantages on this playing field.

I am fed, well-rested and warm. I live in a neighbourhood where I do not need to fear my neighbours. I was born in a country where almost everyone knows English. My parents spoke English at home, as did their parents. My parents each had a job, and an income as I was growing up, and still had enough time and energy to read to me regularly. My parents only had a small number of children and could spend time with each of us, teaching me how to read before I started school. My parents could afford to buy me books for Christmas, Easter and my birthday. Some of these books were filled with riddles and logic puzzles, giving me a foundation in certain sorts of thinking. I was able to see a speech therapist at the public elementary school I went to, who helped me with my lisp so that I often forget I ever had one. I had access to libraries and a mother who worked out of the home who made certain I did my homework, including writing speeches that led me to winning awards in grades four, five and six. My parents could drive me to Air Cadets, where I took communication classes. My parents could afford drama classes for me and drove me to them, then to my roles in Community theatre. I was able to get many part-time jobs which allowed me to pay for my tuition at University, where I majored in English and took many Education and Drama classes. I lived in a city with a University, which allowed me to save on rent and food costs as my parents continued to feed and house me. I wrote many essays while at university, polishing my communication skills. I took a class in Logic and a few in Philosophy. I got to speak with others who had similar backgrounds and were accustomed to communicating similarly to the style I used.

I am loud, well-spoken and articulate. Quieter people often ask me to express their ideas for them. I have often done so, without realizing that most of these quieter souls were female. Unless they ask me not to, I usually credit the source, but it is still my voice that is heard. If I disagreed with what I spoke aloud for them, after all, I would have quietly discussed it with them, so that I would not embarrass them by arguing about the points loudly and in public. I had intended this to be courteous, but it has had the effect of increasing the odds of only ideas I agree with (or am brought to agree with) get heard.

When in small groups, I often look around to see who is trying to say something, but is having a hard time being heard, and I step in to give them a chance to speak. But this relies on my consciously looking and recognizing cues from shared body language. If the person’s body language cues differ significantly from my own, or I get too involved in the conversation to look, myself and my fellow loud people can take over a conversation. Even when I do look, and do recognize, I maintain control of the conversation by inviting and allowing the quieter ones to speak.

I’ve been blind to my position of privilege in this arena, and now that I see a little more clearly, I have no idea what I should do about it. This bothers me, but not as much as it probably should.

Wikipedia defines a coincidence as “the noteworthy alignment of two or more events or circumstances without obvious causal connection”. Sometimes, when faced with a coincidence, we may see a causal connection that is not actually there. Yesterday, I spent four hours cleaning my car- inside and out. Just as I was finishing and putting the floormats back inside the car, it began to rain. I could get the impression that washing my car caused it to rain (especially if it happened often, or I never listened to weather reports). I could further claim that scheduling picnics also causes it to rain, being in a hurry causes the photocopier to jam, and stepping into the shower causes the phone to ring. Instead, I see these things as events that coincide in time but are unrelated by any causal connection (one did not cause the other, nor were both caused by the same thing).

There is a tendency, in some Christian circles to look at coincidences and call them God-incidences, claiming that God is the cause of the coinciding events. When I was younger, I used to say that, “Sometimes, a coincidence is a miracle with the volume turned down.” Whenever I found myself doubting that God was calling me to ordained ministry, I’d flip open my bible and a verse would catch my eye that would reassure me (though it sometimes took more than one attempt), or someone would ask me for my help or advice and I’d feel more confident that I could be a pastor, or I’d hear some amazing story and be reassured that God could do extraordinary things through ordinary people who committed themselves to Him.

For the past year or so, I’ve been detecting a different sort of pattern. When I open my Bible, my eye is caught by contradictions, unkept promises, verses about God’s cruelty and things like that. I look in the world around me, and I keep being faced with instances of intrinsically meaningless suffering and destruction. After visiting the de-conversion blog for a while, I got the chance to offer support and advice to atheists, agnostics and theists who seemed to really need a pastor. And just last week, I got a call from a friend of mine. One of the few friends who met me before I felt called to be a pastor, and even she had only met me one year earlier. I have been worrying about moving back to my old home town and meeting my old friends who knew me as a devout Christian. Would we be able to resume our friendships? Well, this friend had heard through the grapevine of my struggles and eventual decision to leave my ministry and she was calling because her husband had also gone through his own change of position and left Christianity (he now identifies himself as a spiritual or secular humanist) and she is currently unsure of where she stands when it comes to faith and doubt, but they’d like me to celebrate some sort of secular naming/welcoming ceremony for their son who was just born last month. They’re not entirely sure where they are in faith, or what they want for this rite of passage ceremony, which makes me perfectly appropriate in my own uncertainties and skills in putting together and celebrating ceremonies.

If I still believed in God and God-incidences, I don’t know how I’d see all this other than God calling me toward atheism. That does nothing good for my fragile, little brain.

It is good to know, though, that I’ll still have some friends. And I’m really looking forward to writing and performing this ceremony.

Over on Beliefnet, there is a ‘blogalogue’ between Bart Ehrman and N. T. Wright about pain, suffering, and God. It is short and limited, apparently on purpose, but I found it worthwhile to read.

Many people have recommended Wright’s works for me. Others have recommended Ehrman’s recent book. I can relate strongly with Ehrman’s view, and what he says of his experiences. The amount of suffering in the world has been one of the major factors in my inability to continue believing in a God. After reading this exchange, I’m not confident reading Wright’s works will give me fresh insight into this issue.

Edit: I should mention that I found the above link while reading Kay’s blog while trying to find out what sort of person would put my confusion of anecdotes and musings on her blogroll.

When I was a child, they taught me that the sky is blue. I looked up and I saw blue above me. I sat down with my crayons and some paper and I coloured the bottom inch of the page green and the top inch blue. In between, I drew a house with four-paned windows, and a stick figure family that was bigger than the house.

As I grew older, I saw other drawings. Other people did not draw the sky at the top of the page and the grass at the bottom, with so much white space in between. In their drawings, the sky would meet the grass. I looked out my window and saw the horizon. There was nothing between the sky and the grass. So I made another drawing and I coloured the whole top half of the page blue and the bottom half green. I had to learn to leave room for people and houses, or draw them first. I wondered, for a little while, why I was not surrounded by blue. There was nothing between me and the sky. Why was it only blue when it was far away?

As a teenager, I joined the Air Cadets. I learned how airplanes work, and what lets them fly. I went up into the sky in gliders and powered craft. I saw what the tops of clouds looked like by looking down on them from above. I noticed, briefly, that the sky was still only blue at a distance. All around me, it was clear. I didn’t think about it much, though. I was flying!

In college, students talked about how the sky wasn’t really blue. Well, at least not all the time. The sky might be grey when rain was coming, black at night, and all sorts of reds, pinks and purples at sunset. Even when you could say that the sky was blue, there were all sorts of different shades of blue you might mean. We talked about it, debated about it, took photos and painted pictures. Through it all, if asked, I still would have said the sky was blue. Yes, there might be exceptions, or different ways of seeing things, but everyone knew that the sky was blue.

Tonight, though, I went outside and looked up. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen; just a moon and countless stars. As I looked, it suddenly occurred to me that there was truly nothing between me and infinity.

For the first time I wondered if there was really such a thing as a sky.

- Chicken Little