Christianity in all its forms is not going away anytime soon. I stay on the fringes of the religious system because it is/was my cultural heritage. My life experience meant that God died. It took me over 40 years to have the funeral – so I spent all those years grieving. If I can change even one small thing in someone’s life that helps them live with more peace, then that is good. People don’t interpret my Psalm of Anger the way I do – but their interpretations are valid because they are based on their own experiences – they bring to it their own past, and they take away from it, their own solutions. Sometimes those solutions surprise me, and I wonder how they got there. I spent too many years trying to get “god” back (or bring god back to life) to ever not understand that many people need to believe and do believe. My spirituality revolves around the on-going process of understanding the interrelationships in my life. These are what are critical to my existence.
I also hope that some of my writings will help those die-hard Christians understand that it is just not that easy. For many of us, God in his Christian guise died - maybe belief in any form of divinity died. Thomas Doyle understands and feels that it is one of the worst legacies of the child abuse scandal. (See his book on the 2000 year legacy of sexual child abuse in the RC church) We cannot go back. Our life experiences will not let us ever go back. We have to fashion meaning in this life differently. We do not even have the luxury that those brought up without belief have - we are haunted by the belief systems that we grew up in.
I no longer feel haunted by my religious past, but it took me decades to get here. I am looking forward to reading Ian Gurvitz' Deconstructing God: A Heretic's Case for Religion. Human beings seem to require belief systems to give life meaning. Look for a review once I have read the book.
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