Believing in Magic Part 1: Rachel Gets Personal

Amethyst and flowers on the table

Is it real or a fable

Well I suppose a friend is a friend

-Sufjan Stevens

I was recently rummaging around in the 7th level of hell that is my GarageBand folder from my college years, and I came across a song of my own creation entitled “An INFP Confronts the Cosmos.” Strap in.

First off, while I do think that INFP’s are lovely, beautiful souls who deserve our unquestioned reverence, I don’t think I really was one—I think I was just mentally ill. Healthy me is more of your resident cult leader ENFJ, but I also think personality inventories are helpful-tools-but-can-be-limiting-anyway-moving-on.

The Problem of Evil has been my constant companion for most of my life. I remember taking a theology class in high school and asking my teacher where evil comes from if God created everything Good™. At the time, I didn’t realize this was such a fundamental question in theology, and I was disappointed when my teacher didn’t have a simple answer.

“An INFP Confronts the Cosmos” is a folk punk(?) jam wherein the early stages of my frustration with the problem of evil found their voice. The lyrics of the 2nd verse are as follows:

Tell me why you used such flimsy material

Tell me why you made it so you’d have to die

Could you not have chosen a better plot?

One that preferably starts with the ending of this

‘Cause it's our will to choose

But how limited the options!

Oh, the angst!

Fast-forward several years, and you’ll find me very seriously considering changing my religious views on Facebook to “Misotheist” and identifying with actual Satan while watching The Passion of the Christ.

I met with plenty of Christians who argued that free will was the catch-all answer to the problem of evil, the idea being that we couldn’t truly love God if we were robots who had to do good. "But," I would say in an attempt to escape this tired, dead end of a conversation as quickly as possible,

"if God truly is all-powerful, they could probably conjure up a way to create a system within which free agents had the proper conditions to do good and to love God. Also, how free can that will really be if the consequences of exercising it a certain way are eternal damnation? In any event, I’d say that being a robot is probably better than using the same breath to acknowledge mass incarceration and then sing 'It is well with my soul.'"

The whole thing felt profoundly gas-lit, and I wanted out.

…kinda.

I sincerely hated God, but I also incomprehensibly LOVED God. If it sounds Stockholmy, you'd better believe I thought so, too. And not even in a sexy way.

I don’t have a clean answer for you as to why I eventually stopped hating God, but I did. I will say that my turn for the agnostic, monistic, and interspiritual probably helped. I also followed a spiritual inclination to practice intensive Head-Heart connection meditation, and something definitely shifted during that process. But that experience in itself did not answer a single question I had about the reality of evil. I think I just stopped believing that God was all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving (and/or in existence). The four take turns on rotation tapping in and out of my belief system.

Don’t get me wrong: this was not a rosy God’s Not Dead kind of resolution. I was not remotely sorry for how I felt and thought, I was irrevocably done with the Evangelical Protestant world, but strictly speaking about feelings (note: not inherently logical thoughts), my hatred of God had dried up.

These days, you can catch me literally blushing when I see pictures of Jesus, losing my mind over Asherah and Yahweh’s divine romance, and being genuinely stoked to go to a stained glass window-adorned cathedral for Ash Wednesday. Your guess is as good as mine.

I’ll have some tidy spiritual director thoughts and tips about this in next month's post, but today I just want to share.

Doggy-paddling through the chunky stew of spiritual wellness with you always,

Rachel

January 23, 2020 | Denver, Colorado

#theology #spiritual direction #spiritual advice