You’re probably wondering how I came up with the name God, Coffee & Me for my blog site. I started writing about the Christian God around 2008. I left the church a few years before that. That was my angry phase, and I’ve since come to understand why I was so angry. My blogs have evolved over the years, and you’re seeing the third or fourth rendition of my blog site.
I no longer call myself a Christian. I suppose “agnostic ex-Christian” comes closest, although I remain a student of the religion I left behind. I am currently working on a memoir about my long, complicated, and confusing relationship with Christianity.
I was not raised in a religious home. My father never talked about God. My mother was Buddhist, although she did not teach us much about her beliefs. My parents divorced when I was around 11 or 12. Religion was not part of my childhood.
Then I got married.
Marriage introduced me to Christianity, and Christianity introduced me to a whole new vocabulary. Baptism. Salvation. Communion. Sin. Grace. The Trinity. Heaven. Hell. Denominations. Doctrine. Rituals. Worship music. And, of course, the unspoken rule that asking too many questions was shunned.
I studied like crazy because I wanted to understand. I wanted to be a good Christian. I wanted to “believe and have faith.” I attended church, read parts of the Bible, listened to sermons, and tried to learn what Christians were supposed to believe and why they believed it. I was still waiting for “belief and faith” to kick in somehow.
I met a lot of kind people along the way. I experienced friendship, community, music, laughter, softball, and meaningful moments. Christianity taught me compassion, forgiveness, generosity, and care for people who were suffering.
But there were also heartaches, disappointments, contradictions, and questions that never seemed to receive honest answers.
The more I studied, the more confusing Christianity became. Different churches taught different doctrines, yet each one seemed convinced it had the correct version. Bible passages were quoted to offer hope, but other passages were used to condemn, exclude, frighten, and hurt people.
Eventually, I began to wonder whether important information had been hidden from ordinary church members. I don’t mean a secret room beneath the Vatican filled with missing Bible verses and the Holy Grail. Although that would certainly improve my memoir. My wife and I recently watched The Da Vinci Code again.
I mean that churches often taught polished conclusions without explaining the complicated history behind them. I learned very little in church about how the Bible was created, how doctrines developed, why the Gospels differ, or how much Christianity changed over the centuries.
Oddly enough, I learned more about Christianity after I left the church than I did while sitting inside it.
After my wife and I divorced, I no longer called myself a Christian. I wished that I had gotten the proof, the evidence that the apostle Thomas received when he doubted. But I wouldn’t be writing today if I had gotten it.
This memoir will not be an attack on Christians. It is my journey into the wilderness of Christianity. I eventually walked away with more questions than answers.
Christianity contains beautiful teachings. It also contains some bad shit that has been used to harm and exclude people.
My memoir will explore all of it – the faith, the confusion, the good times, the heartbreak, the unanswered questions, and the strange journey of trying to understand a religion that has never been simple.
I wrote this haiku a couple of years ago:
I asked god one time,
If he could help me believe…
I hate cold coffee.
