Since August of this year, I've been contributing time, money and a heap of my spirit to start an Internet access point for the indigenous residents of an isolated peninsula on the east coast of Brazil. Helping to start the Brazilian Peninsula Project has been one of the best experience I've had in recent years. [
http://www.dailykos.com/... ] I've published diaries about this at DailyKos, and also about my experiences with manic depression. [
http://www.dailykos.com/... ]
Since I began publishing these diaries, many DailyKos readers have been exceptionally supportive, sharing with me their personal experiences with mental and physical illnesses as well as making contributions to help support the Internet access point I've been helping to start in an isolated indigenous community on the East Coast of Brazil.
But this week I received another kind of gift from a DailyKos reader, a book by Joseph Dispenza entitled, "God On Your Own: Finding A Spiritual Path Outside Religion" (Jossey-Bass, 2006).
Frankly, I had not planned to read this book at all; I haven't attended church regularly in over ten years. Back then I had become very angry at "God" for a number of reasons: I became angry at God because He did not remove the pain and confusion of manic depression from me, even when I prayed and begged him to do so. The very fact of having to beg God to provide something so basic as mental health increased my feelings of humiliation and desperation. Believing that only God could change my experience, I was dependent upon someone whose willingness to help me and keep me out of trouble seemed dubious at best, heartlessly lacking at worse.
Certainly, a loving parent knows what a child's basic needs are - mental health for example - and does all within the parent's power to meet those needs. If God were all powerful and loved me, then certainly he would see my need to be free of the pain and confusion of manic depression. I would not even need to ask a omnipotent and omnisapient parent for such help because the need would be obvious and compelling without me saying anything at all. So, as my life as I knew it dissolved around me and I became an empty shell, I came to hate God for all that he had failed to do, for all that I had lost while God withheld from me the help that he was perfectly capable of giving, if only he wanted to. Finally, I decided that it was better to deny the very existence of God than to actively hate him. That hasn't changed. I still believe that, given those choices, agnosticism is the more positive alternative.
Moreover, I was divorced during the last two years of my involvement in my church, where I sang in three different choirs. Although no friends disowned, many told me that God did not like divorce and might never forgive me for what I was about to do. I rejected religion as an alternative to staying in a bad marriage wtih the hope of pleasing God through my obedience. Because I figured it was better not to believe in God at all than be consumed with hate for him, I left religion behind and gave up on spirituality as well.
In the book I'm reading, Joseph Dispenza, an ex-Catholic monk, says,
Anger against religion is quite common. These days, it is considered impolite to vent anger against religion in public, but in a safe small group you are likely to hear some anger expressed. Sometimes the anger is turned inward at oneself for feeling disappointed with religion. A man in my hometown stayed in this stage for the last thirty years of his life because he was mad at God for allowing the illness and death of his wife. He died still steeped in anger, leaving explicit instructions that he was not to be given a church service and his body was notto be buried in a consecrated cemetery plot. He told his family he had chosen Hell over a heartless God. Dispenza, p. 27.
Dispenza, says,
Shame, disgrace and embarrassment go with this social aspect of leaving religion. When I was thinking of leaving monastic life after eight years, I felt a tremendous embarassment about returning to my hometown a failure. It was not the first consideration in my decision to prolong my stay in the monastery, but what I perceived as public humiliation certainly factored into it.
Like Dispenza, I
continued to contemplate my dilema of how to be loyal to my religion and at the same time be true to my spiritual aspirations. As I did so, I started to see that I would have to make a final decision on the basis of what was working for me and what was not. (p. 37.)
In discussing the questioning of religion that caused Dispenza to leave the monastery and Catholicism, Dispenza poses the age-old questions,
What if there were no such thing as God? What if all the stories about a Divine Being we have been receiving from other people for thousands of years were elaborate fantasies? What if we woke up tomorrow morning to discover that humans of the past made up God to solve mysteries in the world they could not explain, and we have been living with that figment of the human imagination ever since?
What if our species has been laboring under an illusion since around 2000 B.C., thinking there is a Supreme Being somewhere who is like us, created us, maintains us in existence, and will judge us after we die? What if there never were a God and he never spoke to people or left a record of his words in big books or sacred scriptures? . . . The true spiritual seeker must be willing to entertain these questions, and many more, before building a strong and meaningful personal spirituality. (Dispenza, p. 59-60)
Although thought provoking, Dispenza's questions about validity of religions seem very distant from my present reality. Since giving up my law career and my participation in established religion and leaving the United States six years ago, I have traveled and lived in Europe and South America, seeking circumstances, ideas and a lifestyle that could give me long-lasting relief from depression and other insanity, founded in changes that I, myself, could make in my life. What kinds of circumstances and involvements could I find that would feed my spirit and keep me from falling into depression again?
I can't and won't claim to have learned any profound spiritual truths either from my travels or from Dispenza's book. But, the book has started me examining my experiences to discover whether I have inadvertantly and unknowingly discovered something spiritual beyond the walls of established religion?
Somewhere in the sixty pages of Dispenza's book that I've read so far, he echoes something that philosophers have said about mental health and spirituality for a very long time: An essential part and indicator of a healthy spirituality is serving others. In reading this, I am reminded of my humble current efforts to start an Internet on an isolated peninsula where there are no cars, motorcycles, light posts or traffic lights - only indigenous people eager to communicate with each other and the world. To the degree that I am endeavoring to help them, Dispenza would say that I am engaged in a spiritual activity - helping others - regardless of whether I ever enter a church again. If so, this is also a spiritual involvement that comes without all the baggage of begging God for his assistance and being angry at him if it's not forthcoming.
To donate to Internet access for a community that needs it, please visit PayPal.Com and make a contribution to the BrazilianPeninsulaProject@Yahoo.Com.