Every day, in every way, I am coming to life.

Or, on being Plymouth Brethren, then Catholic, then...?

Many have asked over the years for me to speak more about my journey from the Plymouth Brethren into, and then through, the Catholic Church. I don’t really have a lot of interest in doctrinal discussions anymore, but I do like telling my story (who doesn’t like talking about themselves?) so here’s some. :)

A note; I wrote this chapter from an unreleased book about 2.5 years ago. A lot has shifted even since then. I don’t know how to keep things current when it turns out that, actually, life is change. So please hold my story with an open and loose hand if you can. And if you can’t, that’s none of my business and I accept that. LOVE Y’ALL.

XOXO

Audrey

PS. Special shoutout to Debra Parente, Daniel Holter, and Marshall Altman — all of whom intersected with me at moments in life where I really needed a wakeup call. Friends are magic. I’m grateful for each of you. (Ms. Parente, my childhood piano teacher, sadly passed a few years ago but I often remember her fondly. Some of you might remember my written tribute to her a few months back; that tribute is in this book chapter in a more truncated form.)

ALLLLL right. Here we go.

Doubt

My family’s whispers as we settled into our pew fluttered over the sparse furnishings of the sanctuary, moth-like and thickly quiet. There was nowhere for sound to be absorbed in our assembly room—no carpets on the faded hardwoods, no curtains on the frosted glass windows that always diffused the Sunday morning sun into a cool, somber dimness. So we did not speak to each other during ‘the meeting’, as we had always called it. The meetings were filled with long, intent periods of silence; in between them, a different man would stand here or there to offer encouragement or prayer. In the stream of his hushed offerings, a theme would develop—a spiritual thread, slow as molasses, perforated by quiet, and yet piercingly apparent to anyone listening closely. A brother might reflect on God’s mercy in a hushed, grateful tone, or reiterate God’s wrath in a boom of warning, reverberating of the bare wood-paneled walls. Another might share on Jesus the Good Shepherd the next. We circled reverently around our stories of God like whirling dervishes in slow motion.

We met for communion at 9:30 am every Sunday morning, rain or shine, come hell or high water. When we sang during our meetings, we had no instruments except the human voice. Our singing was rich and faltering by turns, depending on who was there. A brother would call out a song number, usually in keeping with the developing theme of the morning, and there was a hymn starter who would set the pitch and sing the first few words. For most of my childhood this was always the same man: Arthur Brasselman. Stooped though he may have been in his old age, he would still climb up the ladders of his many fruit trees to harvest peaches and pears and apples. He was harsh as he was spry, barking angrily at the children for shaking the fruit trees when he hosted a church picnic. The wrinkles by his mouth turned far downwards, almost all the way to his jaw. I remember asking my mother when I was five years old, in a whisper, why Brother Brasselman was always so sad. He’d been the hymn starter for many years, and had gone mostly deaf, which meant that often he didn’t hear the hymn called out until his wife leaned over to show him the number in the book. Sometimes by the time he got around to starting, someone had already begun, and Brother Brasselman (not hearing that we were already singing) would barge in with the first words of the hymn over top. We’d just pause and join in again from the beginning, sharing knowing looks.

The church of my childhood did not flash or blare or shout its way to the throne room. We sang simply, completely unaccompanied, our voices raised to the heavens through a high old plaster ceiling, reverberating humbly off the bare brown wooden chairs. Our rooms were modest and unadorned, save a few framed Scriptural passages on the walls.  We were staunchly low church and anti-Catholic, and believed things about the Catholic Church that bordered on extreme. I was taught as a child that the Antichrist, who we believed would be a specific, unique figure in history, would be a pope; and that the “Whore of Babylon” depicted in the book of Revelation specifically referred to the Catholic Church. Unlike most other Protestants, though, we did believe that communion absolutely had to be celebrated weekly. This may have been our one and only area of overlap with the Catholic and Orthodox traditions that we as a sect had always so fiercely disavowed; they outdid us, actually, by celebrating Eucharist every single day of the year. We did our best to separate ourselves in every other way from the Romish churches, however, both in ornamentation and orthodoxy. We had no icons, no stained glass, no statues, and certainly no priests or monks.  

Catholic Churches in New Jersey abounded, being that it was a state full of immigrants from Ireland and Italy, among many other places where Catholicism had at least for a time held precedence. They were large community presences, usually; the one a few blocks from my house threw an Italian festival every summer with cannolis and carnival rides for the kids, and beer and bingo for the adults. We attended most summers, however disapproving we may have been of their theology, eschatology, and hierarchy. We had no qualms about their fair food—apparently most people can come to an agreement on funnel cake. I laugh when I look back at this; why did we give them our money for a bunch of ride tickets when we believed they were a completely rotten and corrupt human institution with no redeeming spiritual qualities? A well-meaning relative told me once that if any Catholics were in heaven, it would be by accident. And yet, we got Italian ices and rode the Tilt-a-Whirl in the gathering dusk with the rest of the neighborhood every July, laughing until we cried—heaven on earth.

By comparison Plymouth Brethren churches tended to be quiet little hermitages with little community activity. The little church our family attended when I was in high school (we switched to a closer one when I was thirteen) hosted Vacation Bible School for the neighborhood every summer, but beyond that, we did very little outreach beyond our own walls. I wonder sometimes what people may have thought of us; of our humble, white-steepled little church tucked into a small grove of trees and edged by a little parking lot with room for about forty cars. The church sign read ‘Woodside Bible Chapel’, and we had our service times posted on it, but almost no one ever came without being invited by a member. We kept to ourselves, made no noise, ruffled no feathers.

And yet, as gentle as our church may have sounded and looked to the very occasional visitor, there was a diamond-sharp edge and a shadow to it. As a spiritual community, we descended from hard, insistent, ideologically pure people. We were almost Quaker-like in decorum, doctrinally severe, unapologetically disciplinarian and unflinchingly moralistic. We looked down our collective nose at other Christian denominations as tainted by worldliness—we tolerated the Baptists with their bareheaded women and organs. The Presbyterians were frowned upon for being streaked with traditions of infant baptism and recitations of the Apostles’ Creed; but we were by far the hardest on our own people.

The Plymouth Brethren first formed when John Nelson Darby, a priest in the Church of Ireland, broke away from the Anglican Communion in 1831 to begin what he viewed as a major work of God’s Spirit. It was his belief that separation from evil alone could unite the church of Christ, so the Plymouth Brethren espoused from its inception a culture of purity and conformity. Anyone who was put out of fellowship by one Plymouth Brethren assembly—whether for doctrinal divergence or being tainted by the world—had to be put out of fellowship by all of them. When you were put out of fellowship, you were no longer allowed to teach or lead; you could not so much as receive communion. It could also mean being unwelcome in the homes of others in the church, or even being altogether shunned by the church’s members.

It turned out to be an impossible task to keep God’s church pure and spotless. And so, understandably, Plymouth Brethren history is rife with divisions and splits. There seemed to be a cyclical need for purgation—every few decades, some scapegoat or other would be blamed for the sins of the many, and the church would splinter into shards.

Splintering an oak tree isn’t as clean at it sounds. Our denomination wasn’t the sort of group where people came and went very much. The Plymouth Brethren were largely made up of dynasty families who had been part of it for ages—upon meeting a person with the last name of James, we could (and often did) ask something like ‘are you one of the Virginia Jameses or the California Jameses?’ In order to remain as pure and spotless as possible, we did not marry people outside ‘the assemblies’, unless they agreed to become one of us. Being one of us meant many things; foremost, it meant not receiving communion at any church but one of ours. It meant going under observation by the elders to be evaluated for purity of belief and behavior  before being admitted to the Lord’s Supper. At our church this observation period probably averaged about six months in length, though I’d heard of it taking up to two years at some assemblies in Germany, where their practice of evaluation was especially rigorous. It meant submitting totally to the Plymouth Brethren teachings on male headship. It meant removing oneself from the world in ways most Christian churches didn’t require. There were many hoops in place leading to community belonging, and it was rare for a stranger to jump through them. Once they did, they were usually there for life. We stuck together, because being Plymouth Brethren was not easy. It required radical and total commitment to separation and purity. One couldn’t just be Plymouth Brethren and live life like the Baptist and Presbyterian liberals or the godless and gambling Catholics. It was hardtack biscuits and gruel, a wooden plate of cruciferous greens while the rest of the church and the world feasted carnivorously on the sins of the flesh. As the Plymouth Brethren we  considered ourselves, solely, to be the city on the hill that the Bible referenced; the one and only remaining bastion of true believers. We were the remnant, and we were bound and determined to hold ourselves in pure untainted spotlessness until Jesus returned.

When I was twelve, a few Plymouth Brethren men in Holland began preaching some ‘false doctrine’ and wind of it eventually got back to us in the States. A few men at a nearby assembly in New Jersey got together and sent a letter—hereafter referred to as The Letter—to every Plymouth Brethren assembly around the world to whom they considered themselves tied. The Letter stated that if they did not publicly disavow those men and their teachings, they would no longer be considering themselves in spiritual communion with that particular meeting. They essentially divided our entire global community with The Letter, for we were a small and tightly knit global clan. We wished to remain completely unstained by the influence of the world, so our way of life required an ironclad camaraderie. We couldn’t do it alone.

After The Letter was sent out, I began to hear many stories about fathers no longer eating with sons and brothers no longer speaking to brothers because they took differing positions on the issue. I remember wondering timidly to myself if all of it was really necessary. I mentioned this to one of my Sunday school teachers, asking why we couldn’t agree to disagree. “God spits anyone lukewarm out of His mouth,” he responded: “God spits anyone lukewarm out of His mouth.” I had already known took from this that we were to be absolutely radical in our separation.  I knew this, but The Letter made the stakes feel even more real and frightening. The Letter showed me the extent to which separation was imperative. And we were already experts at separateness—we did not vote or, traditionally, go into business with or take a loan from anyone who wasn’t in our small community. We were not to mix too much with the outside.  I already carried a fair amount of fragmentation and splintering in my psyche from the normal wear and tear of life, like most people, but The Letter deeply influenced my sense of self as I began to navigate a new urgency around the purity I already felt committed to. Even my friends in the already tiny Plymouth Brethren community were on the chopping block, depending on how their fathers decided to act on The Letter. No relationship was sacrosanct or exempt from the long arm of God’s law, from God’s commitment to complete and total ideological purity. And neither was any part of my Self. I began to interrogate myself even more than I already did, checking and checking again for  anything that diverged from this standard.

My piano teacher Debbie, a lifelong and sincere but open-minded Episcopalian, visited our church once because it happened to be several tree-lined blocks from her home in sleepy Fanwood, New Jersey. Fanwood was home to about ten small businesses, a train station, and a post office—and our little tree-shaded church, tucked in between the train station and the Dunkin Donuts, unobtrusive and private and quiet. I remember Debbie’s soft brown roller-set curls, even held back decorously by a tortoiseshell clip, standing out starkly in a room where the hair on every other woman’s head was veiled by a lace mantilla or topped with a crocheted doily. Usually we kept ours folded in the front or back cover of our well-worn and emphatically underlined Bibles, but we kept a basket of head coverings at the back on a small oak console table, in case a lady had forgotten to bring her own. I had no idea she was coming, and was surprised that Sunday to see the delicate arches of her brows over her earnest hazel eyes and under her gleaming bare hair just a few pews away from me. Whenever I’d glance her way during the meeting, she looked mystified and horrified by turns as she watched the communion service unfold:  men spoke and read from the Scriptures and served the bread and wine, while the women bowed their heads reverentially and silently. We made eye contact once or twice, and I remember feeling nerves in response to her warm smiles. I suddenly felt afraid of her seeing where I was, and I grew increasingly uncomfortable as I watched an outsider, someone I knew from another context, observing us—observing me, there.  I felt seen, and strangely embarrassed. It was almost like something in me knew that this wasn’t in alignment with my heart or my wiring, my spiritual and emotional composition. But I was a child—I didn’t really have an eject button. All the same, her observation of me in my religious habitat sent tremors through my already frail sense of spiritual security. At the end of the service, from the seat where I remained with my nose in a book between services, I overheard her approach some of the men who had taken part in the service and asked to speak to the pastor. They replied that we had no pastor, and that we were governed by a board of elders. “Only men, I imagine? I have to tell you, I think this is unbelievably backward.” She was visibly and audibly miffed.

It was the very first time I’d ever heard someone vocally challenge these practices or ideas. I’d been raised to be submissive, prim, and soft, and so had the other women around me. Even the most vibrant personalities among us knew to cover her hair and quiet down when a man was praying or speaking about spiritual matters. Yet that day, this woman who had been teaching me piano lessons for seven years had walked in and immediately taken umbrage with customs and beliefs I had never for a moment felt free to question, even internally.  She seemed brazen to me then—I remember feeling embarrassed for her as she was courteously but firmly ushered into a less central location of the church by the two elders who were answering her questions. I wondered what she was feeling for me in that moment. It doesn’t take much for me to see that she might have been deeply concerned to see me being muted, covered, and modestly dressed firmly into the Plymouth Brethren’s particular brand of meek femininity. I know she passionately believed in my talent and my potential, and I imagine she may have challenged them openly in front of me to show me that I could question everything around me if I wanted to. It stuck with me, though I didn’t break rank til much later.

And now, back to John Nelson Darby. He was the first public theologian to formally espouse the theory of the pre-tribulational Rapture—a reading of the book of Revelation and of the Rapture as a physical event taking place before a literal seven-year global tribulation. I was so steeped in this reading of the text, and so rarely exposed to even Christian teachings outside our approved canon of Plymouth Brethren biblical commentaries, that I had little reason to believe there was anyone who looked at ‘the end times’ any differently than we did. Even the Left Behind books were too liberal for us—if you remember, their plots allowed for a change of heart post-Rapture, which we were taught could not happen. We believed that once the Rapture happened, if you had been left behind, you were wholly and eternally f***ed.

It was from these passages in the Scriptures about the end times that our leaders took this phrase about God spitting lukewarm people out. We studied the book of Revelation repeatedly and regularly; it was a helpful reminder of what was at stake as we sought to live out the call of Christ’s Church. From a young age I was taught about the apocalypse, and I felt a pit slowly growing in my young stomach as I pondered the potential ramifications of the real and present doubt growing within me. When my Sunday school teacher told me that God spit out the lukewarm, I meticulously examined all my actions and thoughts and beliefs for any sign of tepidity. When I would go to school and hear something that diverged from the narratives we were given at church – evolution, say – I would toss and turn all night just knowing that God needed me to speak up, or else I might be ‘spit out’ by Him. And I would—not publicly, but privately—approach the teacher and, trembling, express that I believed they were teaching falsehoods and lies. I wonder what that must have been like for them; for my gifted and talented teacher, who affectionately referred to me as ‘twerp’ (I was the youngest and quietest in the class) to hear me at eight years old nervously vocalizing that she had been deceived by Satan about science. I remember her kind and worried eyes as she said she disagreed. Even if she was given over to deceit in my eyes, I felt some relief, because I had successfully not been lukewarm for one more day. I imagine I probably slept a little better that night.

As I watched The Split happening all around me, with families being turned and twisted and severed, I saw that my questioning nature could, at best, cause severe disconnection and loss. And at worst, it could land me in hell for eternity. I decided very early on to be as obedient as possible—spotless in my behavior, dedicated in my purity of body and mind, and perfect in my belief.  I didn’t want to be spit out. To watch my piano teacher interrogate so handily the practices and beliefs to which I had grown completely accustomed was jarring, certainly; but doubt simply seemed like a risk I couldn’t afford.

         When I reflect on just how long it took me to give any credence to my doubt, which I now see can be another form of knowing, I often feel a little shame and embarrassment arise. I think it’s because I don’t entirely understand why it took me so long to begin to trust that my questions, my feelings, and my experience are actually all playing a role in my inner knowing, my intuition, my sense that there is something more out there than just one origin story can communicate. But one thing I have come to learn is that, for those of us who carry a fair amount of religious or spiritual trauma, it is not inherently our beliefs and dogmas that traumatize us, but our body’s responses to those ideas. I couldn’t give credence to my Doubt for so long in part because my body was still so stuck in a freeze response ; I carried tension in my muscles, down to the cells. I see it in my childhood facial expressions when I thumb through family photo albums; so much fear in my eyes, shoulders hunched, knitted brows. I feared going to hell so deeply for not being a true believer—and to be a ‘true believer’, whatever that meant, was a concept as elusive and vaporous as a disappearing plume of smoke from a chimney in frozen air; an eternally dangling carrot. How could I truly begin to air my questions when my body still feared that.a God of eternal conscious torment was waiting in the wings to pounce? Of course I hid from it. The perceived consequences I still feared were too terrifying to engage with.

Long before I began therapy, a particularly significant shift in my understanding of my Self occurred in the form of an unforgettable encounter with a new friend. Have you ever met someone who so instantly and effortlessly mirrored you that you felt your normal pretenses and social barriers fall to reveal your true essence, in all its imperfect and beautiful shining nakedness? These meetings are rare portals, and I have walked through several of them in my lifetime. These relationships are all different, but one thing they have in common is that each of them provided nonjudgmental and open-hearted space for me to begin to engage with doubt in earnest. One such meeting shifted my trajectory.

In 2009, I asked my label if I could meet with Marshall Altman. He wasn’t really working in the Christian music industry; in fact, he was Jewish, atheist, and held a deep affinity for Steinbeck and McCarthy alike. I had heard a few albums he’d produced—Marc Broussard’s Carencro and Brooke Fraser’s Albertine, among others—and felt a pang in my spirit. It felt almost like a quiet signal fire from the universe that he was ‘my people.’ So we asked for a meeting, and he agreed to sit with me the next time he was in Nashville, to find out if there was any creative territory to be excavated or explored.

The first time we met, we sat in a small box of a room on the first floor of the building where my label and publisher were housed, sitting on some outdated 1990s modern red plush sofas underneath uninspiring fluorescent lights. I had been a staff writer there for about a year, churning out sometimes multiple songs a day with other artists and writers during business hours. I wrote Winter Snow, my first (and so far only) gold song, in between co-writes sitting on the floor holding an acoustic guitar on my lunch break. Within several moments of sitting at the piano to write with Marshall, I felt that sort of cosmic familiarity that comes along once in a while as we traverse the wide world, meeting those rare souls along the way that we may have traveled with before, or with whom we share some sort of universal link. His brown eyes sparked with recognition of my talent, my intellect, and my hunger. I could feel it. I knew he had ‘it’, too. That ‘thing’, the ‘x factor’, the je ne sais quois that can only be found or born with, not taught. We saw it in each other and we were off to the races.

         That day, Marshall and I wrote a song called ‘Breaking Through.’ It was less self- assured than the other songs I’d been writing for my album—this one was,  more questioning, less sure of itself. I think that is in large part due to the fact that, sitting in front of Marshall that day, I felt immediately exposed. It was as if he, looking at me, within one minute knew I didn’t have the ‘blessed assurance’ I had spent so many years chasing; I could feel that he saw me posturing, but rather than feeling shame, there rose up in me a slightly deepened sense of acceptance for the part of myself that just didn’t know. The song churned out of us at breakneck speed. We got done earlier than planned and went for a drive in his rental car through the low-lying hills of middle Tennessee as golden hour began slowly spreading its long light over the grass.  We didn’t speak much, if at all. The shadows of afternoon deepened and fell long across the backroads, and I felt that I was being slowly invited somewhere new—into a space where I could be curious instead of convinced; more courageous than certain.

Our friendship and partnership grew into a flourishing and thriving creative and spiritual space. Marshall never let me bullshit him about anything. On a regular basis as we’d be tracking vocals in Los Angeles, he’d pause me and ask if we could step outside for a second, and then ask me why I didn’t believe what I was singing, and why I was singing it at all if I didn’t really believe it. Even then, he could see that I was, unintentionally thought it may have been, performing certitude in my lyrics.

One evening we were attempting to record a final lead vocal for a song called ‘The Way You Move,’ and I was struggling. I was choking on the words for reasons I didn’t really understand, and with every new take I felt more and more constricted, physically and emotionally. I knew that returns were beginning to diminish, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I wasn’t a new singer or performer, but I was inexperienced in the studio, and it was very different to deliver an impassioned vocal in a small isolated booth staring at a wall or at a producer through double-sided glass than it was to sing in front of a room of people. This particular song talked about God’s love in forceful, almost violating language—“I know that the hardest part of love is not the things I have to give. It’s what I give up; I’m giving up ground. … You’re like a lion standing in my house, and you’re taking off the doors on your way in; I’ve got nothing left to hide behind.” I didn’t have to wonder what Marshall was thinking, because after a couple of my anemic attempts at delivering these lyrics with believable emotion, he leaned over the desk and muttered into the talkback mic, ‘I think you need a cigarette.’ He wasn’t wrong.

So we went out into the gloaming, to the asphalt lot that surrounded his compact studio, both of us bathed gently in the last glimmers of West coast daylight; I shuffled my boots in the gravel and lit up a Djarum Black. Silence ensued and continued for many moments until Marshall finally punctuated the quiet with a question I didn’t see coming.

“So when are you gonna tell me about your father issues?” I snapped my head, which had been facing downward as I gazed at the sun-blanched and aging yellow parking lines on the ground, toward him. “You son of a bitch,” I said laughingly. We both chuckled. I fell silent again, contemplating. Why had he asked me that? I didn’t see what one thing had to do with the other. And yet, I felt a pang in my body—a dull ache pulsing slowly in my chest. Was it sadness I felt? Anger? I hardly knew. Tears stung my eyes, and I turned away. I felt exposed. I felt vulnerable. And I didn’t know if I liked it.

“You know I respect the hell out of you, Audrey. But my god, you write these big songs about love, God, faith…and sometimes I honestly don’t f***ing know if you mean your own lyrics,” he said with his particular mix of salty frustration and familial affection. “I don’t believe you. Not right now, not the way you’re sounding tonight. I don’t believe you. More importantly, I don’t think you believe yourself. What do you actually feel? What do you actually think? Honestly, I don’t know if you know. And to be honest, it’s coming across. I can feel your second guessing. I can hear it. And I think other people will hear it too.”

I stared at the pavement, dragging my toe back and forth across broken bits of concrete and slivers of green bottle glass. Deep down, I knew he was right. I could feel that he was seeing straight through my veneer of piety into the weight of the unbelief and fear that I carried along with my faith. I felt raw, exposed, ashamed. Alongside the burning discomfort of exposure arose the comforting idea that perhaps—just maybe—there existed both a spiritual community and a corner of the music industry where I could fully be myself. Marshall watched me intently as I processed this, then spoke again, “You don’t have to pretend you believe all of this.”

I scoffed. What did he know? My whole sense of belonging and spiritual security was predicated on the stories I’d believed about God for my whole life. I couldn’t just … admit it didn’t make sense to me. What if it was all real, and I was just one of those poor unfortunate souls whom Satan (or even God) had blinded from knowing the truth?

I had been Catholic for roughly a year and a half when Marshall and I met. It, being a far more literary-rich and  philosophy-saturated tradition than the Plymouth Brethren had been, had advanced me in both my intellectual and mystical educations. I discovered Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen there, and Julian of Norwich, and Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. I began to learn what philosophy was, and how to get inside it (and, if I worked hard enough, to begin to see outside of it). If I could anthropomorphize the Catholic Church for a moment, I don’t imagine she may have ever intended for me to pass through and flow out like a river on its way to the ocean, but that is precisely what happened. I picked up gifts and nourishment all along the way, but it wasn’t my final destination.

Instead of finding my doubts being soothed and quieted by my becoming Catholic, I discovered quickly that they were in fact growing louder and more insistent. Marshall’s immediate sense of this in me was only highlighting what I was beginning to see internally for myself. I hadn’t been Catholic for even two months when I realized that doubt was still growing. I began admitting it in the confessional booth as though I were a heretic. In my first year as a Catholic, an elderly Irish priest named Seamus whose vestments were so long they covered his whole hands, and whose long aged nose was perpetually dripping, laughed heartily out loud at my confession when I told him how much I doubted God and the Church. I started, feeling slightly offended. He looked me kindly in the eyes, nose dribbling faithfully, and lilted in his faint brogue, ‘Child, your unbelief is not a crime, and God is not anywhere near as afraid of it as you are.’ I didn’t want to believe him, and went in search of a new priest who might be counted on to more adequately help me excoriate myself.

By the time I met Marshall a couple of years after that confession, my increasing understanding of philosophy and psychology had begun working in tandem to slowly show me the very human patterns of even the religion I was so devoutly practicing.  I began realizing that the individual psyche, culture-at-large (including politics and worldview) and empire were all intricately and inextricably tangled together with religion—I began to understand that as Christians/Catholics, our beliefs were not independent from our world views, our cultures, our families of origin, or even our personalities. For a kid who had always believed that church doctrine transcended all of that, and operated separately from it, this was a huge shift. I quickly noticed a lot of anachronism within Catholicism—the belief that in such-and-such bygone era, people had “really” been devout or the Church had “really” occupied its rightful place in society. Eventually I began seeing the bemoaning of each new philosophical movement (postmodernism, in my time) by the ‘old guard’ as exactly what it was—resistance to evolution. Even as a young Catholic I could see that resistance to evolution is truly futile. The hive mind, the collective consciousness, the single Self of humanity is always changing and evolving. Each human being on the planet is part of it. We are, in many ways, one organism. The Church doesn’t exist apart from empire and culture and the collective unconscious, because it was birthed out of all of it.  

Once I began to glimpse this, I couldn’t un-see it. Believe me, I attempted the un-seeing. At nights after working on music all day with Marshall, I would pore over Augustine and Aquinas and the Church fathers, trying to put on some lens—any lens—that might correct my vision. Because what I was beginning to see is that all are one. That all is one. That there is nothing outside the All. There were many deeper and wider revelations of this yet to come in my life, and I will expand upon them in the chapters to come; but a lot of it began with Marshall and his frank line of questioning.

In 2015, 7 years after Marshall first called bullshit on my piety, I released a hymns album called Inheritance; I did this in part as a last ditch attempt to cling to the beliefs and stories of my past, through connection to the old songs from the hymnbooks that had made up so much of my childhood experience of music in the Plymouth Brethren. By this time, the doubt had only grown and intensified. I hadn’t written a worship song in nearly 2 years and I was starting to experience a groundswell of shame about making Christian music when I was so functionally agnostic. I found myself intentionally hiring band and crew members who were agnostic or atheist so I could feel less emotionally and spiritually alone on the road during tours; this helped me survive the experience of being an agnostic limping through Christian culture, but it also cast an even starker light on the dichotomy of my life and work. It was growing torturous. I was doing all the “right” things as a Catholic—reading the Church fathers, the mystics, the Catechism. If anything, I was more devoted than ever, desperately scratching and clawing for some relief from the seemingly unstoppable implosion of belief within me.

 I remember racking my brain then, while touring Inheritance in this fog of confusion, to think about who in my acquaintance at the time could hold space for the extents to which my Doubt had crept into every space of belief and faith I held in myself, and my friend Daniel came to mind. We’d met through Marshall one day as he swung through Nashville and came to Marshall’s to pick up some gear. In our brief conversation I’d immediately sensed in him a kindred spirit, someone who I could perhaps speak to about anything. I emailed him and asked if I could share some things that were coming up for me as I had already begun to deconstruct my religious beliefs, almost without my own permission. It felt as though it were happening to me. He kindly agreed, and the following exchange will not only illustrate my doubts and fears in stark relief, but also the kindness extended to me by a relative stranger who had let go of these ideas long before I’d ever begun to even allow myself to question them.

May 12, 2015

Dear Daniel,

Thanks so much for being willing to be a soundboard for a minute or two in the midst of your busy life. I'll just dive right in.

I always alternate between periods of easy belief and immensely difficult times believing—at least, I have, ever since leaving fundamentalism and entering into a more historic Church. I've never really felt like that was unwelcome in Catholicism, and I'm really thankful for that. 

This time (which has been going on for several months now) feels different. I feel like what I'm experiencing is the last death rattle of the fundamentalist shell of former me. I fully realize this is a good thing but I have been very thrown off by the intensity of the emotions, the sort of heft of the darkness I'm feeling. I feel little to no fear anymore about what lies beyond the removal of the fundamentalist structures that ruled my thinking and decision-making for so many years, but I guess I've been caught off guard by a few things; one being, my realization of the depth to which those roots actually ran. The personal crisis of looking at myself honestly and realizing certain things about fundamentalism's grip on me is devastating me right now. For example; looking at my conversion to Catholicism, which for so long has felt like the best thing that ever happened to this Fundamentalist Quaker Evangelical mutt, and realizing that I was STILL being guided by the thinking and the fear that ruled me as a child. So my first crisis was, am I even Catholic really? Really, am I? If I truly stopped thinking and acting like an Evangelical would I still be here, or would I be somewhere on a rock in India meditating, or would I be an atheist, or would I be a quack essential oils healing blogger, or what? Haha. It is jarring to look at one of the biggest decisions I've ever made and see all the flaws in my reasoning—and, perhaps more frighteningly, the fear-based decision-making—that got me to make it. 

Perhaps the biggest thing that has really thrown me off is the fact that I am starting to feel very drastically *emotionally* affected by the "big questions" in life. This is new to me. I've always been a relatively even-keel person, and even when there have been giant questions running in the background of my processor (who is God, what is my purpose, should I marry this person, etc etc) I have been the type who is just sort of willing to plod onward, feeling that things will just eventually settle into place and figure themselves out. That is who I have always known myself to be...a dear friend once told me I was the Samwise Gamgee of my community, and that resonates with me; at least as far as pace and temperament go.

Well, now all of a sudden I'm finding myself vacillating wildly emotionally because of these massive questions. Some of them aren't new. But they're affecting me differently. Maybe it's because I have a kid now or something? I mean, I'm finding myself LOSING MY SH*T over wondering things like, "is organized religion really the thing I've always thought it to be?" or "is God knowable?" I cannot for the life of me figure out where all these feelings are coming from. It's making me think that for years I've thought myself to be this even-keel person, but in reality I've just been suffocating my actual responses to questions that matter to me more than I thought they did. I mean, if I did become an atheist at this point I wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it, because my feelings are just so........forward, intense, overwhelming. 

So I guess .. I am just wondering if this is what agnosticism is, or if things will ever settle again, or if I'm doomed forever to be emotionally tortured by these questions about existence that for so long were just things I thought I could calmly wonder. Did you ever go through anything like this? And are you available to perform a secular exorcism? I can fly to Milwaukee tomorrow. ;) 

I'm not looking for answers from you, because I fully recognize that you can't give them to me. Just couldn't think of many people who might understand, and you were on a short list of maybe three. I appreciate you listening and if you do have any thoughts or experiences to share, they would be most welcome. 

Thank you Daniel. I look forward to the day when these conversations might be had over a very strong drink.

-Audrey

May 23, 2015

Audrey.

Ok, finally carved out some time to reply with some depth. My apologies for the delay in getting back to you, been a ridiculous couple of weeks here.

I think that aspect of "more historic church" was the appeal for me when I was undergoing a similar transformation. I explored high church, I think it was after more discussions with Rich (Mullins) actually, and another friend I'd grown up with has stayed on that path dramatically... he's now an Orthodox priest. Kinda remarkable how we end up at such different points in the forest after exploration has begun.

I was in conversation over dinner last night with my brother and his wife who have both now successfully exited the cult in which we'd been raised (I used to be wary of using such a word like 'cult' but honestly feel so much of modern day fundamentalism is cult-like as opposed to anything resembling the 'church' so often described by Jesus and early believers). It occurred to me during dinner last night that we had so much blindness and ignorance about so many things, it's rather stunning that we'd all made it out and turned our lives into functioning, capable, contributing members of society at large. And the weight of that is significant, as you say. I've found the most help in documentaries and personal recollections by authors who share their coming out journeys, and it may be why I identify so strongly with the LGBT community now... that idea of living a lie, of denying the very core of one's being to those nearest oneself... that's some dangerous and deeply harmful psychological battle scarring right there. So the question "am I even Catholic" resonates with me in the sense that I traveled along quasi-christian lines as I explored more about what I believed and what I was skeptical of and where I was certain I disbelieved, and all along I wondered "am I even Christian anymore" and then, after many many years of asking that question on a wily basis I realized that I wasn't. It wasn't in me. Like find the point in the ocean where the blue ends and the black begins, you know that at some point it was (is) blue, and it's definitely now black, no question about it, but there's no timestamp on that event. It's gradual. And for many in my life the pull (allure?) of belonging and belief has held them steadfast in the faith of their fathers. I just know that as some point for me I could no longer look myself in the mirror and pretend I believed, and I honor my truth and integrity above any facade. I didn't want to be party to a lie anymore.

However, I don't think the answer is an Ultimate Truth, for all people everywhere. I think it's personal. I think each of us knows which part of the divine spark is within us and needs to be honored and revered, and which part is mere pantomime and empty pageantry.

Also, essential oils are not quackery... like all things they can be fundamentalized and abused. :)

I have always viewed myself as the Doubting Thomas figure in my family and group of friends. I absolutely have to put my fingers in the holes in his hands before I'll entertain belief.

I suspect becoming a parent is a huge part of this transformation. One would think that Billy's cancer diagnosis would send any normal human being into a bit of soul searching for a season.

When you say "if I became an atheist at this point" I think that reflects the same thinking I was countering above... I don't think there is a single point in time that I became one. Also, I think the definition of atheist needs some revision, as I was raised to believe that to declare oneself and atheist meant, effectively, committing the unforgivable sin of blasphemy against the holy spirit. I now understand "capital A" Atheists to be anti-theist in a way that was taught to me about all non-evangelicals, and view my own atheism as a required description when referring to the alternate... I KNOW I am not a theist anymore, therefore I am by definition an a-theist. I am an atheist with regard to thousands of other gods who had come before, I just eventually went one god further in my disbelief than most of my family and friends at the time.

There's a process by which the scaffolding of the faith of my youth is dismantled and put away in storage for good. For many those planks and frames are torn apart early in life, for others they get challenged at college, and for me I had to wait until I was ready to ask those questions and put the rest of my life on alert. At the time, belief in my search was the only thing I *could* trust, since there were so many people who were invested in the outcome of my existential journey... ulterior motives and all that.

Agnosticism and atheism are two different scales. One measures knowledge, the other belief. Therefore, I don't have that belief currently, so I am an atheist. I'm open to changing my opinions on that and reassigning the title used to describe my belief (or lack thereof), but I also think that the knowledge of whether there's a divine being who is the source of all things—or, at the very least, larger than our existence—is ultimately unknowable since it is, by definition, outside our ability to measure and comprehend... I am therefore an agnostic non-theist. Gnostic non-believers claim that the lack of a god, in particular a theist (or maybe deist god), *is* something that is knowable and provable. To them I say "good luck!"

Also I missed a payment on my exorcism license, so anything I perform in that realm these days needs to be held in the strictest confidence. The elders are merciless in their mission to search and destroy apostates like me... ha!

I definitely wish that strong drink you mentioned were possible. Let's find a way to make it happen someday, somehow.

I'm following along with the creation of your current recording project with great interest, now that I've enjoyed a peek behind the curtain as it were. I do truly hope it's going splendidly, even if it's challenging for you. Working these things out with any kind of public scrutiny is not something I would have ever willingly signed up for. Good on ya.

"Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it."

very best to you and yours,

Daniel

Corresponding with Daniel gave me a much needed, albeit brief, outlet and safe space to confide my truest fears and questions and doubts. I didn’t feel that same safety to be that vulnerable with a substantial number of religious and Christian people in my life; expressing Doubt actually gave me an invitation into deeper relationship with many of the people in my life. Did some friends drift away or recoil when they realized the extent and seriousness of my wondering if All Of It was true? Most certainly. Did expressing my doubt enrich and fertilize what would turn out to be some of my most fruitful relationships today? Even more so. Any religious group or social community that requires us to mute ourselves or mask our real feelings and fears in order to have belonging is not being a safe and nurturing Home for us. When I found a deeper and wider space for that in my relationships with Marshall and Daniel and other people who had either divorced the Church or never married her in the first place, it gave me even more pause than I was already experiencing, and I had to wonder—why had belonging ever been been dependent on belief in the first place?  

When had religion become for me a rigidly codified belief system enshrined in absolute sanctity? I realized in writing to Daniel and conversing with Marshall in those early years of my shifting that I hardly even knew the answer to that question for myself. I didn’t understand then how or when I had become calcified in belief like a fossil—I only knew what I had been fed, which was the narrative that Christianity had been preserved from doctrinal and dogmatic error by the Holy Spirit; and which version of Christianity? Whichever iteration of it one happened to be practicing, of course. It all had started feeling as though we’d divided ourselves into camps by personality or culture and building gods in the images we saw reflected back at ourselves by those we felt comfortable around. I loathed this. And yet…inside the acknowledgement of this reality, I underwent an even more important shift in my understanding of who/what God might be.  

Maybe there is no way to see God except to make God in our image, through our lens, and experience what life is like with that God around. With wisdom, time, and healing might come additions or subtractions to the image; or perhaps, through tragedy or heartbreak, the image might be shattered altogether. And when we put all the pieces and all the images of God that we have made into one big mosaic, maybe it might give us a reasonably interesting and/or accurate idea of who or what God might be.

So do we all make gods in our own image? I think we do. And even if that is true, is that really so misguided? What other options do we have? I was raised to think that God must increase and I must decrease, but the older I get and the more I learn about what it is to be alive, human, awake, and conscious, I think the main problem might actually be that we do not see ourselves as big enough. If we truly understood that the Self, the one single Self, takes up residence in our sinews and in our intestines, in our stumbling yet resilient genetics, in our intelligence, in our creativity, in our faith, and in our doubt—there would be nothing left to fear.If All is One, then what fear is there in feeling Doubt? If I am God playing hide and seek with itself, like Alan Watts says, then everything—my mistakes, my fear, my doubt, and my wonder—it’s all a part of the beautiful game of Life. Every day, in every way, I am coming to life. I recite this while tapping my breastbone with all the fingers on my right hand joined together. Every day, in every way, I am coming to life. This idea brings me inner peace. Whatever has happened in my life, from the mundane to the atrocious to the blissful and everywhere in between, I get to experience it and learn from it. I don’t really need any more cosmic meaning than that. It’s all happening. I’m here. I’m breathing. Every day, in every way, I am coming to life.