Right after my first hospitalization and subsequent separation from my ex-wife in 2016, I made an attempt to reclaim my former faith. Up to this point, I had been a reluctant atheist, and I was still struggling through the ramifications of my lost faith, my lost sense of purpose and meaning. Immediately following my hospitalization, I also lost my home, my marriage, and my job, all in the span of about a week. I was completely untethered from everything I had known, and I was adrift in an ocean of uncertainty and loss.
Things in my head were still very foggy at this point. Yes, I was now on life-changing medications for my depression, and they were beginning to enable me to leave the mire of desolation I had felt for so long, but I really wasn’t sure where to go from here. I was mentally and emotionally drained, and I really wasn’t in any place to start working again right away, but I had to. I needed income, if for no other reason than to continue filling the medications that were literally keeping me alive.
I had no choice but to look at my situation as a fresh start. The bottom had fallen out of my life, and I literally had nowhere to go but up.
One of the first things I did was I started going back to church. Not to that Baptist-turned-nondenominational-to-hide-their-bigotry-and-judgmentalism church I went to before, though. Instead, I found a Methodist church to attend (after shopping around a handful of other churches that failed to even acknowledge my existence when I showed up at their doors). I was looking for something different than what I was raised under, something more liberal and progressive, and I thought the Methodist church might be that place to help me rekindle my faith.
And I attended there pretty consistently for several months. I sang the songs, I made new friends and connections, I even tried attending a Sunday School class there. The pastor invited me to coffee, which I accepted, and I ended up spending a couple of hours pouring out to him everything I’d been through recently. He was compassionate and empathetic, and we even discussed some theology nuanced to the Methodist church that I was unfamiliar with. And for a while I was hopeful.
But after a while, I stopped attending as regularly. My depression was still present, partially because I was still working to regulate my brain chemistry and partially because my life circumstances were themselves depressing. In time, I stopped going altogether. The faith I had hoped to find simply failed to coalesce. I wasn’t really surprised, nor was I really all that disappointed.
During the months I went to church there, I was continuing to grow on my own. I was working to find my feet again, and in so doing, I was starting to come to accept my atheism. I was beginning to actually identify as an atheist, though quietly, covertly. I was terrified that anyone I knew would find out. I was afraid of the judgment and the disappointment I knew I would receive. So I kept it to myself. I knew eventually I’d come out as an atheist, but at that point in my life, I simply wasn’t ready.
But by then, I was ready to admit, at least to myself, that Christian faith no longer had any part in my life. I no longer believed in the Christian God, and I found that that knowledge actually brought me more peace and contentment than any time in my life as a believer. I was free of the stranglehold that Christianity brought, free of the arbitrary restrictions and unnecessary guilt that is inherent to that religion.
I’ve come a long way since then. It’s been a little over a decade since that devastating week of my life, and while my life now isn’t entirely what I would like it to be, I can say that I’m far happier now than I was then. I’ve grown and learned and expanded into a person I like far better now, and I plan to continue to push forward to larger horizons in the future.
