I guess I'm just nothing

Thinking about what happens after you die somewhat inevitably leads to the question of faith.

I don't talk a lot about this.

Perhaps that's why it's difficult to get started writing this.

There are a good number of people in my life for whom religious practice is very important. I like these people and perhaps the reason why I don't talk about this is that I don't want to come off as condescending or dismissive.

Still really hard to talk about.

If I am honest, I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't think I "know" this. I don't get up in people's face about it. I can't definitively say I have proof to show my viewpoint is true because one can't prove a negative. But I've never been given a reason to believe otherwise. I've never had any experience that has given me a reason to think anything other than what seems to be an end, well... is.

This is a sad thing, I guess. But it's hard to miss something that doesn't seem to you to exist, something that is an idea that has never appeared to take any form in your presence. Like elves or fairies, like telepathy or magic or other fantastic ideas I've encountered, these forces exists only in some theoretical way that has no impact on my daily experience. Even writing that last sentence it feels like I'm making a jab. I don't mean to. I just don't know how else to talk about it.

Sometimes religion feels like China. It's this massive and complicated place. There's a huge number of people over there on what feels like the other side of the world. They have this wholely other cultural experience. They live with an incredibly different perspective. They probably believe really different things about the world because of it. I don't think ill of them, though I do understand that I don't know them very well. I wonder about them and I wonder about their difference from me. I think about what it would be like to go and visit. I think it could be interesting and useful to get a sense of who they are and how they see the world. But fundamentally I sense that I could never really be one of them. I sense that perhaps you have to be born this way. That one must have a context, a Chinese family, that brings them into this way of seeing the world or else there will always be a fundamental schism in perspective.

My mother's parents were ostensibly some version of Protestant. They talked vague about church, though mostly in reference to when my mother was younger and the church was the center of the town social sphere. The times I can remember being in a church with them include various weddings, sundry funerals, their 50th anniversary (the party was in the basement) and that's about it. I have literally no recollection of being with them in a sacred building for a religious purpose.

Which I think makes sense giving what I learned from religion about my mother. This was my primary parent, the person who I can say gave me my core values, she was the one that instilled my sense of moral ethics. But these were not ordained in any way, they were hers. I understood from a young age that our sense of duty and purpose as her children were important. I knew that we should work hard and not lie and treat each other fairly and that loving each other is unconditional because we are all that we have in this world. I remember being 5, shortly after my parents divorced, sitting in the tiny high rise apartment my mother had rented after she moved out of my father's house. It was a studio - living room, bedroom, and kitchen all in one with the massive windows overlooking Lake Michigan. I remember a thunderstorm starting while my mother had run out for something (the drugstore perhaps?) and my sister terrified of the lightning, I remember first provoking Dale to greater terror, because I like all 5 year olds are essentially little psychopaths, and then getting nervous that I'd whipped her into a tizzy. When my mom came home I remember seeing her so concerned about Dale. She hugged and rocked her and told her it was just a storm. She shut the windows so Dale couldn't see. I didn't get punished, my mother clearly felt blame for the emotions that had sprung up in her absence however unavoidable the absence might have been.

I watched my mother and my sister and I understood that this was what there was in the world - the storm and our ability to care for each other in its midst.

I do not remember church before my parents divorce. I know that I was baptized Catholic. My father's mother, my grandma Ursuline, made sure of this. The story went that this was a battle. My mom (I think) the one putting up the fight. In the end, I suppose, they relented because she cared a lot and they cared little. My godparents are my Aunt Kim and someone else I do not remember. My sister's are our babysitter Pat McGraw and another person I do not remember. As far as I remember we never went to church as a family. As far as I remember my parents never talked about God in our house.

After the divorce there are a few scattered moments. Weddings. Christmas at Grandma Ursie's. My mother, very briefly, taking us to a Lutheran church near our house a few intermittent Sundays. I remember the pastor wore white and had a long green scarf-y thing with yellow trim. I remember he had dark hair and a round face and glasses. He looked like the neighbor in Dennis the Menace but nice. I know I went to Sunday school a couple times but almost nothing about it. After my father remarried I went to his house on weekends and it put the nail in that coffin. I remember my mom saying it was his job to take us if he felt like religion was something we should have. He didn't, I guess, and so we didn't.

I used to really want to have some kind of faith practice. I was jealous of friends growing up who seemed to have some kind of special secret, a kind of club where something happened that was a little mysterious. I can hear myself in high school giving horribly pretentious answers about this question, talking about how I had been given the enlightened position of being able to choose my religion and listing of names of different ones that I was considering.

My memories of going into houses of worship always have this tinge of outsider-ness. I always sense myself an interloper, a faker, a person who might be exposed. I am not bothered by these ceremonies. I just feel like an anthropologist watching them with an othered perspective. They are fascinating and strange simultaneously. I wonder if these things really give people comfort. I wonder if hearing words about God and his divine light make people feel better when the person they loved is dead and lying in front of them.

To me they are just words. They feel very empty.

I used to really wish I had this kind of comfort. It seemed like it would make life easier if you really believed in it. It seemed like it would provide such a lovely context for existence, such a soothing sense of purpose and meaning. I really really wanted that for a long time.

It seemed to me the way that people invest in fictional worlds. I mean this in the best sense. I mean in the way that people read and re-read and delve and mine for meaning. I mean in the way that characters become solid in people's minds. I mean the way that people know every inch of a story. I mean the way that they let it integreate and infiltrate their lives to such a degree that the story seems so real, that their minds are so able to picture and feel the narratives that they seem as if they must must must must must exist somewhere, somewhere in the universe.

I see people want to believe in these kinds of things. Feel them to take up shape and space and give a kind of meaning in their lives. I think this is what drew me to theater. The need to make people feel something so fully that it seems that it must be real, even if it is so fantastic that it is impossible to believe. 

In the end though, I understood that it was something you had to believe for it to really offer the comfort. You had to buy in to it or it would just keep feeling empty. I felt like I wasn't capable of making myself feel something to be true. It seemed like I would be lying to myself. So I just let it go. Now those thoughts take almost no space in my life. I don't know that I'd call myself an atheist, per se. I think to be an atheist you have to be an -ist, you have to have some thought and structure about what you think. I don't. Agnostic if you need a word for it, in the sense that I don't have definitive "I know that there's nothing at all and I need to make a statement about it." I have even less than this. I feel like I can't say anything about it because it's impossible. Like trying to understand the feeling of the big bang. It's simultaneously infinitesimal in duration and cataclysmically large in magnitude. Our tiny bodies are not design to tangibly understand.

I guess I'm just nothing.

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