Presenting "faith journey" aka existential crisis

Every Sunday from now until January, I'm meeting with a group of Catholic women for personal formation, community discipleship, and event planning.  We will facilitate a women's spiritual retreat after our last meeting.  The dozen of us went through the same retreat last month, facilitated by women who had met together all of last year.

Event planning is well-rehearsed.  Community discipleship is new to me in terms of spirituality, but otherwise not that different from my experiences in other goal-oriented groups.  Alverno College prepared me well for both of these.

The primary way that personal formation is achieved through these meetings is through a half hour presentation, followed by "affirmations" from the rest of the group.  Most of the retreat consisted of these presentations, edited and refined throughout last year's meetings, and then reflections on them both alone and in small groups.  The two leaders of my group, seasoned facilitators, will give their presentations again and then give some light guidance while we dozen prepare our own.
These presentations will focus on each individual's personal "faith journey," how each person got to where we are now.  Guidelines are loose, though based on the presentations at the retreat most of these women speak almost exclusively about their relationships with their parents, their husbands, and their children.

It's only been a day and a half since the first meeting and I've already turned this into a full-on existential crisis!  Go me!  I'm such an overachiever!  I signed up to be one of the first presenters partly so I won't have to think about it for more than a month, and partly + selfishly so I can give a little lesson about good public speaking skills right away (if one more person clicks her tongue after every sentence, I'm going to scream).  The more I think about my journey the more I delve into gender and feminist theory, liberation theology, and nihilism vs. existentialism.  This sums up my progress thusfar ("ppl" = people):

Here is this unusual opportunity to talk about myself openly before a group for a half hour, and... this is very cheesy... if I talk about theory, then who am I?  If my developing plan to speak about my journey consists mostly of concepts that exist outside of me, then what does that say about me?  The debate and contemplation of these ideas will continue after me, the same can't be said about relationships (I wonder how many people identify through their relationships out of a fear of mortality?).  But if I end up impacting these studies through academia, does that reflect on the quality/value of my life?  If I don't, does that imply failure?
It's not that people, places, and events aren't important to me, I just can't imagine filling up more than 15 minutes with talking about only them as a reference to my self.  But these concepts, I could - and do! - go on and on and on.

At the first meeting the other day, each person summarized their personal goal as an individual in the group for the year.  Mine was "be an agent of change."  That tends to be my goal/role in Catholic communities altogether, and it's what I hope to achieve through grad school (next year???).  The retreat highlighted how alone I feel as a whole human being in these communities and I don't expect that to change as long as I aim to facilitate change.  I'm just not certain what it says about me as a whole human being presenting oneself through theory.

Millennials leaving religion

I was just listening to the "Keep the Church Weird" lecture by Rachel Held Evans and it was like lightening struck.

Rachel Held Evans says what I've been saying for years: evangelizing to millennials does not work because we have learned to avoid anything that seems to be an advertisement. Advertising is cheap and shallow, the exact opposite of what spirituality and religion should be. And I've not been the only person who's been saying this, Kaya Oakes made similar points in her book "The Nones Are Alright." Those who say they are "spiritual but not religious" leave many parts of mainstream religion behind including the contemporary commercialism, and this departure is largest among millennials.

Think of how mainstream American culture treated millennials in the late 90's, when we were in middle school. The Spice Girls, N SYNC, the Backstreet Boys, Tiger Beat magazine, claire's, etc. Because the young adults at that time had both expendable income and a modicum of autonomy unseen in previous generations, we were targeted in advertising unlike ever before. This was also when "NeoWicca" became popular among young adults, and became increasingly commercial. Perhaps the Spice Girls are the best example of how extremely millennials were marketed to; the idea of a commercial girl group was formed in order to compete in pop music, and then women auditioned to fill those roles (source). Advertising became more obvious as well, with the celebrities most popular among young millennials blatantly flaunting their sponsors' logos. The film Josie & the Pussycats highlighted this in a tongue-in-cheek manner. All of this advertising worked well when we were 10-15. I argue that the trend of wearing things "ironically" in the late 00's was a way of maturing out of that. "I got this Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirt out of a dumpster, I'm wearing it ironically." The idea of actually supporting popular brands was so odious that millennial hipsters made it blatantly obvious that wearing those brands was a joke. And if you were not in on the joke, that meant you were a sell-out.

So what does this mean for the religious bodies so desperate to bring the millennials back to their churches? The techniques that worked so well for big name brands in the late 90's worked then, but not now. The techniques that existed ("worked" is an inappropriate term for a social trend that denied efficiency) ten years ago won't work now. Frankly I don't know what will bring millennials back to the churches. But working harder at enticing us back than at sincere service to the poor is certainly not the way to do it.

God vs. Humankind

I've written before about the abusive parish in which I was raised.  In the years after I left that parish, I was very angry at God.  How could God allow such horrible cruelties, especially upon children?  How could these Christians preach about compassion and divine love out in public, but in private lock children in their basements without food or make children kneel on broken glass?  In my mind, largely because these abusers had told me so for so long and so violently, there was no distinction between God and them.

Although my relationship with the Divine continued, it was very narrowly compartmentalized.  MY God was loving and giving and powerful, THEIR God was malicious and preyed upon the weak.  Great pains were taken to differentiate myself from organized religion altogether.  Anger, obsessive defensiveness, and passive aggressive vengeance dominated this time.

After college, I mended my relationship with a whole God by separating God from humankind altogether.  This was when the healing process went from painful to soothing.  All the boundaries began to fall between God and I.  Could this have been done if I hadn't put up such a large wall between other people and us?  Probably not, as at that time the only people I knew who were interested in spirituality at all were very aggressive anti-theists.  Ultimately, I wasn't going to allow anyone to damage the new, awe-inspiring relationship I had with God.  And the most direct and effective way to do that was to separate God from humankind altogether.

That doesn't seem to be working as well anymore.  The need for spiritual community has arisen regularly for the past few years, only to fade away as I refused to make myself that vulnerable again.  Now that I'm seeking and finding community, though, I'm questioning if that boundary should still remain up.  The last thing I want to do is to let down my barriers only to have someone or a group of someones give me good reason to put them back up again.  As to seeing God present in any human being, that is a long way off yet.

Anti-Theist vs. Spiritual

A recent trend in my life is that most of the outspoken atheists I know are less compassionate than the outspoken theists I know, who are in the minority.  This trend coincides with a shifting of my active spiritual development from recovery to exploration.

For many years, I shied away from theists (save for NeoPagans during high school) because most of the ones I knew had used spirituality/religion to manipulate and hurt people.  My personal search was that of a victim/survivor trying to get away from trauma.  Ideas of What's Going On, commonly referred to as God to the detriment of theological language, were separate in my mind from the terrible people around me.  Blame the music for the douchebaggery of the dj?  Blame the art for the snobbery of gallerist?  No, I try not to mix the unmeasurable with the measurable so it never made sense to me to blame "God" for the acts of humans.  Other people can come to their own conclusions.  Nevertheless, it took a long time for me to stop judging theists.

After years of theological and philosophical study, summer '13 was when I chose to stop being a victim/survivor and to begin being a practicant, however curious and hesitant a one. Although I have yet to actually talk to anyone at any of the parishes that I have visited - including the one I've found that promotes both compassion and intellectual search - largely because I still distrust dedicated parishioners in general, I have opened discussion of spirituality/theology with friends, family and appropriate acquaintances.  The trend I find today is disturbing.

At this point I should make a distinction: "belief" is a word that I shy away from using.  A religious belief used to mean a lifestyle (traditions, symbols, holidays, values, languages, rituals, etc.) that a person practiced.  What a "believer" actually thought didn't matter; an atheist was simply someone who didn't practice what any established religious community practiced.  The meaning of belief changed when our culture changed away from separate groups of lifestyles.  The understanding of belief as an idea that's accepted as measurable reality, an understanding promoted by both anti-theists and fundamentalists, is relatively new.  I hate to say it, but I find that this definition cheapens the personal meaning that a person can discover - whether it's through religious practice, scientific research, or something else altogether.  In any case, when I say "atheist" I mean a person who refuses any religious affiliation in all aspects of life, and when I say "theist" I mean a person who regularly participates in religious practice.  Most people fall somewhere in the middle.

What a person accepts as reality/truth, whether it's 100% scientific evidence or angels, really doesn't matter to me.  It's frankly none of my business, nor are my "beliefs" anyone else's business (though I'll gladly discuss it with any interested, non-judgmental parties).  But the trend among many of the vocal atheists I know today is to harshly judge anyone who isn't as reliant on science as they themselves claim to be.  What is the point of this?  I can agree that certain ideas are, for lack of a better word, stupid: arbitrarily attaching doctrine to something mundane and trendy.  But who does more harm, the person who prays before every meal or the person who refers to pray-ers as cattle?

It's common for anti-theists to deride all religion altogether because of atrocities done in the name of religion: the Spanish Inquisition, Al-Quaeda, the Exodus (ex-gay "therapy") program, witch-hunts, etc.  To affiliate violence with religion, either a specific one or in general, both devalues the benefits of religion as well as shifts the focus away from actually solving violence.  I've met atheists who advocate genocide of all theists, I've met people who are atheists because scientific research brings more personal meaning to them than anything unmeasurable, I've met theists who win religious community service awards while locking children and dogs in their basements without food or water for days, I've met people who began volunteering at poverty-stricken nursing homes because The Virgin Mary "told" them to.  The religion isn't the point, the practices of both compassion and personal meaning are the point however they are brought about.  What disturbs me is that many of the very atheists who blame religion for cruelty are beginning to act out the same hostilities.

I used to block out theists because the only ones I knew were malicious.  Now, I try not to categorize people through their practices - and I don't want people in my life to line up into patterns of spite that way again.  That does appear to be the trend, though, among many of the atheists I've been meeting the past couple years. As I establish myself as a practicant rather than as a victim/survivor, it is a priority to distance myself from those who would put me back into that state.  After all, it seems to me that anyone who thinks less of me because I find personal meaning through spiritual practice would also think less of me because I find personal meaning through art.  They're both unmeasurable, personal, nonverbal, harmless exercises that I enjoy and have spent years studying.