The Yearning for Religion

Honoring the ache

Photo by Samuel Jerónimo on Unsplash

I am, for the first time in my life, religiously unaffiliated. It would be easy for my fellow nontheists to assume that this is cause for celebration — that I must feel free for the first time in my life as if I have just escaped a horrible arranged marriage.

Nothing can be further from the truth. Yes, my religious life has often been tumultuous, disastrous, and exhausting. But have you ever been addicted to nicotine? Have you ever felt that irresistible need for a cigarette? That restless, nagging, persistent yearning? That is what I feel for religion at the level of my soul.

But religion ties you down, the secularists argue. Why be bound when you can be unbound? Why be imprisoned when you can be free? Oh, my friend, that’s the whole point. Religion confines us, and that’s why I need it. It provides freedom because it is limiting. Having a home boxes you in, but a roof over your head is better than none at all. The universe is a terrible wilderness — we need some shelter against it.

There is the double loneliness that many of my fellow atheists perceive this yearning as weakness, alien, and even threatening. Last night, as I was meditating on this ache in my heart, I recalled a poem by a medieval monastic which was set to music by Samual Barber:

Ah! To be all alone in a little cell with nobody near me;
beloved that pilgrimage before the last pilgrimage to death.
Singing the passing hours to cloudy Heaven;
Feeding upon dry bread and water from the cold spring.
That will be an end to evil when I am alone in a lovely little corner among tombs far from the houses of the great.
Ah! To be all alone in a little cell, to be alone, all alone:
Alone I came into the world alone I shall go from it.

To ache for religion is to wish for the metaphorical confinement of the monastic cell, to yearn to feed upon dry bread and drink plain water. What madness is this? Surely, this must be a sickness in the modern world, to desire such poverty. There is the loneliness of being without a religious community; there is the compounded loneliness of not being understood for wanting it.

Sometimes, this ache for a religious home borders on painful. Often, the ache is for Christianity. I’ve been rereading the Chronicles of Narnia, and it is a reminder, not of all the ways Christianity hurt me, but of all the best parts of my childhood and youth. Sometimes, the ache for Christianity is so great that I have to stop reading. Aslan the lion was the avatar of Christ to me, and I still wear a lion ring — an heirloom from my grandmother — as a remembrance of Aslan. I may not believe in him, but I can remember him.

Joan Tollifson

recently described her own ache for Christianity, and I resonated with it so intensely that I could have written the words myself:

I felt a deep connection with Jesus and the way he befriended working people and outcasts, as well as his message of love, compassion and forgiveness. I was moved by his humanity, his suffering, his open heart. I felt the presence of God. I loved going into empty churches and cathedrals—these places felt alive with a deep sacred presence. I had a secret fantasy of becoming a monk. Christianity has a warmth, a heart quality, that has always drawn me, along with the way it embraces both transcendence and our everyday humanity.

Later, she describes the power of Christ on the cross:

The primary symbol of Christianity is a torture instrument, the cross, with God himself in human form nailed to it. The whole story of how Jesus was betrayed, arrested, tortured and killed—and then how he rose from the dead—which I take symbolically, not literally, or we could say, spiritually, not physically—is a profound message of how we move through suffering to redemption and joy.

But, for me, as for her, Christianity has always been an uneasy fit. The social aspect of Christianity is intolerable, but that’s bearable compared to the intellectual hindrances I face. I can’t force myself to believe things that I think are untrue: that Christ was physically raised from the dead, that a supernatural realm is superimposed upon our own, that God is a trinity. I cannot “live as if” something is true. My commitment to integrity doesn’t allow me to lie or bend the truth.

My only solution is to honor the ache, to find beauty and significance in the need itself. I am most unhappy when I scramble to find the place where I can fit, the home where I can finally be bound. I experience a reprieve from the suffering when I return to the ache, befriend it, and rest in its light. Maybe peace isn’t found in connecting with another religious system. Maybe it is found right here, right now: the one place from which we can never escape.

Wendell Berry speaks of this restlessness and confusion, and I return to his words often when life becomes bewildering:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Is this sustainable? I don’t know. Community, meaning-making, ritual, and symbols are necessary for survival. I will need to find them eventually. But for now, it is enough to respect and be present to the ache. This is where my work begins.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments. If your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post. Please share this article with friends if you enjoyed it.

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