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Nave[l] gazing, i guess
In typing out this list I notice that none of it directly engages the usual atheist objections (proof, problem of evil) at the level in which the objections are typically framed - indeed none of them make any sense except through abandoning or demolishing that frame. But for point 1 [promise of forgiveness and repentance], which included a deep-seated nihilism from my teenage years that I never outgrew, I might not have broken out of it myself.It's been a little over a year an a half since I was last at a church service in any meaningful way.
I've come to the realization that - or, rather, have had a much harder time ignoring this understanding I've had since 2014 that - these objections were never dealt with at face value and my continued active participation reinforcing the contrary belief was the only thing really holding them at bay.
Which leaves us with 1.
I have no recollection of any part of my adult life where I was not either fleeing (or rather hoping to flee) from some aspect of my past self, or content with a newfound Role and perceived Progress in fulfilling it. Being a Christian and doing my part at our parish fit perfectly into this framework, especially as a complement to everything about my work that was failing to live up to it (which, being work, must be allowed to fail if anyone wishes not to be destroyed by letting their own hustle consume them).
But that would not have been enough if it weren't for another part to it.
One thing I never explicitly mentioned with respect to 1: January 2014 was the time of my breakup with my last girlfriend, after months of inability on my end to commit or "man up" towards an end of taking the relationship to the next level. Towards the end of it I was convinced that I had made enough mistakes to have rendered myself not only unworthy of love but also incapable of love, in an existential sense of being condemned to be nothing but impulses and vices stuffed into a face and a name, with nothing behind any of it that was fundamentally human in any way that mattered.
For the first time I learned to fear the existential, consequential, not-arbitrary-punishment-by-wrathful-God version of hell.
This specific framing of my ontological beliefs fit perfectly into what the Church was offering. It certainly helped that I'd been reading Fr. Stephen at the time and my beliefs were being moulded into that frame the whole 2013 leading up to that point, informed in part by similar things I'd encountered (and partly internalized) many years earlier in Sunday school.
But what, really, was that thing that I was afraid of?
- My approach to sexual and romantic relationships was still primarily informed by all the horrible pickup-artist nonsense I'd been reading and trying to improve my life with previously. You know, the sort with the negs, the stringently maintained emotional boundaries, the methods and self-help that was designed ideally to get the adherent laid with as many women as they wanted. It was absolutely clear I needed to repent of this, but I did not have the clarity of mind back then to completely divorce myself from it which meant L and I were in a very bad place emotionally.
- At worst, I had this nagging fear that at the end of it all I was truly Nothing - some kind of not-quite-P-zombie that had no real worth as a sentient being. It was not a rational fear and may have been conflated with the fear of the meaninglessness of death.
- The "incapable of love" thing was... okay, I am feeling like this was a thing that went really far back, but all I could remember of this angle from before adulthood was some really wild teenage crush stuff that got out of hand in my head. I don't know what the fuck I am or was or had been talking about, but some notion of some kind of profound, fundamental lack in ability to connect to other people was involved.
There's the "love is an action" stuff that I'd tried to follow for years hoping it would develop into better things, but it's never really... done that? Instead, each time was either a deliberate and highly artificial force of will or the task itself was done as a matter of habit. There was never any additional layer of joy that was independent of merely taking part in a job well done. Once something was no longer needed, I had no issue dropping it.
In the past year or two I've encountered more writings about people who were sociopaths but still wanted to do good and be right with people, wanted the best for those other people and were putting in the effort to accomplish on purpose what other people appeared to do naturally. Understanding this - and letting go of any lurid thoughts that there were people out there who were truly, objectively, subjectively, fundamentally Not People and I was about to find out I was one of them - probably helped heal this part of me more than any other change in belief system.
That said, however: how much of this really is true inability to connect, and how much of it was an implicit need to refuse to be able to connect, based on both a lifetime of internalizing "I'm a special individual and I'm better than the other people around me because I'm special" and a lifetime of executive dysfunction causing me to disappoint everyone by being unable to fulfil my commitments at the worst times?
Which is all to say this: the shit I was running away from, what I thought were deep and basic parts of me that needed divine intervention to remake in the same way pure water needed a miracle to turn into wine, was a poorly-defined mix of bad ideologies, existential overthinking, possible mere neuroatypicality and brain dysfunction, and some genuinely bad shit that I'd gotten myself into but had clear causes, reflected specific things that I had done or failed to do, and could and should be addressed on those terms and neither needed to nor reasonably could be "prayed away" without that direct engagement.
But I don't think I could have gotten anywhere with any of that if I hadn't broken down a shitton of limiting beliefs in ways I believe, given the tools available at the time that would not have faced immediate and effective resistance thanks to those limiting beliefs, only this path through Orthodoxy could have done.
And for that I remain grateful.
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