Faith After the Diagnosis, Before the Worst

 

As I set out to write this blog, I thought, at first, that I could compare my loss of faith to losing my wife, Irene.

She died on May 8, 2024, not six months after she was diagnosed with glioblastoma—terminal brain cancer. In the end, she chose to receive medical assistance in dying. On the chosen day our kids, grandkids, and siblings—sixteen of us—gathered on our lakeside patio. It was an unseasonably warm, sunny day. We should have been kayaking.

Each of us took a few minutes to tell Irene why, and how much, we loved her. We listened to “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” the latter because Irene was that bridge for us. Irene turned to me and said, simply, “I’m so curious about what’s next.” Finally, the drugs were administered. And so, she died in my arms.

On our last vacation before Irene's
diagnosis we visited Geneva,
birthplace of our tradition.

More than two years later, I still find myself surprised by tears. Sometimes in bed, when I reach over to touch her, but she isn’t there. Or when her portrait shows up on my screensaver. I weep when, putting down the phone, there is no one to talk to about our kids. We were such a team. I feel like a caboose that has been severed from its engine and is careening the wrong way down the tracks into an abyss.

And I suppose there are comparisons to be made between my loss of Irene and my loss of faith, though I have not actually wept for that. The loss of faith actually feels more like what I felt in the months that led up to Irene’s death.

On one level, after her diagnosis, life just continued on. Mundane matters still needed to be looked after: watering the garden, getting groceries, feeding visitors, paying bills, and servicing the car. But then, on top of that, there was all sorts of unfamiliar, very hard stuff, too: brain surgery, chemo and radiation, hospital stays, waking up multiple times during the night to help Irene get comfortable, and ultimately, watching her slowly decline, both physically and cognitively.

But there was something else, too. It was probably invisible to most people, sort of like the distant approach of wildfire smoke from over the horizon. After Irene’s diagnosis I was depressed. I walked under a cloud, trying to comfort those I loved, to be hospitable to everyone who cared; trying hard to be the lover Irene needed when neither of us could see the way, clearly. It was exhausting and disorienting. I worried about the future, about life without Irene, and then felt guilty about that. It wasn’t me who was dying, after all. Irene was busy fixing old relationships, closing her business, laughing with old friends—all while being intensely kind and supportive for me. I was profoundly despondent and anxious and trying hard not to show it.

My loss of faith makes me feel similarly despondent and anxious. Living without faith, I feel like a toddler looking up from where I’m walking, in a mall, and realizing I can’t see my mother. 

Here I need to be clear about something. Though I sometimes speak of my loss of faith as a loss of God, it isn’t as if I ever felt or believed I had a personal relationship with God, like I might have a personal relationship with someone I know. I’ve never heard God whisper in my ear. I’ve never had a phone call from God or shared a glass of wine with God or Jesus. I never felt like God was a friend, like say Nick or Nandy are friends.

No, my faith was communal and intellectual. I adopted it because I was lovingly nurtured into it by my parents. I warmed to it because it was the faith of a community that really was a whole village raising me. I loved the part of my faith that was figuring out how things like the Trinity or atonement or the ordo salutis worked. I loved that it gave me a vision for what life meant, and it was full of people excited to work with me, usually in Christian organizations, to make that vision come to life. I loved faith because it made sense of the world—of both its beauty and its failings—for me.

And then, after years of inner wrestling, faith wasn’t helping me make sense of the world anymore. I lost the thread. I’ve written, in my blog, about some of the stumbling blocks to traditional faith that I’ve run into. More is coming in a book I’m writing. But the bottom line is that when I quit struggling with faith, when I simply accepted that I could no longer credit it, it was depressing. As with life after Irene’s diagnosis, I carried on with all sorts of mundane and meaningful—even lovely—parts of my life. But when it came to the meaning of it all, I was under a cloud.

I know that a lot of people who don’t believe in God don’t suffer much on that account. Many atheists have worked out thoughtful worldviews that inspire and guide them through life. And many people just never think about God or faith. Perhaps they have unknowingly bought into the subliminal gospel of acquisition, or some part of the experience economy, or maybe even in nothing much at all. They just go along and get along. They’re not wired for God, and it doesn’t bother them.

Even other ministers who have left God behind and describe what that is like in autobiographies seem quite content. William Lobdell is typical: “I like my life on this unexplored shore. It’s new, exciting and full of possibilities. I wouldn’t have predicted it as a Christian, but I now feel wonderfully free—not to go on a binge of debauchery like the Prodigal Son, but to stop wrestling with the mysteries of Christianity. I can stop dreaming up excuses for the shortcomings of my faith.” (William Lobdell, Losing My Religion. New York: HarperCollins, 2009, 279).

And sure, there is a part of me that gets this. My last congregation blessed my uncertainty about God, and invited me to explore it from the pulpit and in the classes I taught. That was life-giving and freeing for me.

Still, perhaps because faith for me was always so intellectual, I struggle, existentially, in my bones, with how, in the absence of God, life can have any ultimate meaning at all. For agnostics there is no providence—no “almighty and ever present power of God, by which God upholds, as with his hand, heaven and earth and all creatures, and so rules them that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty, all things, in fact, come to us not by chance, but by his fatherly hand.” 

I have no deity to watch over me or anyone I love. Everything is contingent, as in Bryan Walsh’s book, End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World. He describes the many ways human civilization might collapse. He lists things like another asteroid, perhaps as large as the one that killed all the dinosaurs. Or a volcanic eruption, like that of Toba, 75,000 years ago, that almost led to the extinction of Homo sapiens. Or maybe nuclear war, or climate change running amok, or a pandemic, or AI—all endings that seem plausible given recent events.

What meaning there is, we have to make on our own, without divine intervention. Looking to the future, I have no comfort in life and in death. I sometimes feel like a wounded soldier dragging himself home after surviving a lost battle.

God has disappeared. And yet, I am haunted.