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.

My Career Under a Cloud

 

       My father, Rev. William Suk, died forty years ago. He was only 54. I’ve kept a few of his sermons as keepsakes. I read them over this week. English wasn’t his native language, and he was always a bit insecure about that. On the whole, though, the sermons are cogent and well-written. He worked hard to make them so. People appreciated his preaching.

 

        What struck me, though, was that I didn’t find anything in those sermons that interested me. They were all based on the Heidelberg Catechism—a mid-sixteenth century statement of the Calvinist faith. As a result, his sermons were doctrinaire and abstract—at least to my taste. I guess he wrote them in a different time for a different audience. In the end, I read through them as much for the bits of my dad’s self-disclosure as I did for any religious content or insight. On the whole, his sermons just didn’t speak to me.

 

       Which is interesting, because there is another, much larger group of sermons that rarely speak to me. These are the six hundred sermons I wrote and preached as an Evangelical minister in the Christian Reformed Church. What is more, the same goes for three hundred or so editorials and articles that I wrote over the ten years I was editor of my denominational magazine, The Banner. 

Me Doing My Thing

       Like my father, I spent a lot of time on each sermon or article. I always booked twenty hours for research, pacing the office, false starts, rewrites, practicing. I always tried (to mixed effect) to write in a way that would leave the audience wondering how I’d land the plane, in the end. Along the way many were published in journals or won awards in various forums. 

 

       Still, most of it—the vast majority of it—doesn’t speak to me anymore. I now think that the vast majority of what I wrote is either misinformed or just plain wrong. I pounded the pulpit for stuff I don’t believe in anymore. And so it was with much of the rest of my career—endless committee meetings, administration, catechism teaching, hand wringing over budgets and liturgies, and even much of the congregational visiting. All of this was in service of an institution whose core raison d’etre I no longer share, whose core story I admire, but no longer believe to be God’s word.

 

       So, now I look at all my sermons and think . . . what a waste. The vast majority of my professional life lies under a cloud of regret. I think about this a lot, and it saddens me. I might have been a paleontologist or archeologist—though as much as those careers appeal to me now, I suppose I’d more likely have become a mid-level white collar worker, given my naivete and immaturity as a twenty-some year old.

 

       Mind you, there are a few caveats, a few things that I think about as I try to justify my life as a preacher and editor.

 

• As I look at those sermons now, I see that I put a lot of energy into preaching love—of neighbors, social justice; love of immigrants, the marginalized, love of neighbors near and far; love of partners and children and art and more. And perhaps some of that preaching had an impact. If people love more, I don’t suppose their motivation for loving matters much. Love is love. 

 

• On many occasions parishioners felt my presence to be a support to them when they were sick, or troubled, or depressed, or mixed up, or whatever. To the degree that I lightened the load for some fellow travelers, I’m glad. 

 

• As an evangelical minister, I did other things—imperfectly. I preached a certain kind of morality—one that was more accepting and less rigid than was common among evangelicals. I worked, over time, for the full inclusion of gay people and women into the church’s life. I tried to encourage churches to be healthy communities where members could find friendship, support when needed, and kindness all about. I wrote often about the need to make churches safe places for children and women.

 

• My last caveat is the best. I spent my last nine years as a minister in a congregation that was okay with my being agnostic. I was overwhelmed by the freedom that gave me to explore new sources of meaning and new motivations to love neighbor. You will find the kernels of some of those sermons elsewhere in my blog.

 

       Still, I wish I had done something else with my life. True, I enjoyed myself, mostly. Along the way (less as I aged) I felt fulfilled. I climbed the ecclesiastical ladder with some success. My congregations were mostly happy places where I and my family were liked and appreciated. 

 

These days, though, looking back, much of my career seems like a long, wasted effort in the interest of a poor cause.  So how do I ultimately make peace with all that—leaving aside the caveats, above? 

 

Well, sometimes I think about my great grandfather Willem and his son, my grandfather Jan. Willem made a living selling groceries out of a dog cart. When that dried up, he went to work in a local cement factory. He died in his early forties of silicosis of the lungs. He didn’t have a choice. He did what he could to support his family—at least, until he couldn’t, anymore.

Dog Cart Grocery

As a result of his father’s death, my grandfather, Jan Suk, had to get a job with a farmer before finishing grade six. Of course he had to. There was no welfare in those days. His fatherless family was poverty stricken and survival was far from guaranteed. Years later, after immigrating to Canada, in the mid-fifties, his first job was loading beer trucks. Soon after and for the rest of his life he worked as a hospital janitor. 

 

Frederick Buechner famously defined “calling,” that is, what you should do, career-wise, as the intersection of two things: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep need meet.” Well, that’s a very modern and privileged notion, one that became an option for many people only because of the years of amazing economic growth and resulting prosperity that defined the fifties and sixties. 

 

The truth is, for most of human history, until not long ago, when it came to one’s life work, there was little “deep gladness,” and far too much “deep need.” Until recently, the vast majority of people had no choice. They didn’t have careers, they had work—often physically punishing, at poverty wages, and with little opportunity to move up ladders. I have learned to think of my career through that lens. Whatever I may think about the value of my sermons, I have had it infinitely better than all my grands going as far back as I can document.

 

I did not live a life defined by poverty, intellectual want, and difficult labor. Unlike my ancestors, I had privileged choices with respect to what I would do with my life, and even if I made mistakes, I really gave it a whirl. I also found a perfect partner. Our family was mostly (and still is) very happy. These days, I’m working hard to recognize and appreciate all the good things in my life that my ancestors could hardly have imagined.

 

I get that this might not sound like much to people who live life according to the rubrics, visions, and teachings of their churches. There is no great overarching vision here for the meaning of life, and no myth to support a hope for heaven or the kingdom come. I just do not believe in those things anymore. All my many years of theological study, my mastery of “Reformed, Christian” perspectives on sex or politics or the environment, all my life promoting Christianity, and especially my sermons—it is mostly dust to me.

 

And, to be honest, I am sad about that. Very sad. Looking back on sermons that no longer speak to me isn’t much fun. When I write about this stuff, or go on my daily walks, or remember how it used to be—I get depressed.

 

But as a child of privilege, at least I was free to change my mind. My ancestors never could, and they made the best of that in spite of tragedy and drudgery and poverty. Now, I am trying to make the best of it too. And it shouldn’t be too hard, given that my life was full of more opportunity, choice and ease than my ancestors could ever have imagined.

 

The freedom and opportunity to change one’s mind. It’s something we can actually do, these days. It’s a great gift, if we could only stop to examine it for what it is. And embrace it.