I Did Not Want to Leave

Here is what nobody tells you about leaving organized religion: you do not have to throw out God. You do not have to throw out Jesus. You do not have to throw out spirituality or meaning or the sense that there is something larger than you. What you can let go of is the man-made system that told you there was only one way to access it. The building. The hierarchy. The rules that had nothing to do with God and everything to do with controlling people. You let go of the middlemen. You keep the conversation.

I had to figure out Jesus on my own terms. Not the Jesus that was packaged and sold to me by people who used him as a tool to keep me obedient. Not the Jesus that came with a list of rules and a threat of hell for breaking them. The actual Jesus — the one who flipped tables and walked with broken people and said things that terrified the religious establishment of his own time. That Jesus is still worth knowing. But you have to separate him from the institution that co-opted him, and that separation is some of the hardest work you will ever do.

Figuring out God on your own terms means sitting in the uncertainty. It means being okay with not knowing. It means admitting that the certainty you used to have — the certainty that felt so good, so safe, so solid — was never as certain as you told yourself it was. It was inherited certainty. It was someone else's certainty that you absorbed because you were born into it. Real faith, the kind that is actually yours, starts on the other side of doubt. And getting to the other side of doubt means walking through it. That walk is hard. But you do not have to do it alone.

I sat in a peyote ceremony. I am not going to pretend that was comfortable or easy or something I recommend to everyone. But it cracked something open in me that religion had sealed shut — the idea that God might be bigger than any building, any book, any institution. That the divine might not care about your denomination or your dietary restrictions or whether you showed up to the right building on the right day. That maybe — just maybe — God is in the conversation you are having with yourself at three in the morning when you are asking the real questions, the ones you were always too afraid to ask out loud.

Your spiritual path is yours. Not your parents'. Not your pastor's. Not your culture's. Yours. Maybe it includes God. Maybe it does not. Maybe it includes Jesus in a way that would surprise your old church. Maybe it includes meditation, or nature, or silence, or ceremony, or nothing at all except the honest attempt to be a good man in a complicated world. What matters is that it is honest. What matters is that it is yours.

The freedom of finding your own spiritual path is that you stop performing belief for other people. You stop going through the motions because that is what is expected. You stop pretending to feel things you do not feel in rooms full of people who might also be pretending. You start having a real conversation with whatever you believe is out there — or whatever you believe is not out there — and that conversation, however messy, however uncertain, however uncomfortable, is more honest than anything you ever said in a pew.

I have been through the religious system. I have been through the psych ward. I have been through the peyote ceremony. I have been through the marriage separation that happens when you stop believing what your wife still believes. I have been through all of it. And I am still here, still standing, still figuring it out. I do not have all the answers. Nobody does. Anyone who tells you they have all the answers is selling something. But I have the experience of walking through the fire and coming out the other side, and sometimes that is more valuable than answers. You are not alone in this. I am here.