The Secret Sorrow

A Eulogy for God Go to any bookstore and look over the shelves on death and dying. What will you find? Books on grieving the passing of a parent, the loss of a spouse or sibling or friend, the untimely death of a beloved child. Even the loss of a pet. Books on the dying process. Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief. Hospice. The denial of death. Medical descriptions of the most common ways we die. And, of course, stories of personal tragedy—and of hope rising from the ashes. All good books. Wonderful and helpful books. What will you not find on those shelves? You won’t find a single book about mourning the ultimate loss: the death of God. You won’t find such a book in Religion or Psychology, or the rapidly growing Atheism section. It bothers me. I think: Shouldn’t there be at least one? I mean, doesn’t God die every day somewhere in America? When God dies, there is nowhere to turn for solace or community, even for a kindly and understanding ear. There are no spiritual guides, no psychological models, no personal stories to comfort and assure us. Yet, for some of us, God’s death is a singular, unprecedented, unspeakably painful loss, encompassing every emotion, every stage or aspect of grieving known to unfold when someone real, someone near and dearly loved passes away. Except this is a species of bereavement that we must, I suspect, keep carefully hidden—not just from others (for so many individual and cultural reasons) but often, and more tragically, even from ourselves. Grieving the death of God is, therefore, a secret sorrow. It must be borne alone in silence; shrouded, like a lifeless body, in darkness. But what if people who feel like us are all around us? Hundreds or thousands or millions. We just don’t know it. We cannot identify them. Because no one utters the unspeakable. Atheists are, or so I hear, the single most vilified minority in America today. We are “godless,” by definition. Not only are we immoral, or amoral at best, we must not have the same sorts of feelings as other people. How could we possibly feel anything but relief or joy at being done with God? We are, after all, rejecting God, aren’t we? Surely we must feel nothing but antipathy for God, for religion, for spirituality. Mustn’t we? Why on earth would we feel bad when we ourselves have chosen not to believe in God anymore? How absurd. Well, maybe most of us don’t feel bad. Maybe most of us walk away and never look back. Maybe, like former lovers, we succumb to hatred, looking backward with disgust. Maybe, seeing all the damage done by so much belief, we want nothing more than to rid the world of faith. And maybe most of us never felt a single pang of sadness or loss. Maybe. But not me. After God died one cold November night in 2003, I grieved. I wept. I felt lost. Someone with whom I had lived for more than thirty years was dead. Suddenly, without warning. Someone I had loved. Someone very real to me. Closer than my own breath. Someone whose still, small voice had spoken to me in the hollows of the night, whose mysterious and caring presence had accompanied me through so many dark times. But no more. It was incomprehensible. How could this loving and incredibly personal Other be gone? No matter what my rational and scientific mind told me, I still wanted God like I want the warm and undeniable pressure of a kiss. No one really understood what I was going through. Even trying to explain myself was overwhelming. I felt stupid, or guilty. As if I ought to be apologizing for God’s death. I mean, hadn’t I actually killed God? So, I stopped trying to explain myself. I quietly slipped out the back door of the benign and progressive Christian world to which I had belonged, and closed off my heart to the magnitude of my own suffering. For several years, I denied and repressed and pretended as best I could. But my unfinished business with God kept coming back, lurking in the shadows at the periphery of my consciousness, jumping at times right into my face, flattening me for hours or days. Eventually, I knew I had to open to my grief, to let it to come out of hiding and say its piece. I came to realize that I needed somehow to honor this death appropriately. To offer a eulogy of some sort. To give God a funeral and a final resting place. This odd book, it turns out, is my eulogy for God. It’s a “eulogy” (literally, “to speak well of”) because I have nothing bad to say about God or my religious past. It’s a eulogy also because it recalls and celebrates the most life-giving thing I learned from God: compassion for my own wounds. What’s more, publishing this book and sharing it with you is, for me, a public ritual and communal act. Thus it represents the long-overdue funeral or memorial service I never held for God. I wrote this book for you, too, even if you’re just curious about what it might feel like for one to let go of God after a lifetime of seeking. Finally, obviously, I wrote it for me, as part of my own healing. It has been an extended exercise in listening to my own wisdom, the Teacher Within, as some call it. I’m a writer. It’s how I make sense of my life. The book is “odd” though, because it’s distinctly personal and particular, chaotic and redundant and inconsistent at times. Embarrassing even. But that’s okay. I’m trying to be completely transparent. Somehow I think that might be educational. Might even contribute something a bit sloppier, less cerebral to the endless debates between science and religion, faith and unbelief going on today. It’s odd also because of the form it takes. After trying for a year, at least, to figure out how to write a eulogy for God, I realized two things. First, I couldn’t do it. And second, paradoxically, I had already done it. By that I mean, I had already written whatever it was I felt I needed to say. It was there, mostly in my journals, but also in scattered bits and pieces of paper lying about the house waiting to be gathered together and listened to on their own terms. Like my previous book, Museum of Voices, I have not written anything specifically for this book. The chapters that follow were all written for some other reason, or no reason at all. Only after looking them over for a while, in a quiet moment, did I understand what I had captured. You will hear in these pages the sound of my voice—a voice, indeed, of confusion and sorrow and meaninglessness, but also, at times, a voice of mindfulness and acceptance and humor. And ultimately, a voice of belonging to the world, this world, just as it is. A world without God, so far as I can tell. But not without love, or wonder, or moments of joy and meaning. And hope. My hope, in fact, is that publishing these reflections might help bridge the chasm of misunderstanding, the apparent dearth of empathy, that still divides those who believe in God from those who do not. Let’s find a way to live together in this world more peaceably, okay? We could start by letting go of the delusion that we’re so very different, after all, whether we call ourselves nontheists or agnostics, naturalists, believers or cosmic vagabonds. Underneath the superficial labels, we’re all human beings. We share the same DNA. We all feel pain and grief. We all need kindness. We are all, in our own ways, “spiritual,” if by that we mean alive, aware, and trying to make sense of our little lives in the greater scheme of things. That, in the final analysis, is the common ground on which we stand. We could, therefore—as maddening as it may feel at times—try to understand one another’s seemingly indecipherable brainwaves. Whether we agree or not, we could listen. And we could hold our judgments a bit more lightly. Naïve, perhaps. But that is my hope.