Crisis of Faith

“O, that way madness lies; let me shun that! No more of that!"
-- King Lear

One of the most influential changes in my worldview came when I could no longer look at faith without seeing the seams; its construction can’t help but show. Where you are, how old you are, who sells the goods to you – these aspects are more essential to a person’s belief system than the beliefs themselves. I can’t say for certain that my parents are atheists, but without a doubt their encouragement of my faith left too many holes to hold back the floodwaters of inquisitiveness that became the driving force of my intellectual development. Had we been an every-Sunday type of family, I’m certain my beliefs would have taken a different shape. As it stands, my parents spoke of a belief in God. They even set up a proper introduction to many of the traditions of Christianity. I was baptized, though I can’t say how well it took. My brother and I attended Sunday school through our elementary years. For a while we said the Lord’s prayer at bedtime. Still, even as a child I could feel my parent’s half-assed commitment to the process.

During the fall of my sophomore year in high school, the death of my great-grandmother sparked a startling increase in my spiritual examinations. I suddenly found myself on a disturbing new plane of understanding; I was smart enough to ask the tough questions about life, God, and the like, but nowhere near smart enough to appease my anxieties myself with satisfactory answers. Christianity proved no match for my irrepressible rationalization, and I quickly realized that faith, blind faith, would never again have a place in my worldview. As this realization hit me, another clubbed me with a much darker and horrific possibility: there was no God. There was nobody looking after me, nobody keeping me safe. And if there’s no God, there’s certainly no heaven; when you’re dead, you’re done.

Suddenly, at 15 years old, I felt I was going to die the next day. I found myself doing the oddest things, like staring at the sun waiting for it to explode. If God was not there to watch out for us, who’s to say the sun can’t just blow up and wipe the entire planet out of existence? My newfound nihilism paralyzed me with a incessant sense of dread and fear and depression. In those few months, I thought I was headed for a complete mental breakdown. I slept almost 12 hours every night just to stop the noise in my head.

My parents, for all of their successes with my brother and I, didn’t quite know how to handle things. I broke down in front of my mother after finally confessing to the source of my odd behavior.

“So, you don’t want to die?” she asked, simply.

“No,” I whined.

“Well, you’re going to, Phil”

Thanks, mom. Your bluntness did wonders.

My dad had an even more difficult time, since clearly my strong adherence to reason came from his side of the family. He didn’t try and persuade me that God existed. He merely tried to make me more comfortable with the idea of death. Not the most effective line of attack for a fifteen year old who thinks the sun is about to explode.

Still, somehow the shock of God's absence slowly diminished into a numbing of the soul. I was able to start sleeping normally. I was able to stop staring at the sun. I became a regular teenager, turning my attention back to success on the football field and to my crush on a senior cheerleader.

Still, next to my quest of becoming a successful writer, my quest for faith ranks a close second. I have spent much of the past 8 years studying, reading, and questioning, in search of an understanding of the world I can live with. If I’m lucky, I might one day find one.