When You Back Away You See It Differently

That picture is me, standing at the back of an auditorium, leaning against a wooden pew and wearing jeans.  I chose the picture because its blur is a perfect expression of how I was feeling about religion at the time that it was taken.

Fundamentalism was deeply damning for me.  While I was in it I loved it, I thought it constituted the boundaries of the universe and I was so grateful to be one of the chosen.  Once I started to think more carefully about this faith tradition and my own identity.  I realized that I could not be a part of it any more. 

I had a crisis.  Leaving that tradition was complex but that wasn't the crisis.  The crisis for me was more personal:  how could so many people who I thought of as loving good people not have asked enough questions?  How had they let me stay?  How had they allowed it to continue?  How had they surrendered their lives to it?

I have a colleague at the institution where I teach who often says that scholars often choose their academic discipline to resolve some deep unresolved matter that has haunted them.  I don't know if that's true, but I do know that academic life has given me the tools to step back over and over again and see aspects of my youth from a wider view.

History of religion, anthropology of religion, sociology of religion, the study of religious rhetoric.  All of these disciplinary orientations have helped me see my formative experiences as the fruits of many larger cultural forces.  And they've also allowed me to understand that every world of origin is plagued with finitude, small-mindedness and ethnocentrism.  These limitations are also the gifts that allow communities to thrive.

I'm grateful for the words, for the authors, the traditions and the lines of inquiry that have given me a vantage point to understand my own life in a way that is inflected with more mercy, compassion and understanding.

I'm thankful that we don't always have to see things in the way we once saw them, but that context and perspective can alter our visions for the better.

#50thingsofvalue