The First Noel

I dread Sundays with a special dread.
For at times, quite suddenly, in stillness, in music, the realization of a love betrayed sears across my heart in a flash of unexpected pain.
I sing mechanically, entertaining myself with the task of finding a harmony, or perhaps merely the sound of my own voice. And suddenly I find myself shaping the words to a song which I have sung just a few years or months ago in a passion of adoration and trust, and the stabbing sense of loss brings tears. 
I think as little as possible about religious faith during most weeks. I generally succeed in focusing on things that have more pressing interest or import to me right now. My marriage, my job. Things I need to get done. Creative hobbies- gardening and homemaking, cooking and planning special meals, writing, painting, homesteading, sewing and collecting antiques- dreaming the life I want to live and create for my family, trying to forget the things that hurt or worry.
Yet there's an internal voice which won't be silenced entirely ever, which raises itself at moments of confusion like this to wonder if everything that passed before, my whole life, my whole way of viewing the world, can really have been only a shadow and a dream built on a false system of belief.
To describe the Christianity I remember as a 'system of belief' seems so sterile.
Mustn't there be, somehow, somewhere, existing in some form, something that is God?
Can't we find Him, know Him? Does He care about us?
Will I ever trust again, ever 'worship' again, ever find any concrete meaning in the Universe greater, more noble than myself to demand sacrifice and loyalty, to give hope and serenity in exchange?
This beginning Advent season is the worst, the most agonizing, because so recently I loved it so dearly.
How can it move me, still, so powerfully- the beauty, the harmony, the exquisite balance and detail of the great Story? It bathes the history, literature, art of my culture, of all Western Civilization, in the reflected brilliance of its colors and light.
Not long ago I was a Christian repulsed by my religious community and its practices, wracked by doubts. I think now that I am an agnostic in love with Christianity. 
At this season of the year the wonder deepens- the joy, the solemn mystery of this faith attain their climax. 
Into the darkness and the cold, across the miles of silent snow, through the heavy gray clouds and mist or the icy brilliance of our million stars there comes the soft glow of candlelight and the glad sweetness of their singing, growing in strength, pushing back the night to the very blackest edges of the universe. And the old names seem to shine with a new radiance- Adonai, Emmanuel.
Messiah.
This year, for the first time, I stand apart entirely, outside in the barren dark. Without, an icy wind rakes through the emptiness, and the windows of their churches, bright with candles, vibrating with song, throw this new grief into stark relief.
For unto us a child is born. For unto us a hope is given. 
There is such a hopeless sadness in this loss of faith- so much weariness and confusion, even anguish in this journey out of Christianity. That vanished faith, imperfect as it was, immature and at times self-serving was built upon a sincere and hopeful love.
There is excruciating loneliness. A lifetime of relationships are in flux- changing, fading, vanishing entirely. I can't replace the friendships, don't know how to plough through the distance and experience community in new and meaningful ways.
The beloved, familiar melodies of Christmas make this isolation tangible, make the solitude a humming in my ears and a bitter taste in my mouth.
I forget my frustrations with the churches and Bible studies, forget their blundering and lack of nuance or compassion, their ignorance and incurious complacency, their distrust of art and intellect, their click-bait religious and political screeds on Facebook that murdered the last vestiges of my respect and I feel only a desperate envy.
I envy the simplicity of their belief.
I envy their sense of belonging.
I envy their joy, even as I doubt its sincerity.
I envy their Savior, their God-Man, their God With Us.
I envy their Christ Child, snug in his manger.
I no longer believe in Him, but at moments like these I am forced to accept that I love Him, still, with an absurd and tortured love.
Lord, to whom shall we go, when there are no words of eternal life?

The tossed empty space/ Of cloud rack when the moon has passed away

     At first it was a relief- the freedom- the release of that long, fierce intellectual tension between what she believed and what she knew to be true. At last she could gaze with quiet eyes on the shouting and posturing from pulpits, the forced intimacy and saccharine emotionalism of flocks and know herself to be utterly apart from them all without the old guilt, the old surge of confusion.
They repulsed her, exhausted her with their heartiness and jocularity, the strained smiles and artificial sympathy or agreement they demanded of one week after week.
But there were other moments, heartbeats of still beauty when she was alone and the world had ceased to jostle and roar around her when she felt keenly the depth of her loss. At these times she was caught, as always, by the delicate coloring of the sky, the arched loveliness of cedar boughs stretching overhead, and the emptiness of it hammered at her heart.
Before, there was the glory of gratitude, the delicious sense of complicity with a creative God, this artist God poised always in exquisite concentration upon each detail of His world, who spread His treasures before her in the solitude and silence as though he were gladdened by her gladness and her wonder.
She was lost now in this pathless maze of uncreated beauty, this blur of art without its artist. The joy was gone.
There was a weight in this new, tired cynicism which dragged at her with a dull ache. She couldn't un-see what she had seen- that her lifetime of dogged faith in rigid, carefully crafted doctrine- all her finely tuned dogma, the passion, the tenderness, the repentance, all these triumphant centuries of church history with its tales of shining heroism- were built on nothing were all insubstantial and unsubstantiated as air. Only her belief in them had imbued them with life, and this earnest belief had faded and then vanished entirely.
The betrayal cut so deep, was so rooted in pain and abandonment, that its aftermath was paralyzing.
She could not rebuild, could not construct a new framework of faith. The world was empty of magic of symbolism- only its bewildering, meaningless loveliness remained.
Impossible to revel in her liberty. Empty to accept the smug congratulations of those others who had wandered, like her, from the fold, many of whom seemed to wriggle and gambol like puppies in the excess of their delight in their own cleverness, their assurance that only their keen intellect and deep wisdom had made possible their escape.
She turned to the familiar landscape, the gentle trees with their lace-like intricacy, their tracery of twigs as fragile and dainty as the bones of birds. The exuberance of flowers, the ecstasy of light and shadow in a grassy field were waiting, unchanged. She clung to their beauty in her anguish of loneliness and found at times more agony than solace. They seemed so distant and lifeless, so separated from the warm and living personality which had once seemed to animate the universe.
The isolation only seemed to grow in intensity.
Each day she lived the same shock and despair as she realized that her hypocrisy and silence were the last links with the only world she felt at home in, as the weight of her deferred unmasking crashed in upon her. She despised the old world and loved its inhabitants. She cringed at their triteness, their clumsy speech, their absurdity, but she could not bear to break loose definitively from their warmth, their stability, their familiar reassurance. She still craved their approval and respect. The world she saw outside, its materialism, its secular citizens, its vivid scorn for her roots repulsed her no less than her past. She stayed, utterly alone, and the thought of escape remained one of utter loneliness.

She had always felt a deep core of quiet, a silent watchfulness within her. In the old days, it was a vibrant silence, a source of strength and compassion, an inner rest.
Now she was trapped in the quiet in a kind of mute despair, choking back any expression of the grief that throbbed in her head and writhed in her belly. There were all the things which must not be spoken aloud, not to him, not to them. There was the futility of speaking unheard, unwanted words. There were long nights of strangled tears and the harsh, frantic days when she longed for merciful darkness. She clung to silence, curled up protectively upon herself, desperate to hide her tapestry of naked nerves from further torment. In the end, the silence bound her, left her crouched hopelessly cradling a dark and secret shame, a tired disillusionment with existence. Life was strain, every muscle tensed against a coming rejection, a final separation from the only friendship and community she had known.
Her very body mocked her, betrayed her, bled her into utter weariness. Its brokenness locked her behind new walls of isolation, separated her from the comforting physical world. There was no god whose passing cloak she could clutch at in the midst of a crowd, no hope that faith in divine mercy would restore her. 
Even suffering was meaningless. She felt an object of ridicule. Self-pitying, melodramatic, absurd in a world of shifting allegiances and doubtful honor.
She dreaded their pity and their prayers.
There were words for the gathering darkness, the plodding misery, the raw emotions, the exhaustion. Depression. Anxiety.
They twined themselves inextricably throughout the fabric of her lost faith, but the weaving was still too narrow, too recently begun and too haphazard for her to discern any pattern.