atheism for lent, day 44: deny your god to gain salvation

It’s here, y’all. The final day of Atheism for Lent 2023. Basically a semester’s worth of university philosophical study packed into 44 days. I’m a little stunned that I managed to do the whole course for the first time (my third try!). It feels good. I’ve accomplished something extraordinary, I’ve learned a metric crapton of new viewpoints, and I’ve gotten yet another humbling peek at how much I don’t know.

It feels really good. I can’t wait to see how it all percolates and transmogrifies in me.

So, let’s delve into the material for our final AfL’23 reflection.

We’re looking one last time at the documentary A Guide to Making Love by Peter Rollins and Helen Rollins. The two clips Peter offers us explore the idea of “a self-divided God.”

In the first clip, Peter builds on the work of Simone Weil, whose mystical atheism sees God as a kind of “non-enjoyed treasure” that stimulates human desire without ever satisfying it. To her — and as we saw yesterday — “standard” atheism doesn’t go far enough. This atheism names God “non-existing.” But for Weil, “God” is “a non-existing thing”; “God” is the name we give to the fundamental void (the Lack) at the heart of reality, and this void is what generates and maintains human desire. This desire is what gives life meaning, moving us forward, giving us something to strive for.

Desire, then, that which gives life meaning, is sustained by nothingness — not by the items, careers, relationships, habits, philosophies, religions, riches, or substances we fritter away our energies to acquire. But once we acquire these things, we still feel restless, unfulfilled. Melancholic. Like children who tire of the new toys ten minutes after unwrapping them beneath the Christmas tree, we tire of the earthly things we were promised would make us happy. Before we had them, we were depressed, despairing of never hitting the make-me-happy-target we set our sights on. But then we do hit the target; we achieve the goal; we get the promotion, the financial remuneration, the relationship we pined for. For a brief moment, we gain happiness…and then it pales. The thing we achieved or acquired has not, in fact, made us whole and complete. We sink into the melancholy of a dream fulfilled that does not fulfill us.

“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.”

–Plutarch
(attributed)

To move beyond the frenzied need for and pursuit of these earthly things, we must embrace the ontological void; we must embrace this Lack we know by the name of “God.” Not because God will “supply all our [physical] needs” but because God-the-Lack births desire and, therefore, births meaning within us. Here, we encounter not the absence of God, but the God Who Is Absence Incarnate. Here, we gain insight and even peace in the realization: ALL THE THINGS are divided. ALL THE PEOPLE are divided. ALL THE GOD is divided. We are NOT all One, but we ARE all together in our not-one-ness. We are not all One, but we are “allone.” This, then is the art of making love: we create love within ourselves and between each other by standing with and helping each other in our inherent dividedness, generating spaces for each other to explore that bittersweet vulnerability in the utter safety of compassion, kindness, and tenderness.

“To be human is to be otherwise than what we are, always suspended between who we are and who we’d like to be” (Rollins). “Gurus” on every corner — prophets, drug dealers, politicians, bosses, self-help influencers, preachers — offer us reconciliation between the two, an escape from our “angst” via innumerable methods of becoming who we want to be. Take this pill, speak this mantra, say this prayer, get baptized this way, read this book, do this workout, watch this video. “Eat this fruit, and you’ll be like God.” Eden’s satanic serpent was only the first in a very, very long line of salespeople telling us exactly what we need in order to make up the Lack within us and within the universe.

But giving ourselves over to these methods is a fool’s errand, as illustrated in the story of Oedipus:

Driven by the Delphic prophecy that he’s destined to murder his father and marry his mother, Oedipus flees his home in order to avoid his fate. What he doesn’t know is that he was adopted — and in his flight, he quarrels with a stranger and kills him, not knowing that he has just killed Laius, his own father. Oedipus spends his entire character arc trying to become a certain person: he wants to be an honorable, moral man and king of Thebes. All he has to do to achieve these aims is answer the Sphinx’s riddle and marry Queen Jocasta. Oedipus gets exactly what he desires: the heroic feeling of saving Thebes from the Sphinx, the hand of the queen, and the kingship. Only when he gets what he wants does he realize that he has destroyed his own life by murdering his father and marrying his own mother. Fulfill your dreams, young man! — so that you can learn that they will never fulfill you.

We can see ourselves as Oedipus; Jocasta represents the “sacred object” we believe will make us whole and complete; and any obstacle to attaining our Sacred Object is the father, Laius. Like Oedipus, should we ever rid ourselves of the obstacles in our way and achieve our aim, we will discover that our perceived success is nothing but a disguised failure.

So…what if the Sacred Object in question is God?

One of the thoughts from AfL’23 that sticks most strongly with me is the Christian mystic idea that anytime we say the name “God,” what we’re saying/thinking/imagining/loving falls immeasurably short of the reality of God. No matter who you are, you have some idea in your mind of who, what, where, when, and how God is and isn’t. This idea we have of God is false. It doesn’t even begin to touch the unimaginable nature of the ineffable God. And what do we call false gods? We call them idols. To worship the God you hold in your mind — and you can worship nothing else, if you are to worship God — is idolatry. There’s no getting around it.

In A Guide to Making Love, Peter tells the story of Seamus, who hears the voice of God telling him to go out gambling. Seamus does so, winning round after round as God tells him exactly which moves to make. Finally, after winning an impossible round of roulette, Seamus exclaims, “I won again?! I can’t believe it!” And the Lord spake unto him, saying, “I can’t either! You’re the luckiest mf I’ve ever seen!”

While hanging on the cross, God — the Sacred Object, the Transcendent Absolute — screamed his pain and anguish at being divided from his Self. God: not undivided, but self-divided. “What if God was one of us?” (Joan Osborne). Well, God is.

In both the sacred and secular worlds, we’re drawn to this idea that there’s a Sacred Object that will make us whole and complete, ridding us of the trauma that is living itself. Ridding us of the Lack. But the truth is more complicated. To get any sort of peace at all, we must let our personal losses — our individual Lack — touch the Lack that is built into the universe. We have to embrace the chaos inherent in the cosmos: the chaosmos (which Peter has spoken of in other areas of his work). When our individual Lack touches the collective, universal Lack, we find comfort in our discomfort; resolution in our contradiction; fullness in the void.

And what we enter into then, that is what we name “salvation.”

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To those of you who have followed me from AfL’23 to these blog posts: thank you. I’ve gotten such lovely feedback from so many of you on how helpful my posts have been throughout this journey. I appreciate you all so very much! Thank you for reading, and thank you for letting me know that my words meant something to you. That’s all any writer ever hopes for, really. Just to know that the words resonate out there somewhere. You lovelies have helped make these 44 days an especially significant journey for me, and I can’t thank you enough. You’ve made me feel less alone.

To Dr. Peter Rollins: THANK YOU for all of your work, both in AfL and elsewhere. Thank you for your intentionality and your passion for sharing all of these thoughts and ideas and ah-ha!s with the world. I truly appreciate your mindfulness and your willingness to explain and answer questions. Thank you for your care and concern for the world.

I don’t know how yet, and I don’t know how long it will take, but the Atheism for Lent practice is transforming me and will continue to do so. These 44 days have resolidified my commitment to questioning, doubting, seeking, and plunging farther into the dark depths. I’m excitedly looking forward to finding out what awaits me on the other side.

XOXO,

Courtney