What the...heaven?

Faint stirrings of something unidentifiable...

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where it would be possible to commit murder--or suicide--and just for the merest instant, thought about doing it? Don't be shy, speak up. I believe nearly everybody has had this experience at some point in their lives. I'm not talking about depression or psychosis that leads to brooding about killing yourself or somebody else. I'm talking about some kind of random rogue neuron firing in your brain as you're walking along minding your own business, perfectly happy and content and all of a sudden you're thinking Mortal Thoughts. And in the next instant, you've swept them free of your brain, maybe thinking (if you think of it at all), where the hell did that come from?

I'm thinking of joining a church.

I have repeatedly and with increasing irritation swept this alien thought out of my head and the damn thing keeps blowing back in on the breeze. It hasn't exactly rooted itself amongst the dendrites and synapses; I'm certain that, with determined effort, I could eradicate all traces. It becomes a question of whether or not I have the will. And oh, yeah, before I resolve to blow this thought to, ahem, Kingdom Come, I should probably figure out where the hell it's coming from.

You have to understand: my feeling about churches has long been less than salutory. I was forced into attending for a short time in my childhood and thereafter became something a little less than an Easter-and-Christmas Christian. This is possibly the worst soil in which to grow an abiding love of all things churchy: if I had been coerced to attend much longer, chances are excellent I might have found my own reasons to continue the practice; if I had subsequently attended more often, I might have come up with a reason why I was doing so. But it's easy to resist an implacable parental edict to go to church and it's pretty hard to justify going to church twice a year over not bothering at all.

Being in a church always seems to activate an ugly side of my nature. I feel very much like the outsider I am. I'll sit there analyzing every word I hear, looking for logic holes to drive entire fleets of trucks through, and often finding cause to wonder if people actually believe this stuff. The invariable "fellowship" afterwards also rings sour. I'm sure everyone else is sincere about it, which just adds guilt to the already potent mixture of standoffishness, boredom and uneasiness I'm feeling...what's WRONG with me???!!!

So to someone with this mindset, the recurring thought of "hey! Maybe you should think about finding a church to go to!" really does cause a reflexive reach for the mental broom, not to mention the mental bleach.

Because of the tradition I come from, the Christian church is what I know best, and what I run hardest away from. There are certain underlying assumptions in every branch of Christianity I've encountered that cause system crashes in my mind. Specifically, I have trouble with the following:

(a) Why would the Christian God, being all-powerful, insist on being worshipped at all? To what purpose?
(b)* Why would the Christian God, being all-loving, insist on throwing people in some kind of Hell, literal or metaphorical (or allowing people to place themselves there, which is really the same thing)?
(c) What kind of God would reject, tacitly or otherwise, people who come to Him (and "Him" is another problem) because they haven't followed certain proscribed steps? What kind of human monsters speaking in God's name would perpetuate such slander against the Almighty?
(d) Does faith in God really disallow critical thought (using faculties which, supposedly, God gave us) and insist on blind devotion to a creed?

I've come to my own answers to these questions, ones that make sense to me, and I've found it quite telling that I've had to pretty much abandon the Christian tradition in order to do it. The short form of my answers is (a) It doesn't; (b) It doesn't; (c) It doesn't; and (d) it doesn't, or at least, it shouldn't.

So I long ago rejected the religion I knew as far too implausible and strict. Despite this, or maybe because of it, I found myself trolling through a wide variety of spiritual tomes, from A Course in Miracles to, most notably, Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God series. I meant that quite literally, by the way: I really "found myself" reading these books. I found things in each one that resonated strongly with what I had always believed. I built my own personal theology piecemeal and am pretty happy, all things considered, with the construction.

But something's missing.

The egotistical side of me is sure I'm missing the opportunity to hear my own beliefs spoken from a pulpit. Certainly not to convert others to my way of thinking--I'm not that much of an egotist, and "Mine is not a better way, mine is merely another way."
A test I took on Beliefnet classed me as an "old-fashioned seeker" and defined that as someone who is "happy with their construct of relgion, but always looking for a better way to express it." That really rang true.

Also, I'm beginning to feel this compulsion to join with something greater than myself, that I might do some good in the world. That means joining some kind of group, some sort of churchlike thing.

I'm going to go about this slowly and cautiously, because I really would like to find a place I feel comfortable with. Something neither too Christian--a world I always seem to pair with "judgmental"--nor too New-Age, read-the-aura-fondle-the-crystal-become-one-with-your-astral-projection.

Updates as they happen.