But it's a serious question. If God is at the centre of traditional religion, how can anyone function there without it? Aren't you living a lie by saying you are still a part of the religious world?
To deal with the last question first, I have only been coming to terms with this new small-a atheism for a few weeks now and am not aware of any religious rule that says you must immediately be public with every religious, or irreligious, experience you are undergoing. If it seems pertinent to the conversation, I will share my experience. Secondly, this may turn out to be simply a "glitch". By this time tomorrow it could be gone as easily and silently as it came. Am I obligated to throw out the baby at the first sign of the bathwater getting cold? Thirdly, I don't know that this IS an irreligious experience. Moments of doubt and absence, and even depression and anxiety, are a part of the religious experience itself.
Christianity has been the most "out" about this experience, and has written for centuries about the different forms that it may take. St John of the Cross' "Dark Night" has become so famous and widely discussed that, despite being rarely actually read, most people get the gist of it. The term "dark night of the soul" has been happily borrowed by other religions to replace foreign language expressions in their traditions that would have no meaning for English speakers. I make no claim to be such, but Contemplatives and Mystics have an experience that is said to come after the initial Dark Night and the Unitive Experience in which the merger becomes so complete that both God and Self disappear. Judaism also has a tradition of a Dark Night though it is less commonly acknowledged.
http://suite101.com/article/dark-night-of-the-soul-in-christianity-and-other-religions-a242173
http://www.nonduality.com/berna.htm
http://www.spiritualteachers.org/b_roberts_interview.htm
Judaism also has a tradition of a Dark Night though it is less commonly acknowledged. Being a communal people, rather than an individualist faith, Jews tend to experience things en masse. For most of Jewish history Galut (Exile) has been the motif by which profound alienation and dislocation was understood. The idea of God's withdrawl from Israel on account of sin was always there; Then my anger will be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them and hide my face from them, and they will be devoured. And many evils and troubles will come upon them, so that they will say in that day, 'Have not these evils come upon us because our God is not among us? Deuteronomy 31:17
The idea of God's face being turned away was balanced by the belief that the Shekhinah, God's Presence, would never totally abandon Israel. It would follow Israel into exile like Rachel, weeping for her children. Not until the advent of Modernity would this source of comfort be lost. Karen Armstrong, in The Battle for God describes the Jews who were forcibly (or genuinely) converted to Christianity in Spain but then failed to find acceptance in Christian society as the first modern atheists. Like midair acrobats, they had let go of one swing on the trapeze, and, being prevented from grabbing the next one, they had tumbled into nothingness. It was a totally new kind of experience. They moved between two worlds, never wholly part of either.
If the light side of Modernity was the Enlightenment, the dark side has gone by no one name... Colonialism, Capitalism, Existentialism, Communism, and Fascism have all been put forth as contenders...but perhaps Nihilism captures it best. Nihilism, the belief that nothing really exists or has any ultimate meaning, was the child of loss and the parent of a thousand misfortunes. It is from Nihilism that what Jung called "Odinic impulse" toward destruction came. For Jews, and others, that path ultimately ends at the Holocaust.
http://beamsandstruts.com/bits-a-pieces/item/248-robert-harrison-on-the-dark-side-of-modernity
http://lists.lib.keele.ac.uk/lists/8898524E-416B-AEBB-3586-D197315C0B93.html
http://jmreligion.wordpress.com/2009/11/07/modernity-and-the-holocaust/
http://www.newdawnbooks.info/Reviews/Pagan_Resurrection.html
(a strange book, but quite well researched and an easier read than Jung directly for the layperson)
It is no coincidence that Elie Wiesel's account of the Holocaust was called "Night". Even the Shekhinah seemed to have gone in the wake of the Holocaust. While individuals and smaller groups had previously experienced such despair and distance from God, always Judaism as a whole had absorbed those who did not disappear into Gentile society. In just a few short years, two thirds of European Jewry were gone. The three million odd survivors were too much for the rest of the shocked Jewish world to absorb. A few left for the Gentile or secular world, but most felt it was not possible to run there...the Nazis had tracked down and killed even partial and non-Halakhic Jews (not Jewish according to Jewish Law). The Jews had been attacked as a People, not as a Religion. With an additional five to eleven million non- Jewish victims, it remains, nearly a century later, an enigma. The Final Solution has no final answers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_theology
It had once been possible to lament the abstract sufferings of previous generations, and recite the sins that brought their fate upon them, whether in this life or in another. This abstraction was no longer possible for most and those few who clung to it, naming Secularism, and abandonment of Torah, as the sins that brought the Shoah down upon them, have been the object of scorn and fury ever since. Some Jews could no longer find it in them to blame their ancestors for their sufferings either. If this took blame out of the picture, it also took a strange comfort away. To believe that you could have prevented a tragedy in the past, is to believe you could prevent one in the future. Guilt was a bulwark against utter helplessness in the face of chaos.
In my own small, private and incomparable way, I wonder if this was not what happened to me. Five years ago I entered into a wonderful state of ....well, something without a name....a oneness with God and all creation without losing anything of myself but what was never mine to start with. It all came to an abrupt end in a car accident. I lost that immediate connection that had meant everything to me. I was in exile....a sort of limbo. Yet there was a residue of God left behind. I felt like a homeless person, though I stayed in one place. Rootless, without connection, and searching for what I had lost. Unable to cope with it at the time, I left my conversion process and set out to look for another community. Yet I didn't find one. I found Modernity everywhere I looked and rejected it again and again.
Tired, I tried to accept something of Modernity....have a "normal life". I thought I felt something of God again in my acceptance of fate. I settled into the life that presented itself to me....but I missed Judaism so often, and it seemed to stalk me about, unwilling to let me go. I met a "nice guy" and was ready to settle in. I felt God again, and felt that He asked of me to give up my demands and forgive the world its imperfection. Then Mr Nice turned back to Modernity....to addiction, to Communism, to a sort of unrecognizable Christianity, the kind I can only imagine existed in the 1930s. He turned both anti-Israel and anti-Jewish and spoke of the need for immediate revolution, no more slow change. I now know that is the legacy of his Mennonite past. He ran off with a married woman, even as he became a "Christian" but not before doing and saying unspeakable things. She had been a friend, not a close one, but part of my wider circle. Fittingly, she was an atheist who had named her children for pagan gods, including the god of war.Jung would have been prouder if she'd named him Odin. Social onlookers chose to "not rock the boat" and looked aside, saying nothing and continuing to socialize with my betrayers. They didn't want to "judge", you see....it wasn't their business, after all.
Perhaps in those days I felt a miniature version of what the Jews of Europe felt. For friends and neighbours, people you trusted, to turn on you. For onlookers to hide their eyes and pretend they don't see, or to make excuses for those responsible. For the larger world to be callously indifferent. To ask yourself what you have done to deserve this?...and find no answer. It might be a comfort to blame myself. It might give the experience meaning. But I cannot think like a pre-Modern person any more than I can think like a Modern anymore. I cannot go back, nor can I accept the New Age version of victim blaming. I have spent 13 years in the process of leaving Modernity in some form or other, yet had never quite been able to totally let go of the swing. Now I was certain of the need to leave, immediately....but where was I go? One simply does not walk out of Modernity.
Even more certain was I of what it means to be a Jew. I understood now how some Jews had turned totally against Gentile society and Christiantiy, Each time I drove past the massive Christian television building that housed the office of the therapist who encouraged this new "Christianity" and its cruelty, I gave it the finger. I suppose in rejecting Modernity I ought really to spit and pronounce Yiddish maledictions. The Yiddish I can live with, but the spitting would wreak havoc on my upholstery. I admit that I shrink now from anyone who says they are Christian, as well as anyone who says they are Marxist, Socialist, Communist, a pacifist or a peace activist. I mistrusted all the latter groups with good cause even before this last. It can no longer be helped, it's now ingrained. And the poor fellow at shul who made a joke about the Communist Haggadah, I very nearly didn't speak to him ever again in case he was serious!
It is fitting that the sole Christians I was able to remain friendly with and admiring of are traditionalist Quakers. The Religious Society of Friends was among the few groups that gave no support to the Nazi cause, and sent members in at great risk to rescue Jews. While they don't exactly embrace Israel, and deplore some of its policies, I have never heard among them an antisemitic word. Not from their activist/Left wing, nor from their Christian end. If it's there, it is a minority view and I have not experienced it. Nor have I experienced it from Muslims, though I know it exists among them...but those are other stories.
I have fallen into that strange gap. I walk between worlds, not yet part of any. Rejecting Modernity but stuck fast in the Modern World. In that strange limbo of the forcibly converted Jews. I was told that God is at the margins, in the places where one thing becomes another yet find a terrible Nothingness here, instead. Yet it is forbidden in Judaism to give up hope. Even without God, or with God's face so hidden I cannot find it, I still believe in the merits of Traditional Religion. I still believe it is the best way to live. I didn't come to it out of faith, or emotional distress, nor by a search for an external Authority to hand my tired brain over to.
I was brought to it by asking a quintessentially modern, anti-authoritarian and scientific question, and then following the trial where that led me. Along the way I found something more.
It's true, Religion is less "fun" without God. There is no impetus to persue it from within, and no "high" of the least sort when you accomplish anything in it. It ceases to be an adventure and your prayers taste like ash in your mouth. You have to search for meaning in a new way. I could walk away, but where to? Is there any more meaning in the routines of work, or the grind of chores? Of course not. So where? To some thrilling addiction? Have an affair? Smoke a joint? Enter the Nihilism of modern "freedom"? I already know that slavery, and want nothing to do with it.
My always Atheist friend asked, why religion? If the Mystic just ends up at Ain Sof, at Nothingness anyway, why bother? Because, God or no, evil does exist. Existentialism may have tried to legislate it out of our vocabulary and consciousnesses but when confronted with it we still know it just the same by the way it makes our skin crawl. Touching it changes people, but if I let it take away the core of me forever, if I give up the life I know is right on account of it, then evil wins. And with or without God, I have no intention of letting that happen. It may defeat me, but I don't have to hand it the victory.
http://www.newkabbalah.com/D-DarkNight.htm
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