I remember the first time I heard that phrase. B came home from college with a t-shirt he adored but had gotten a grease stain on - dead center, very obvious. For a fastidious boy, unacceptable. It had a logo and the words 'Greco Roman Cluster Fuck' on it. The phrase appealed to me. I kept it.
The other day my indigestion (you'd have to go way back here to get that reference...) asked if it was ok if he outed me as agnostic. I told him it was fine. Although I am not advertising, and I am not aggressively promoting anti-religion I have come to a solid and comfortable place of anti-religion in my personal life.
I think I have always been in a state of reasonable unbelief. But at the same time guilt ridden and struggling to be "faithful" to a 2,000 year old book written by a bunch of white guys. I'm over it.
The beginning of the end was subtle. The mother died, so the need for a structured system of belief to make sense of the anguish of life diminished. No need for a rigid structure to make sense of the world around me that felt like endlessly slipping sand. One of the last things my father and I discussed more deeply was his failure to read the christian bible through at some point in his life. By that point I was on round 2 I think, beginning in Genesis and going through to Revelation. He was impressed with that accomplishment. At that point I was still forcing belief but it was getting harder.
Two things struck home and ended the charade for good. First, Marcus Borg. Non-literal biblical interpretation makes the most - the ONLY sense. Allegory, metaphor, moral lessons. Jesus speaks endlessly in metaphor. The biblical stories work if they are moral lessons, not literal fact. Not "seven days or bust, the earth is only 6,000 years old, science isn't real" nonsense. And if it isn't literal, and there's other texts that easily pre-date it, then you're really up against it to prove that your one book is the only right one. And you are really seriously arrogant. Second, the moment when I bought a book that explained how to explain away all the inconsistencies in the book. If you need a book to explain all the things that don't make sense...if you need apologetics to explain away everything sensical, rational, logical, touchable, REAL then there has to be a problem with the system. Possibly with the foundation. Probably white guys.
Maybe three things. Hospice, though purely anecdotal. I watched a lot of people die. The most tormented were usually the most faithful. OK, four things. Feminism. Although I have denied, struggled against, resisted with siren call of feminism I simply cannot get away from "...the radical notion" that, as Marie Shear said, "...women are people". Any tome that tries to tell me otherwise is going to have an uphill battle, because I am damn sick a tired of believing that I am chattel or a second class citizen, obliged to submit to a man just because he has a dick and somehow managed to twist history to his benefit.
So there you have it.
And it feels really good to say all that out loud. But it feels really really bad to know that I should have gotten here DECADES ago. Talk about guilt. (sorry, kids....maturity is the radical notion that parents are people).
So here's my cluster fuck. Gaining credibility when you've proven yourself to be an idiot is hard. Eating crow is hard. Moving forward when you can't fix what's done is hard.
I do this thing I love now. I give natural history museum tours or I fill up a minivan with native wildlife and I travel hither and yon talking about adaptations, evolution, earth history, facts. And you know what? The truth is that the science is so amazing, so incredibly and endlessly fascinating...I love it so much. I feel like - like hospice, it's a thing I was always meant to do.
