It's the season of eyes meeting over the noise
And holding fast with sharp realization
It's the season of cold making warmth a divine intervention
You are safe here you now
--Lyrics from "The Atheist Christmas Carol"
By Vienna Teng
I think of a patient I met a several months ago. Byron (not his real name) was in his eighties and becoming sicker. He knew he was coming to the end of his life and seemed to accept it. He was an atheist but he welcomed my visits, and one morning, we had a lovely chat.
Turns out Byron knew a lot about the bible and about Christian theology, especially some contemporary Catholic theologians such as Teilhard de Chardin. Byron had grown up in Texas--in the "bible belt"--and was turned off by the extreme fundamentalist beliefs of the people around him. Even now, he said, he had a niece back home who always prayed for him, that he might at last accept Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Byron loved his niece but didn't feel "seen" by her. He found it hard to reconcile so many (or any) of these beliefs with his own thinking, learning, and intelligence. None of it made sense to him, and I wondered if any of it would have made sense to me had I grown up in that kind of environment.
I felt sad for Byron. He seemed so kind and open. I wondered if the God he was presented was too small for him, and if he thought his only choice was to reject a belief in God rather than reject such narrow beliefs about God.
I don't know if this is what Byron thought. These are just my thoughts and perhaps they reflect my own experience: a sense of sometimes being too confined inside the doctrines and traditions of my chosen religion when what my heart and my imagination desire is to run free: to discover what lives inside me and to proclaim what I know about God without claiming to know God . . .
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