Barriers

A few months ago an old friend sent me an email. I was best man at his wedding, we lived and worked together for years, shared a lot of miles on motorcycles, survived being broke. But that was nearly two decades ago and I am a wanderer. Still, he was a good friend.

He is also a Christian, as was I at the time.

So one day an email pops up from my old friend, and I was kind of glad to hear from him. It might have been better had I not. We traded a few emails back and forth but he was pretty hostile. Apparently I am a bad person now, a Pharisee, self-indulgent, self-absorbed, hedonistic; drifting and looking for something. I shared part of what I had learned with him only because he asked, explained what I could - but it was a waste of time. He simply assumed I was lying to him and said as much. I couldn't be really happy or satisfied, I had to have fallen into some kind of "sin". He never responded to my last email.

Oddly enough his daughter and I had a quick exchange just a few weeks ago. At least she signed off with a snide remark about how I must be putting in a lot of effort to avoid god. My affront? I had suggested that, if her faith was helping her cope with the rough patch she was in, then she should cling to it. But if it wasn't maybe she should consider that faith doesn't always make things better.

There are other Christians in my life that treat me with an underlying disdain as well. It isn't a universal response, there are exceptions.  But it is certainly the norm.

It strikes me as sad that we can't even talk. I'd like to think I am hearing what they mean to say. I used to believe the things that they do, I am familiar with the doctrines and the prejudices, the ideas and the assumptions. It is pretty easy to anticipate what will be said. What I never anticipate is the hostility with which they say it. Somehow, after years of friendship and sometimes many a shared hardship, I am the enemy. Yet I have no desire to talk anyone out of their faith. Why should I? Sure they hold doctrines that often lead to people being hurt, but that happens in politics and economics at least as often as it does in religion. Ours is a young species, we haven't got much of anything right yet...religion, politics, economics, or even science for that matter.

One of the primary reasons I left religion is that it required that I hate too many people. It wasn't put in just those words of course. There was a lot of talk about love. But the bottom line was just a chosen few got eternal love, the rest burned in hell.

As it turns out I wasn't very good at loving back when I was a Christian, and I am only marginally better at it now. Most of the time people simply baffle me, believing things that are clearly mistaken, (again as much in things political and economic as religious). Most seem completely unwilling to entertain a new thought or give way to a new idea. If tomorrow someone came up with an economic system that actually worked really well, capitalists, communists and socialists would all hate it with equal passion. The perfect political system would be loathed as well. Just having a conversation without pissing everyone off is a trial these days.  I have no idea how one gets around to sharing love.

What kind of love is it when no one even hears what the other person is saying? As soon as I say I am not a believer, or a capitalist, socialist, liberal, or conservative, most people could care less how I feel. What I do doesn't matter either. I can make room in my home, share anything I call mine, help with any good project, and it means nothing at all.  What matters is I don't agree with what they believe which must make me the arrogant one, the lost one, the hateful one.

Nothing, it seems, will change their mind.  There is no way to crawl over the barriers.