In this post Shawn reflects on some of the emotions that drive his passion and work at Recovering from Religion
The Duality of Resentment and Compassion…
We have every reason to be angry, and resentful, and may well be for a very long time, perhaps even the rest of our lives.
Discovering that we believed in such utter nonsense for most of our lives, and dedicated our energy; our time, blood, sweat and tears to a fiction is reason enough.
And some of us have been abused in unspeakable and unforgivable ways. We will never forget, and any form of acknowledgement or apology from their side is far from forthcoming.
So when looking into the eyes of our former religious leaders, many of us feel a mixture of disgust, outrage and bitterness for the nonsense they spouted and we believed in for years, sometimes decades of our lives. Our minds go straight into ‘attack’ and ‘defence’ mode, understandably so.
Yet Sometimes…
Yet sometimes a moment occurs when we’ve been angry enough, for today. A slight shift in attitude may occur. Instead of only seeing reasons to be angry, for a few moments, we recognise the severity of the trap that our former religious leaders are caught in.
This can especially happen when they start getting really old and frail, when we can see death creeping up on them, as it will for everyone else:
No longer the ‘powerful’, ‘authoritative’ leaders we once respected and revered, we now see wrinkles, and perhaps a flash of fear in their eyes. Surely, somewhere buried deep in their subconscious, underneath the highly conditioned exterior, a part of them must wonder whether they too have been trapped in nonsense their whole lives, and whether death may actually be the end.
We start to perceive something different… It is as though they are trapped in a prison that we’ve already escaped out of. We begin to perceive the texture of the solid iron bars of faith that surround them.
Instead of seeing them as merely detestable, we realise they are like bugs caught in a stupendously complex web of powerful ideas.
Ideas so powerful that few people develop a sufficient mass of critical thinking to deconstruct them.
We will never let our guard down, of course. They’re not welcome in our house. And we have long since burned their holy books.
But in the long run of our recovery from religion, we sometimes start to balance a sense of universal humanity with our carefully managed resentment.
