The New Testament didn’t get any better for Sweeney, who found Jesus to be “much angrier than I had expected…and very impatient.” I suppressed the urge to shout, “Preach it, sister!”
I have to say, that for me, the most deeply upsetting thing about Jesus is his family values. Which is amazing when you think how there’s so many groups out there who say they base their family values on the Bible. I mean he seems to have no real close ties to his parents. He puts his mother off cruelly, over and over again. At the wedding feast, he says to her, “Woman, what have I to do with you?” And once, while he was speaking to a crowd, Mary waited patiently off to the side to talk to him, and Jesus said to the disciples, “Send her away, you are my family now.”…Jesus discourages any contact his converts have with their own families. As we know, he himself does not marry or have children and he explicitly tells his followers not to have families as well, and if they do, they should just abandon them.
She detailed how she tried desperately to retain her faith, despite seeing its deep flaws. She eventually looked for God in Eastern religions, nature and love—the refuge of impersonal transcendentalists. She said she finally had to accept “what was true over what I wished were true.” This was, for me, the most profound moment in the play. I had been wishing Christianity were true, as if I wished hard enough, I could turn fantasy into reality.
Sweeney’s description of her atheist life was quite comforting to me. Right up front, she tackled the subject of death, saying that she believes our consciousness dies along with our other organs. This made sense to me: before I was born, I had no consciousness; after I die, I will have no consciousness. There will be nothing. The revelation had an instant and curious effect. The intense squeeze of time—the difference between eternity and one lifetime—made my life, and my time on Earth, much more precious. Sweeney put it like this:
I suddenly felt very deeply that I was alive: Alive with my own particular thoughts, with my own particular story, in this itty-bitty splash of time. And in that splash of time, I get to think about things and do stuff and wonder about the world and love people, and drink my coffee if I want to. And then that’s it.
Driving home from the play, adrenaline raced through my body. It felt as if I had made a discovery that made sense of my life and gave my mind some rest. For me, the play was the key I had been missing in my new worldview. I could now open the door to a new life—one without God. It didn’t feel too scary; it felt more like something new and exciting. Like exploring a new home.
In college I had earned money working as a lifeguard on the sands of Huntington Beach, California. It was the perfect summer job—guarding the waters of one of the world’s best and most dangerous beaches. I made about 1,500 rescues during my four summers there. Most of the swimmers I helped were caught in rip currents—rivers that form in the surf and pull people out to sea. Rips themselves are harmless. They don’t yank people under, they aren’t very wide and they dissipate outside the surf line. But inexperienced swimmers don’t know this. All they sense is that they are being pulled quickly out to sea. Panicking, they claw at the water, fighting in vain to get back to the beach. They tire, choke on water and go down. No swimmer can make headway against a strong rip current. But someone with ocean experience can get out of a rip easily, simply by swimming to its side. Or she can just relax and let it carry her beyond the surf, where it will quickly dissipate.
At first, experiencing doubts about my faith, I acted like one of those frightened beachgoers who swim madly against the current, trying to get back to what I thought was the safety of Christianity. But the current of truth had me and wasn’t going to let me go. When I decided to stop fighting it, I felt relief—even serenity. I decided to ride it out past the surf line and see where it would take me.
SEVENTEEN
One Story Too Many
The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example.
—MARK TWAIN, A TRAMP ABROAD
I WAS NOW a godless journalist on the religion beat. The problem that loomed before me wasn’t lack of objectivity—I knew I could still produce fair and balanced stories—but burnout. Like a homicide detective, I had seen too much. A cop friend of mine says his job is hard because he is always dealing with the worst people or people at their worst. That was me on the religion beat. And because I had developed a reputation for a certain kind of story, I kept getting great tips about unsavory people within religion. Some of the best stories never made print: the semi-famous pastor under investigation for hiring a hit man to kill his former gay lover, or the nationally known conservative preacher who took a wide variety of illegal drugs deep into each night and was a serial adulterer. Sometimes prosecutors never filed charges. Other times I couldn’t get additional sources to back up the story.
My body of work nevertheless continued to improve, earning me national awards each year. But I had developed a cynicism I didn’t like. I tried to focus on more positive stories about faith, but even that didn’t help. I had lost the reporting mojo that made the religion beat—even at its darkest—a journalistic rush. Since I now believed that God hadn’t called me to this job, I no longer felt bound to stay on the beat. The end was near.
It came in the summer of 2005, in a courtroom in Multnomah County, Oregon. Just as there is a large network of clergy sexual abuse survivors, there are also several national support groups for women whose children were conceived by Catholic priests. Most of the priests have spurned their children. Their superiors generally offer little support—morally or financially—for these kids. One of my sources had called me with a tip, and that’s how I ended up in the Portland courtroom. I was reporting on a story about an unemployed mother who had been impregnated by a seminary student 13 years earlier. She had gone to court trying to get increased child support for her sickly 12-year-old son.
Father Arturo Uribe, 47, took the witness stand. The priest had never seen nor talked with his son. He even had trouble properly pronouncing the boy’s name. On the stand, Uribe looked relaxed. He wore a white button-down shirt, gray slacks, blue blazer with a small gold cross on the lapel and an easy smile. In a thick Spanish accent, Uribe confidently offered the court a simple reason as to why he couldn’t pay more than $323 a month in child support for his ailing 12-year-old son. He simply had neither money nor income.
“The only thing I own are my clothes,” he told a Portland judge.
His defense—orchestrated by a razor-sharp attorney paid for by Uribe’s religious order—boiled down to this: I’m a Roman Catholic priest, I’ve taken a vow of poverty and child-support laws can’t touch me.
The boy’s mother, Stephanie, couldn’t afford a lawyer. Unemployed, she lived rent-free in the basement of a friend’s home in a run-down section of Portland. The dank housing exacerbated their son’s chronic asthma and allergies, which had been kept under control by 28 prescriptions over the past year. She had joined a food donation program so she and her boy would have enough to eat.
Uribe’s “having success, moving up the ladder, and we’re just stuck here, struggling,” Stephanie told me before the hearing. “My situation is not ambiguous. I’ve got DNA walking around that proves he and [his religion order] have responsibility. They are so morally corrupt.”
In court, Stephanie was flummoxed by the legal proceedings, stumbling badly as she acted as her own attorney. Many times, the judge helped her along. On legal points that didn’t matter, even Uribe’s attorney helped. But on any argument of consequence, the opposing lawyer shut her down mercilessly with rapid-fire objections. It went on, painfully, for three hours. The judge ruled almost apologetically in favor of Uribe, who was serving as the pastor of a large parish in Whittier, California. The fact was, the priest had no income or significant possessions. It didn’t matter that his order had plenty of resources; it wasn’t the boy’s father. There was nothing the law could do.
“It didn’t look that gr
eat,” Stephanie said afterward, wiping tears from her eyes. “It didn’t sound that great…but at least I stood up for myself.”
It wasn’t the first time Stephanie had been savaged by the Catholic Church. A dozen years earlier she had filed suit against the Archdiocese of Portland, hoping to get child support for her son. Then-Archbishop of Portland William Joseph Levada, now a cardinal in the Vatican and close advisor to Pope Benedict XVI, argued in a motion that the “birth of the plaintiff’s child and the resultant expenses…are the result of the plaintiff’s own negligence,” specifically because she engaged in “unprotected intercourse.” The church’s attorney later told me that he was using every available legal argument to be an advocate for his client. Legal documents filed on behalf of Levada, one of the top Catholic leaders in the world, argued that Stephanie was negligent because she had not used birth control—even though birth control is a mortal sin in Catholicism.
At first, Uribe’s religious order agreed to pay Stephanie $215 a month, a sum that was raised by $108 a few years later. But as her son’s medical and other expenses grew, neither Uribe nor his order would pay more. Uribe summed up his position in a statement he sent to me before my story was published, which had a distinctly lawyerly, not a fatherly, tone to it:
The leadership of the order agreed to assume my obligations for child support. The order has continued to do so and has provided or offered more support than I have been [legally] obligated to pay…. I will continue keeping my son and his mom in my prayers.
Stephanie said that Uribe had never attempted to contact his son—even after the boy sent him an album filled with photographs of himself and tried to interview him for an elementary school journalism project after the death of Pope John Paul II. Stephanie’s son sat by the phone each afternoon for days, waiting for the call from his dad that would never come.
“It is unclear to me just who Arturo is praying to on our behalf,” she said. “Certainly the God of my faith has no tolerance for a father shunning his own child.”
During Stephanie’s latest courtroom battle, the only spectators, besides myself, were her sister and brother-in-law. When the hearing was adjourned, I stood outside the courtroom doors, waiting to get a comment from the priest or his attorney. As the triumphant pair walked out, smiles on their faces, I introduced myself as a reporter with the Los Angeles Times and started to ask Uribe a question.
“He has no comment!” the startled attorney said. “No comment!”
“Do you want to comment, Father?” I asked.
“No comment,” she said for him.
The two stalked off and disappeared into an elevator, angry that a reporter from Los Angeles had crashed the hearing. A few minutes later, the elevator doors opened again and out they came. The attorney marched back into the courtroom and tried to get the judge to put the public hearing under seal, a request he denied.
If it weren’t so sad, it would have been funny. I could see why the Catholic Church would try to cover up the case. When my story ran, even the most faithful parishioners were shocked at how callously the church dealt with a priest’s illegitimate son who needed money for food and medicine. (The embarrassed order voluntarily provided Stephanie with an adequate settlement after the story was published.) They were equally shocked that Cardinal Levada would have his name attached to a legal argument that claimed a woman had been negligent because she had not used birth control.
My problem was, it no longer shocked me. For years, I had seen worse from priests, bishops and cardinals caught up in the church’s sex abuse scandal. Even before Father Uribe’s hearing began, I knew how it would play out.
As I walked into the long twilight of a Portland summer evening, I felt used up and numb. I wanted to be angry, but I was too depressed to muster the emotion. From a park bench, I called my wife on a cell phone and told her I was putting in for a new job at the paper.
EIGHTEEN
“Welcome to the Edge”
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him.
—H. L. MENCKEN, MINORITY REPORT
I WAITED MORE than a year to come out of the closet and tell people I no longer believed in God. I needed to let the ringing in my ears subside from the pounding I took on the religion beat and allow my new feelings about faith to solidify. I also wanted time for my emotions to settle down. I had left the religion beat—and my faith—with a lot of anger, and I didn’t want to come across as a spurned lover wanting to exact revenge on religion.
It wasn’t hard to keep my lost faith a secret because I hadn’t talked openly about my religion, except to close friends. As I began to confess to them what had happened to me, the typical reaction was shock. My loss of faith had taken me years to recognize and then grow used to, but they had to absorb the revelation in a single conversation. One day I ran into Christopher Goffard, a journalist who had been just hired by The Times. I’d worked with him some years earlier and was always a huge admirer of his work and his character. We had kept in touch over the years and had talked religion on several occasions. During our newsroom reunion, he off-handedly asked me something about my faith.
“Oh,” I said, a sheepish smile on my face, “I don’t believe in God anymore.”
“What?” he said, as if he’d heard me wrong.
“I don’t believe in God anymore, Chris.”
“But you were so religious. What happened?”
“I lost my faith on the religion beat.”
Christopher responded like any good reporter would have: “That’s got to be a great story. Let’s go have lunch soon and talk about it.”
A few days later, over a plate of chicken tacos, rice and beans, I told him my story as best I could. As I fumbled through it, I realized I hadn’t dissected exactly how I had arrived at this place. The reasons for my disbelief were all tangled up in a mess of confused feelings and blur of stories. I had always been a strong believer in Socrates’s warning that “a life unexamined is not worth living,” so I vowed to myself then to figure out a way to better understand my fall from faith.
Fortunately for me, the newspaper provided an opportunity for me to retrace my spiritual journey and publish my findings. The Times had recently started producing first-person pieces of journalism that instantly became some of the paper’s best reads. One reporter wrote about discovering she had an extraordinarily high risk for cancer and how it affected her decision to marry, to quickly have children and to undergo a life-changing surgery. Another journalist described his quest to track the source of the salmonella poisoning that had left him hospitalized. A foreign correspondent wrote about the professional and personal dilemmas he faced in Somalia because of a death threat he received shortly after two of his colleagues had been murdered. Each of those accounts was gripping. I wasn’t sure whether my story would stack up against them. I knew the stories I reported on were interesting; I had no idea whether my own journey would be. But I decided to float the idea anyway.
I e-mailed the editor who approved these pieces. There were many good editors working at The Times, but Roger Smith stood apart. He looked like a distinguished attorney with his close-cropped white beard, neatly combed hair and conservative and tasteful (especially by newsroom standards) wardrobe of suits and slacks and sport jackets. He had an unflappable demeanor and a fairness and kindness that had endeared him to reporters usually not known for their charity toward editors. He also had an eye for a great story and a gift for elevating an average piece into an excellent one. It was always an honor to work with Roger. His stories ran under the front-page banner of “Column One,” where, in theory, the paper’s best read ran each day.
Roger e-mailed me back and said he loved the premise for the piece, but that I had to be prepared to reveal myself in ways that could be painful. We journalists, by habit, are not good at revealing ourselves. We are voyeurs who live through others. We step momentarily into the lives of people, scribble down wh
at we see and then write about it in the third person. This was one of journalism’s most attractive benefits. Each day, I had a free backstage pass to a different world. Among hundreds of experiences, I have interviewed the president of the United States; stood on the infield grass at Angel Stadium and flinched at the crack of the bat as the Los Angeles Angels took batting practice; and tagged along with a paparazzo, hunting celebrities in Beverly Hills, among many other adventures.
“Report the news, don’t make it” was drilled into us from the beginning of our careers. Occasionally, when we can’t avoid it, we refer awkwardly to ourselves in the third person, as in “the mayor handed a visitor in his office a gavel and said….” Like actors who don’t break the fourth wall with the audience, we don’t break the wall that puts us in the story. But now I wasn’t just part of the story, I was the story. I had to keep shooing away doubts—why volunteer for this? The backlash might be vicious: I would be seen as a spiritual wimp, or a traitor to Christianity. Maybe even a tool of the devil. I’d be ridiculed. I’d be told I’m going to hell. Even Jesus said the only unforgivable sin is speaking out against Him.
I wondered why exactly I wanted to write this up in the first place. Yes, I wanted to understand my own journey, but I could do that by writing in a private journal. The journalist part of me wanted to do it because I thought it might be a good story. But there were other motivations. I sensed that there were other people wrestling with doubts about God and religion, but who felt alone and forced to stay in the shadows as I had done. I remembered my relief while watching Julia Sweeney’s Letting Go of God. Maybe my story could help others, too.
Losing My Religion Page 23