Year of Faith

One of my dream careers would be to become a Christian priest, probably protestant (lots more free will, a lot less tempting young boys, apparently).  I’ve always seen it as an opportunity to learn the true length and breadth of Christian doctrine and how it relates to other religions and to people directly.  I could be the spiritual head of a diverse community of believers, and lend spiritual and moral wisdom to numerous personal issues and problems, and lead compassionate initiatives internationally and throughout the community.

I’ve always seen the priest as a mix of two things that are very important to me- accumulating knowledge and wisdom, and then using that knowledge to help people in a very real and immediate fashion.  There are so many opportunities to help people deal with their faith and their understanding of God and their religion, to be able to have these kinds of conversations with the troubled and the curious.  This kind of prospect genuinely excites me.  Now I might have a completely unrealistic and romanticized view of the priesthood, but that’s the point of a dream job, isn’t it?

Slight hitch though, not a big problem, but something that may or may not come up once in a great long while- I don’t believe in God. It would be an unorthodox kind of life to lead, to be sure, an atheist priest.  Someone who is supposed to lead people to God and understand God and yet has no such faith.  Probably wouldn’t go down so well with the congregation, I fear.

Stranger still though, it’s never occurred to me that this would be detrimental to my understanding of the Christian faith, God, or Christ.  Knowing these things inside and out, as I am want to do, and knowing how to interact and converse with people in a religious sense seem to be the real necessary skills for a priest.  So long as I could cultivate these things, as well as the skills necessary for the other minutiae of the priesthood, isn’t that enough?

I honestly believe that being able to deal with a congregation from the point of view of an atheist would be a real boon rather than a blunder.  An atheist knows how difficult it is to accept the idea of God, they know the ins and outs of all the arguments, they know how absurd faith can be, how hard it can be to square this faith away with reason, and they certainly know how religion can be criticized and assailed from without and within.  I love religion and God just as much as the average Christian, I just don’t believe He exists, which changes the kind of love to be sure, but I’m still very much caught up in the whole thing on a  day to day basis.

The reason I bring all of this up is that I recently read a news story about a fellow who is actually living my dream.  Klass Hendriske turned more than few heads in the Netherlands and throughout the Christian community in 2007 when he published a book called Believing in a God Who Does not Exist: Manifesto of an Atheist Preacher. He obviously came under a lot of scrutiny from the powers that be (or may not be, in this case) but just recently the Protestant Church of the Netherlands declared that they will not be taking any action against Hendriske, saying that his views are actually sympatico with other liberal theologians within Protestantism.

So no burning collar, no cassok striping, nothing ontoward at all.  As you can imagine this news was rather uplifting for this little dream of mine.  I doubt that it will actually happen for me, but it’s nice to know that it’s possible.  Seems that the Protestants have put themselves on some shakey ground though, as Hendriske himself says, “If my view is allowed, then there’s something wrong with the foundations of the church.”  Yes Klaas, there is something wrong, and you and me both know what it is.

In any case, I’ll be looking forward to an English translation of his book.

So I’m trying to find a process by which I can update this blog on a semi-regular basis and keep my own personal journal that documents my experiences. There is a whole lot that I don’t put on this space, and that makes me feel like my lovely little blog is being neglected. So I think that I shall be a bit more regimented in keeping daily journal entries, and will put up some choicer bits here instead of trying to remake the pentagram every time, as it were. I will also use this site for reflections on current religious events, news items, etc.

Or not. We’ll see how it goes.

In the meantime I have made a bibliography page to keep track of all the books I have read or made reference to throughout the year. It was either this or try to organize my library.

I assure you, the choice was a simple one.

You can now read all about my lovely self and the lovely project in the about section.

I am also trying to get a contact page working.

Right now though, I really want to go outside.

I want you to imagine a terrific expanse of yellow, and a dark man composed entirely of right angles, with the exception of his smooth, hard-hat covered head.  This man, his head surfing at an unnatural height just above his shoulders, is bent low over a dark pile, also composed of right angles, wielding some kind of tool, stabbing into the unkown.

That is what you would probably see right now if Geocities and it’s atrocious gifs were still around.  But for now we have this, and as you have probably guessed, we are under construction at the moment.  Sorry about that somewhat pretentious opening paragraph.  I warn you that there may be a lot of that in the future.

At the moment I am trying to get into contact with local religious groups and lining up my reading lists for each month.  I want to try to get all of my preliminary research out of the way before the year starts, so I’m not spending time during the year trying to prepare for the months to come.  I won’t be able to mitigate that entirely, but there is still much to be done.

The schedule probably ins’t going to change now, and I’m going to start working on the different ‘About’ pages, one about the project and one about myself.  Perhaps I can finish those this evening.

One of my old proffessors has been invited to a Buddhist ceremony tomorrow morning, and he invited me to come along.  It is the celebration of the Amitbha Buddha’s birthday, a key figure in Pure Land Buddhism, at the Golden Buddha monastery. I was looking forward to it until I realized how early I need to wake up tomorrow.  Sounds like a ludicrous reason, but I really am not a morning person.

More to come.  So much more.

T-minus eight days. I am terrified by the amount of stuff yet to do.