I'm obsessed with a pen

Really, I'm obsessed with a pen.  A few years back a coworker showed me the Pilot Varsity, a disposable fountain pen. Only now did I finally splurge and buy myself a set of three--black, blue, and purple, for $8. It writes differently than a ballpoint, obviously, but not much unlike some modern ballpoint alternatives. And it is clean. There is no leaky splatter I might have expected with a cheap fountain pen. The biggest downside for me is that it bleeds just enough through the page that it might not work for me if I want to write on both sides.

This is a really fun toy for me. I find myself writing pages and pages of gibberish and writing completely random and unnecessary lists, such as all the addresses where I have lived and every school I've attended. I even started thinking about whether to take some time to improve my truly terrible handwriting.

I've been and on-again and off-again journaler throughout my life. I might like to journal with a fountain pen because I enjoy using it so much. But I really don't need to have a paper journal again. All my journaling in recent years has been on a computer. But before I went exclusively digital, I filled a few composition books that are in a closet downstairs, some loose notebook pages that might be in a folder in the bookcase behind me, and some Word files and emails saved as drafts. I don't know if it is good that my journals since 2008 or so have all been in Microsoft OneNote, a very useful program, but one that I don't think has been updated since. (Strike that. There is a new version that I probably wouldn't pay for.)

The fountain pen is a pleasure to write with. It produces a lovely swoosh as it slides along the page and it has an inky smell that modern pens lack. I'm wondering if I should go ahead and write with a dip pen by candlelight to get a more complete retro experience.

Maybe there is a parallel to eating with plastic utensils versus fine silver. A better pen makes writing more enjoyable and makes the experience seem more important.

Spirituality for Skeptics

Unitarian Universalist minister Kendyl Gibbons has some affirming words relevant to my quest.

So many of our inherited religious traditions want to put the cart before the horse. They want to start with the vocabulary of ritual and the structures of belief before we have a chance to reflect on what it is that actually calls forth the experience of reverence in our bodies and minds, and hearts and conscience. Without that primal experience, all the rest is hearsay; it’s all rote and drudgery and guilt. No wonder we resist it, reject it, find it full of hypocrisy and arbitrary, meaningless rules. No wonder the skeptical mind and contorted conscience rebel, and contend that it must all be nonsense. Good for the mind and the conscience. Good for the heart that will not embrace merciless virtue or saccharine piety; good for the body that will not deny its hunger, or kneel to authority, or dance for the sake of a rumor. It seems to me – it has always seemed to me – that skepticism is actually the most reverent posture there is; the longing to know for ourselves for sure, not to be misled; the willingness to take responsibility for discovering what, if anything, might be actually worthy of our worship, and to give our reverence to nothing less.

An abridged version of the sermon was published in UU World. The full text and audio is available on the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis website.

Spiritual Atheism

I think I remember losing my belief in god at a young age and concluding that my nonbelief forever separated me from the world of traditional Western spirituality. Chris Stedman in Faitheist: How An Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious shows by example that nonbelievers can be part of the interfaith brotherhood and live morally-driven lives. This cracks open a metaphorical window that had been painted shut since my early adolescence. His story is a persuasive argument that there can me much more that unites believers and nonbelievers than separates them. This helped me feel a little less marginalized as a nonbeliever.

This was a jolt to my way of thinking that gave me a big psychological boost. I had been thinking and reading a little about the question of whether an atheist can be spiritual, and if so, what that would look like. And now, after Faitheist, I am stunned at how open to new thinking I feel at this stage in my adulthood. I had honestly felt that my mind had been made up about these things years ago. So before this window slams firmly shut again, I'm trying to cram in a fair amount of new thinking and reflection.

I started with a book whose title sounded right on target for my quest. But Spiritual Atheism by Steve Antinoff is a dud. Its provocative title belies its theme of straight-up Zen Buddhism. I don't think life is inherently miserable or that we are overrun with deep contradictions that can only be transcended by meditating several hours per day. I just can't see that as my path to a godless spirituality.

Tom Owen-Towle, in Wresting with God: A Unitarian Universalist Guide for Skeptics and Believers, argues richly that atheists are not a monolith. There are several atheist "postures", from dogmatic atheism, to those who are indifferent to a god concept, to enlightened nonbelievers--who Clark Wells notes reject human idols and seek truth beyond them.

French philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville's The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality is the most sophisticated exploration of the concept of spirituality for nonbelievers that I've looked at so far. Sharing Christ Stedman's brotherly attitude toward those he doesn't agree with, he states that he wrote the book not out of hatred of religion, but out of love of philosophy. And he believes atheism doesn't preclude spirituality: "Not believing in God does not prevent me from having a spirit, nor does it exempt me from having to use it....Being an atheist by no means implies that I should castrate my soul....Renouncing religion by no means implies renouncing spiritual life."

He describes his own spiritual experiences in which he feels a sudden serene and delightful sense of oneness with the world. These rare experiences, he says, have been the most joyous moments in his life. I don't know if this is what I am looking for, or what spirituality could look like in my life. I haven't had the kind of experience he describes, and frankly, it seems foreign and out of reach to me.

But there is a kind of thinking that Owen-Towle notes which I find promising for nonbelievers. He quotes Unitarian Universalist minister Stephan Papa, who says:

I call myself a mystical agnostic because even though we cannot know about a creator or sustainer, we do know, I believe, that the proper response to the miracle of existence is wonder, awe, worship, allegiance. So I append the word mystical. On the intellectual level, I am an agnostic; on the emotional, a mystic. Will I ever be whole? Will I ever know? Probably not?

Comte-Sponville rejects the existence of god but recognizes that the question of why there is something rather than nothing cannot be answered. To me that points toward the existence of one, for lack of a better term, miracle. I don't believe in religious miracles in our world. But I agree with Comte-Sponville that the existence of the world as a whole is unexplainable. Deep reflection on that fact brings me the closest I can get to a sense of spirituality without any belief in the supernatural.

Does this mean that all of the existence is--again, for a lack of a better term--divine? That would be pantheism, which Owen-Towle includes in his broad definition of theism.

I find a certain beauty in this journey driven by both intellectual curiosity and deep spiritual hunger. I feel a strong sense of humility in how very apparent it is that I don't have all the answers to the mysteries of existence.

I recently splurged on a Unitarian Universalist chalice necklace. I see the flaming chalice as a concrete symbol of what Unitarian Universalism is to me these days: an honest and humble commitment to introspection and deep reflection--a process rather than a conclusion. I find solace in the chalice.