how to engage with faith as a special interest
i have been in and out of church for fourty some odd years. so you could say it's been a journey.
in that time i've often ruminated--as is my wont--on the idea of faith. especially the sort of evangelical intuitive sense of the word faith where you're supposed to be feeling something called faith. you're suppose to have some kind of experiential basis. some sort of qualia.
i've never had that. not really. [this is of course in retrospect; i can't really remember what it was like to be a long time ago but i do remember wrestling with this as far back as i can remember.]
i've tended to engage with faith as a special interest. but not just faith! systems of thought in general.
i have heard a lot of people talk about how they would feel these deep resounding feelings of being moved by the holy spirit during worship services--and to be clear i also felt and do feel stuff while singing hymns especially (not so much more contemporary stuff but that's a different topic for another day)--but who would then attend a "secular" concert and feel all the same things. confusing! maybe the holy spirit is at the concert too?
i guess i never associated those feelings with anything other than competent singers performing the songs well--after all in the orthodox reformed sect we were very very very serious about four part harmony. it was shameful not be able to sing something other than the plain melody. i remember hearing one of my cousins singing this beautiful tenor harmony and i was so jealous i learned to sing bass. i had a deeper voice than he did. it was all very juvenile but i walked away being able to reach that a-below-a and feeling great about it.
that four part harmony tickled my brain in just the right way. still does if i'm honest. but i didn't feel like that was somehow the indwelling of the holy ghost as it moved on the surface of the waters or whatever. it was all too mechanical and performative. i could see how the pieces fit. yes all those moving pieces formed something frissonant but it was human frisson.
but i had that experience in a different way. i found the experience of catechism and doctrine and frameworks of theology very rewarding. mysterious even. it was reformed so of course it was very fit-together-y and (unbeknownst to me) very enlightement-modernist. but rewarding nonetheless.
once the internet rolled around--and this was before you could so easily get trapped in a bubble of algorithmically-mediated confirmation bias where you're only ever served what you might already agree with--i started looking around for folks who enjoyed the same sort of stuff.
and i found it. and lots beside. i discovered (quickly) that not only did the reformed doctrinal stuff strike my fancy but so did other varieties of christianity of which there are as i'm sure you know extremely many.
and not just christian thought. ancient greek thought! and especially buddhist thought. philosophy in general.
this is what i mean when i say i engage with faith a special interest. maybe it's because i'm too in my head or something. i feel an attachment to christianity in the same way that i feel an attachment picking wild mint from a forest floor or biking around the neighbourhood or harvesting strawberries or damming up a creek.
any religion that can't deal with that sort of adherence isn't really a very good religion. in my humble opinion. there is a variety of religious experience and there are many different kinds of minds.