Grand Mal

When I was a kid, I witnessed seizures on several occasions: a woman at church had epilepsy, and my best friend’s sister had a similar neurological problem. Those seizures were terrifying to me, scary in the same way that I feared death. Death was inscrutable, permanent, inevitable, and dense with sadness. To my kid mind, watching a seizure was like watching animated death: a person’s “soul” seemed to fly away, leaving the body to shake and tear itself apart. And the group of onlookers – always funereal and helpless, circling the person like a gravesite.

To me, a seizure was the ultimate expression of brokenness. How could a body break down so completely? How could the muscles strain and jaw clamp with shocking force, but without purpose? And why would someone’s body betray them so completely, breaking itself through brutal effort?

I guess I am having a seizure of the intellect: my mind is churning, straining, and foaming - performing sweat-soaked work without accomplishing a damned thing. I am raging to do something, to answer a question, but the harder I work the more broken I become. This is the work of self-destruction: a seizing, redlined engine where every cog is broken.

Perhaps this is the life of an atheist. Or more specifically, an ex-theist. As a theist (a Christian in my case) I had a working engine where each new idea was processed, reconstituted, and turned into action or exhaled as waste. And then the engine broke. Now new ideas come in and rattle around, breaking the delicate internal parts, bashing against each other to become smooth and indistinguishable. Where ideas and beliefs once had a clearly distinguishable hierarchy, I now see a gray homogeny. How can anyone move on a glass smooth surface where every direction looks the same?

But I am an atheist because atheism happened to me. I didn’t choose it. I hate it. And I don’t know what to do. Maybe I’m writing some of this down so that I can examine my thoughts, and pick out a path where none appears to exist.