We had an agreement

In yesterday’s post on trust, I talked a little about how my explosive exit from the faith kinda destroyed my willingness to listen to anybody about faith. That inability to trust anyone extended like a malignancy into the world of books.

I couldn’t read a book about faith without feeling like it was just a Great Value Bible. The only books I was interested in reading were books on psychology and the mind—scientific, reasoned approaches to understanding why our brains work the way they do. Anything that attempted to go beyond the scope of what we could measure and study was automatically out.

If an article started speaking on behalf of God? No thank you. If an author started telling me how the universe works as if they’d studied manifestation as a science? Vomit. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to read it.

No matter what they had to say, no matter how confident or sincere they sounded, it all looked the same. It’s just somebody trying to manipulate vulnerable people by claiming to know something they obviously cannot know.

Then someone recommended The Four Agreements. And I’d be lying if I said it was different, that it didn’t state things as fact that are demonstrably unprovable. It does do that. But it hit different. I’ll explain.

The book starts with a story of the mythology of Toltec wisdom. As soon as I started hearing the words (I listened to the audiobook, read by Peter Coyote, which might have softened my E.T.-loving heart a bit) my eyes began to roll . . . but then I stopped mid-roll, which I typically found impossible. The thought hit me:

This is myth.

I almost mythed the whole point (I’m not even sorry). I realized this book was not asking me to believe the mythical story really happened. It was asking me to imagine how the world might work if the mythical story were true. Suddenly my brain changed

It hit me . . . that’s probably how all religion’s supposed to work. When we think, What if the world works like this, we start to get a vivid picture of the way things might be and how we can relate to the unknown and the known. We see a world of how people can relate to one another. When What if turns into Because this happened, the world of discovery wonder turns into a world of dogma, judgment, and fear.

The illumination of that simple distinction allowed me to absorb The Four Agreements to my core. I love the book. One of the things I love is how it paints the picture of how we inherit faith from our family and our society. I love how it depicts every belief we hold as an agreement. (Think, Okay, I agree, this is the letter A, or Sure, we’ll call that a dog, and then expand that concept to Whatever you say, yes, I was born a sinner, and you realize how deep these agreements infiltrate our psyche.) It turns the recently un-Christianed mind from feeling the need to disprove everything we’ve been taught to simply breaking the agreement.

I don’t need to disprove the existence of God or the legitimacy of the Bible. These things were never proved to begin with. We had an agreement that we’d operate under those basic terms, and I no longer agree to do that. It’s over. You, Mr. Author, can continue to agree with whoever sees fit to do so, but I am not longer one of those people.

And most of the time, I don’t even pick up the books written by people who expect me to agree to those terms. I still roll my eyes at them. But if an author invites me to ask, What if . . . . well, I can agree to do that without committing to accepting an elaborate belief system.

There is freedom in What if. There is shelter in dogma. I’ll agree to freedom, thank you very much.

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