After Faith

There was a time when faith seemed simple.

Not easy, but clear,
like a star that remained where it was placed.

Now I walk without that certainty.
No temple, no voice above the clouds.
Only the quiet in which a person
must decide what he believes.

I did not lose belief in a single moment.

No revelation,
no thunder.

It faded gradually,
the way scent leaves a room
after the flowers have been taken away.

At first I did not notice.

I continued the old motions,
speaking the words,
standing where others stood.

But something had changed.
The words had grown lighter.
They no longer carried the weight
they once demanded.

Later I saw things I had ignored.

Grace discussed as if it were currency.
Forgiveness priced and measured.
Voices trained to sound humble
while protecting power.

I was still obedient then.

I read forbidden books quietly,
as though someone might hear the pages turning.
The fear remained for years—
that doubt itself was dangerous.

Yet the more I read,
the more the structure trembled.

Not violently.
Almost politely.

A beam shifted.
A wall opened.
Light entered from directions
I had not been told existed.

Faith had been the air of my childhood.

It disciplined the body,
shaped the voice,
taught me which questions
were not to be asked.

Leaving it was not triumph.

It felt more like walking away
from a house where someone had died.

You close the door carefully.
You stand outside a long time
without knowing where to go.

There were dark months.

Therapy,
memory,
old wounds speaking in ordinary language.

I understood at last
that some of the voices I called divine
were human.

The anger of my mother.
The cruelty of my brother.
Authority mistaken for holiness.

Unbelief arrived quietly.

I had imagined it as emptiness,
a cold sea.

Instead it was space.
Air.

The strange relief
of not having to pretend.

I slept in my car for a time.
The church behind me,
the cross still visible in the rearview mirror.

One counts losses
in such moments
as if they were possessions.

And yet life continued.

A woman’s voice on the phone
once saved me.
No doctrine in it,
only concern.

Later there was love.

Not sacred in the old sense,
yet no less powerful.

From that point I began again.

Art replaced what faith had held.

A camera.
Music.

The attempt to see clearly
the faces of others,
their pain,
their endurance.

Sometimes I think
holiness begins there.

But the old language remains.

The psalms still return in dreams.
The cross appears unexpectedly.

One cannot erase
what formed the blood.

Even disbelief
carries memory.

I no longer seek heaven.

What I look for now
is simpler:

the sound of breath,
the presence of another person,
the stubborn fact
that life continues.

If faith was lost,
something else was gained—

the freedom to stand in the open air
and admit

that the world,
even without certainty,
is still worthy of attention.