Ever left a religion?
This might help.
Hi!
I’m the author of Leaving the Witness - a memoir about leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’m launching this newsletter for people who find themselves in the same situation as I am. That being: figuring out life after leaving a religion.
Subscribe (by clicking the button below) and you’ll get a newsletter in your inbox a few times a month, written by me. It’s my hope that you’ll find the writing therapeutic, funny, relatable, and helpful. This newsletter exists to remind you that even if you feel alone in this journey out of religion, there’s someone out here who can relate.
When I left my religion, one of the most difficult beliefs to let go of was the hope of living in paradise. Even though I don’t believe in an afterlife anymore, paradise still looms large. I find myself wanting it, even though I know it isn’t real.
Call it what you may - heaven, utopia, nirvana - am I safe to say everyone craves paradise? Given my background, I may be an acute case. But I don’t think I’m alone in this. In his 1933 novel, British author James Hilton created the fictional Shangri-La, a mystical valley nestled in the mountains, a permanently happy land, isolated from the world. In Shangri-La, people lived hundreds of years longer than the rest of us, and barely aged in appearance.
Back in the 50s, throngs of people bored with mundane working lives saved every dime they had to escape for two weeks to the country’s newest state, a paradise called Hawaii.
The fascination with these heavenly islands has not abated. An elderly Mark Twain once said to a friend, “What I have always longed for was the privilege of living forever away up on one of those mountains.”
There is a town in California that named itself Paradise - wishful thinking, perhaps. Nestled in the Sierra Nevada foothills, it boasted very little crime, low-cost housing, and beautiful scenery. Then, in 2018, a wildfire famously tore through the community, leaving all but 5 percent of its homes and buildings damaged beyond repair.
Head back far enough through a bunch of civilizations or religions and you’ll pretty universally find a paradise fixation. Whether searching for it, anticipating it, or mourning its demise, we yearn for it.
The word “paradise” came to English from the French paradis. The French got it from the Latin paradisus. Go backward from there you find it in the old Persian as paridaidam. The Assyrians also borrowed the word, using it to describe the walled gardens of the Persian Empire. The Greeks found it suitable as a name for their zoos. Look back even further and you will find that “paradise” ultimately derives from a word in an old Iranian language that means “walled enclosure.”
That makes sense. There are many forms of paradise, of course - the idea means different things to different people. But paradise is only attainable, at the end of the day, by shutting out the realities around you. It’s a form of insulation or ensconcement or escape that people wish for, and always have wished for, throughout time. To be human is hard, and always has been.
I stayed in a religion for the bulk of my life in the hopes paradise would be mine. In fact, it was already mine, in a way. I lived, at least mentally, in a walled enclosure. Everything I didn’t want to believe, see, or understand was outside that mental barrier. As long as I stayed inside the wall, I already had paradise, because my life was built within its framework - as it was for everyone I was close to. My paradise was just as vivid as the fictional paradise the author created in Shangri-La, but it was accentuated by the fact that to me, it wasn’t fiction.
When that wall came down, I was left with Paradise Lost. Milton wrote 10 books and ten thousands lines of verse about what it means to lose paradise. And that wasn’t even his own personal paradise. Losing paradise is devastating, even if it was all just a story.
How do you make something that is real to you “un”real? How do you go from believing you are eternal to accepting you are temporary? I don’t want my old religion, but I want Shangri-la (sure, I’d even take a staycation at the hotel). I want to have one single day without a concern, I want to live 100 years longer than we can, I want to be loved without condition, I want my grief to be gone, I want my life to look like I envision it should. It doesn’t. Does anyone’s?
If you have a religion you believe in fervently enough, you can have paradise. Or, you can believe that you have it. Or, at the very least, know that it’s coming (which is almost as good as having it). If you have enough money, you can buy paradise for a few weeks.
But if you have neither religion or money, then what?
This newsletter is about finding our way to a life that, in a way, is the opposite of paradise. It’s about breaking out of the walled enclosure, as many of us who left a high-control religion or cult, or escaped other confinements of life, have. It’s about the difficulties and challenges that come from stepping outside of paradise, but also about the wonder and the joy of experiencing life as it truly is, and ourselves as we authentically are. It’s about learning how find meaning without paradise.
I am on an ongoing journey to make sense of life without religion. If you have left or are leaving a religion, or any life situation really, and are trying to discover who you are without it, join me!
Send in your ideas for what you’d like to hear about, read about, or get answers to, by replying to this email. I will write about struggle, growth, learning new things, changing, and life in general. I’ll write about what I learn in grad school (just started studying religion, ethics and politics). This can even be an advice column - send your questions or comments by replying to this email.
Feel free to share it with your friends, I’d love to gather a big community here.
Losing paradise isn’t easy, but we can still be happy. We can find our way there together.
Sincerely, with love,
Amber
P.S. A final note. Subscriptions to this newsletter are $5 per month. I plan to publish a few times a month, depending on the childcare I can find in this pandemic. If you can afford to support this endeavor, I am deeply grateful. If you have financial hardship but still want to read it, get in touch and we can work something out.