INTRO:
It's been a little over three years since I walked away from the Watchtower organization ("the borg", hereafter). I'd been part of the organization for only three years (from 2017 to 2020), and I know that's an extremely short duration, compared to others'. But still....In retrospect, leaving the borg was one of the best decisions of my life, the consequent trauma notwithstanding. In the beginning it was hard; aside the emotional abuse I had to endure as a result of being shunned by my close friends, the more traumatic experience for me was the existential angst I almost drowned in. Nothing made sense to me anymore in those few months following my wake-up from the borg's indoctrination. Everything was open to doubt. I went from certainty to near-nihilism. I wasn't sure if God was real; with my faith in God thus shaken, depression followed....
The long and short of the matter is that I'm in a different and better place now. I'm trying to trace here--briefly--the paths I took to get here, partly as a reminder and encouragement to myself and partly because I'm hoping (in the words of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) to leave some
After three years of struggle--reading, thinking, conversing and arguing with friends and family, etc.--I've arrived at a skeptical affirmation of the Christian faith. A "skeptical affirmation" is not as bad as it sounds, if I explain what I mean. As I said above, I was forced to start my search from a position of uncertainty and profound doubt: all alleged certainties--the borg, including the institutional church, the Bible and others' spiritual experiences--became irrelevant to me. Those were no longer my certainties. I didn't feel bound by any infallible church/magisterium ("Jehovah's Organization"), an inerrant Bible or by any irrestible personal experience of the divine. I found myself in a position where God hadn't spoken--or, if it seemed as if he had (through the Bible perhaps), I couldn't be sure of it. In the absence of all my former certainties, my search for God was bound to start from a skeptical position.Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother [or sister],
Seeing, shall take heart again.
I'll start writing about my journey in the next post. Thanks for reading, and please pardon my self-indulgent prose.