Yes, I have violated one (okay, almost all) of the ten commandments. As I’ve grown older, my relationship with gods has become more complex. Count them up, and it looks like promiscuity. Five gods in sixty-eight years, each one demanding worship, each one eventually abandoned. I used to be embarrassed by the list. Now I think it’s one of the most honest résumés I own. Perhaps a man who never changes gods has never looked hard enough at the one he started with.

Here’s mine, in order.

Jesus Christ

My first god came with a pulpit and chain. Pentecostal, ultra-conservative, a preacher father with rules already in place before I’d finished asking why. Obedience was the entire dogma. You didn’t debate this god. He didn’t even really talk to you. You served him, on schedule, in a coat and tie, while the honest questions curdled somewhere inside your heart and soul.

I spent thirty years building a career out of that silent god. Music director, mega-church staff, ordination, a platform of thousands, decades of proving my devotion in front of a throng. I built conferences and platforms and reputations in his name. And the whole time, behind the scenes, I kept running into pastors who demanded unflinching obedience even when they were obviously wrong.

Somewhere around year twenty-five I began to realize: this god requires my unflinching submission and denial of self while not restoring my withering soul. So I resigned, at the zenith of my career, in 2006, and I have spent the next twenty years finding out what happens to a human being after it’s endured three decades of cultish programming. Healing from religious trauma is a bitch.

Gaia

The farm taught me this god, not a book, though the books gave me language for what the farm was putting in my being. Wendell Berry’s The Long-Legged House, Thoreau’s Walden, Emerson’s Nature, I read them the way a person reads a map of a country he’s already living in. They didn’t convert me. They affirmed me.

Fifty-five acres of Appalachian wilderness will do that. The Appalachians are the oldest mountains on earth, and I mean that as more than geology. Something that old carries a weight you can feel through the soles of your boots, mystical isn’t a word I use loosely, but it’s the only honest one I’ve got for what that ridge did to me.

I built a meditation practice out of walking it: one slow step, one breath, another step, another breath, until the woods stopped being scenery and started being a temple with no walls. From my journal: I remember reading about Sufi master Pir Zia saying that whenever he walks, he imagines making love to the earth; I look down at the ground and imagine plunging my manhood into the ground with passion and love. Imagine wrapping my arms around the earth.

Instead of being weird, it felt right somehow, making love to Mother Earth. This Earth that is mine. I think again of Wendell Berry, living of the earth, not on the earth. It smells like home.

Thoreau called his morning walks a blessing for the whole day. Mine were closer to god than god ever managed to be.

The clearest proof came on a day I was sick, genuinely sick, worn down past the point of arguing with my own body. Something pulled me up the western ridge, fever raging. I stripped off my clothes and lay prone on the ground, face to the rising sun, arms and legs spread against soil older than any religion that ever tried to indoctrinate me. I felt it. Whatever you want to call it, the earth pulling the illness down out of me, or my own mind finally admitting the truth about what my body needed. I lay there and felt something healing move through my veins, rhizome to flesh, the ground doing what no sanctuary ever did.

That’s the difference between living on land and living of it. On land, you’re a tenant, passing through, waiting to be somewhere else. Of land, you’re tissue, one more organism in the same skin as the mountain, the oak, the ridge. Gaia never asked me to believe anything. She only asked me to lie down and let her prove it.

None (Atheism)

Then came the night in 2016 that ripped the clerical robes off the lies. I watched people who’d spent decades preaching and demanding moral purity throw their entire obeisance to an obviously corrupt man. I refused to look away from what that meant. I had already been looking for truth, and found religion’s uncensored history waiting under the distortions and lies: centuries of atrocity and genocide, censored out of the Sunday school version of religion the same way certain governments now censor the history they’d rather nobody know.

I came out the other side an atheist, and for a while that felt like the only intellectually honest place left to stand. No god. No mediator. No invisible landlord collecting rent on my behavior. I wrote a booklet about the early stretch of that journey and called it My Confession, because that’s what it was, the most uncensored thing I’d said in decades.

Man (Humanism)

Atheism turned out to be a hallway, not a permanent room. Somewhere past the reckoning of three gods, I found Greg Epstein’s case for a fourth “god.” He had found atheism too negative; he wanted something more positive. Instead of NO god, he posits PRO human, built on the idea that moral behavior doesn’t require a supervisor. Humanism let me keep the virtues I still held and the ethics I still believed in, minus the landlord, minus the hell, minus the performance.

This god asked something harder than obedience: responsibility. No one to blame, no one to thank, no one keeping score. Just people, doing their best to be good to each other because it’s the only species we’ve got and the only planet we’re standing on. I found real dignity in that for years. I still do.

Dionysus

The god I emulate now doesn’t ask for my submission. He hands me a flowering wand instead of a dividing sword and tells me to go make things better. Wine, theatre, dance, sex, ecstasy, the harvest coming back every single year whether anyone prays to it or not. Dionysus is the first god I’ve admired who looks like me: unabashedly nude and unashamed, generative, free, a little wild, more interested in one’s aliveness than one’s obedience. An enlightened god that espouses wholeness rather than goodness or perfection.

I created a sculpture of him in my home. An idol, if you will. My very own “false” god. I’ve had his symbol tattooed into my skin. Every essay I write, every nude self-portrait and photograph I create, every solstice I celebrate on my Barcelona terrace is a small act of worship to the one god who never once asked me to cut my hair or cover my penis.

ºººº

Five gods, and here’s what they have revealed to me collectively: every single one of them was formative, at different ages, working out what I needed permission to become.

Pro: Jesus taught me love and the Sermon on the Mount. Con: His conservative “followers” call him woke and weak.

Pro: Gaia taught me to honor and care for the earth. Con: Nature can be deadly, harsh, and unforgiving.

Pro: Atheism taught me to honor intellect and empirical knowledge. Con: The negative aspects and followers outweighed the positive benefits.

Pro: Humanism taught me the idea that humans can lead fulfilling and meaningful lives based on compassion and personal responsibility. Con: It overlooks the spiritual or transcendent aspects of human experience that form the magic and wonder of my life.

Pro: Dionysus is teaching me joy, sensuality, freedom, and wildness, which, after the other four, might be the hardest lessons of my life. Con: How do I honor my freedom and desires while respecting and communing with my loved ones.

I expect there are more gods somewhere ahead of me. I’m no longer afraid of meeting them.