“The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.”
For much of his life, Jimmy Pianka stayed with Greek Orthodoxy. Raised in Lancaster, PA, he went to church camp through age 18 and admired his religion’s emphasis on artistic beauty. His slow break from his faith began as his curiosity grew. He wondered how he could believe in and love both God and Jesus even though he felt like he did not know them.
Jimmy feels lucky that his sister paved the way for his departure from religion: she had angrily left the Church years before he did because of Greek Orthodoxy’s position on gay rights. When he admitted his atheism, his parents seemed concerned not that he had lost his belief in the divine but rather that he would be unable to raise a successful family of his own. His father openly wondered how he would be able to raise moral children outside of the Church. While losing his belief in God has brought its own difficulties, Jimmy feels grateful that his life is free from superstition and a fear of hell.
I was raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. From childhood, I was brought up very intensely in Greek Orthodoxy. I went to church camp for 10 years in a row, beginning at age eight. I was a part of a really tight community, which stems in large part from its history: Greek communities often immigrated together, and the Greeks from my town came to the United States from the same island. I have gone back there many times and have met a lot of the people who still live there. Not surprisingly, because Greek immigration histories like the one from my town are so common, there is a strong cultural current that runs through Greek parishes in America. Greeks use the church as their primary cultural glue.
My experience in Greek Orthodoxy was emotionally developmental for me in that I very seriously believed in the faith as I was growing up. It was both a huge part of my moral structure and my behavioral compass; it guided a lot of my thinking. I always enjoyed my religion from an aesthetic sense. The visual style is gorgeous, mystical, and very old, and it helped characterize a lot of my artistic sensibilities. The divine liturgy that’s done every Sunday is a 2,000-year-old, untouched ritual.
Greek Orthodoxy is an Abrahamic faith that’s based on a single, theistic creator. Anyone who is superficially familiar with Christianity would feel right at home in an Orthodox community. It does, however, have more of an open-minded perspective on the definition of hell than many other Christian religions. Hell, as defined by the Orthodox perspective, is often viewed as a distancing from God rather than literal fire and brimstone, with heaven being interpreted as infinite proximity to God.
The idea of loving reverence pervaded all of the Greek Orthodox sermons that I remember from my childhood. At camp, we would detach from our normal lives and spend a lot of time in blissful awe of the divine. We would often talk about miracles.
There was a famous event that took place 15 years before I first came to camp when an icon of the Virgin Mary allegedly started crying salty tears that smelled like roses or lavender or rosemary. People were dabbing Q-tips and cotton balls on them and transferring the tears to other icons. Then, people claimed, the other icons would also begin to cry. It became a pretty big story. When local community skeptics heard about it, though, they asked if they could come and check it all out. The bishop said, “No, faith should be enough.” No formal inquiry was ever allowed.
Over time, I began to be exposed to some of the bigotry of Greek Orthodoxy. I remember one time, after 9/11, my church community was under a pavilion listening to His Eminence Father Maximos. He was the regional bishop of the diocese. At the time, I didn’t know much about Islam, American politics, or the twin towers. The bishop said, “Islam is a Satanic faith, and it promotes genuine hatred.” He viewed Islam as not just an incorrect faith but also as an evil faith in some vague sense. He preached that it was literally of the devil.
It was around that time that I started to think a little more critically about religion. I remember being told, “You should feel love for God.” I found myself increasingly irritated by the fact that I felt as though I did not know God. I tried to feel something, I wanted to feel connected to a deity, but it just wasn’t working.
As I was having trouble making this spiritual connection, I was also having difficulty taking the people within my religion seriously. I’ve always had a very committed mind, and I could never understand how, if someone truly, truly believes in something, they could not give their entire life to it. Had I stayed a believer, I would likely be a priest. It didn’t seem as though the supposedly religious people around me possessed true conviction.
As I began to develop doubts, I was pretty open about my skepticism. The religious right had its rise to power during my high school years, and that furthered my distaste for religion. Its values did not align with those of my heart. I started thinking about Greek Orthodoxy more thoroughly, and the story of my own faith began to fall apart.
I continued to search. I’d always leaned toward Eastern religious ideas, even as a kid. I remember once, at church camp, I confessed that I felt drawn to Buddhism. I was told that while Buddhism is a noble religion of compassion and love for all other beings, it’s selfish in that it turns one’s gaze inward and focuses on the self, rather than turning attention outward to God. According to my church leader, I should be aiming my spiritual inquiry and development externally to the divine.
My interest in Eastern religions continued as I got older. I studied abroad in India and Nepal on a Tibetan and Himalayan Studies program in college. What I experienced there was fascinating and had a profound influence on me. I was taught that while Christianity has a history of rejecting heretics, Buddhism has a history of debate time that’s built into its monastic schedule. Monks are required, rather than encouraged, to question their dogma and step through it. In many ways, Buddhism has a tradition of freethinking.
I gave Buddhist contemplative practices a serious try when I was in Asia. I found meditation to be really hard, especially for someone like me, with a really active mind. The first thing that I realized when I began meditating was how cluttered my thought process is. I found that the intellectual caliber and value of my average thought is similar to the quality of artwork on cereal boxes. Our minds are thinking about nothing all day, like puppies that are constantly wandering away from the newspaper they’re trying to pee on. We put the puppy on the newspaper, maybe it pees for a little bit, but then it wanders off. Meditation attempts to train people to take the puppy and calmly put it back on the newspaper.
I found meditation illuminating. It spoke to my interest in neuroscience and the brain. My education has persuaded me that Western rational thought generally tries to talk about the mind in a very objective, third-person perspective, as if it’s an object on a table that can be dissected. I think this approach lacks introspection. We are conscious all the time, yet Westerners are rarely encouraged to look at the content of their own mental lives. Meditation helps to make people more intimately aware of the reality of their consciousness. While I’m not attracted to dogma or a belief in the supernatural, I think contemplative practice can be beneficial for many in our culture.
Despite my appreciation of contemplative practice, like all religions, I found that Buddhism is inextricable from the people who practice it. Its religious writings, like all religious writings, have been written by people who lived in a particular time, in a particular context. In my view, Buddhism begins with some excellent ideas. But in the same way that Christianity has manifested itself in superstitious and damaging ways, so has Buddhism. Although it claims to be a religion of critical analysis, while I was in Asia, I saw old women who would go outside every day, take prayer wheels, and repeatedly spin them to try to generate good karma. I watched Buddhists who were performing ritual laps around holy sites step over lepers with severed limbs in their attempt to generate good merit. Once, I was sitting in an abbey listening to a lama speak about how the road to enlightenment is found through compassion, through opening one’s heart with love for others. Everyone was reverent, with their heads bowed. Behind him, there was an eight-foot Buddha statue made out of solid gold with an enormous diamond between its eyes. That rock alone could have fed the entire neighborhood for weeks. There’s often an enormous amount of wealth that’s concentrated within religions and, quite frequently, they do not use that money to live out their own stated morality.