I am an atheist. Finally.

I'm ready to write about an intriguing teaching experience I recently completed.  It has taken me this last month to process it all, and while I was teaching, all of one period of art a day, I was nearly overwhelmed with my own processing of the... the... experience is all I can call it.

I was offered a job (desperate in that school started the next day) at a local Christian high school.  I must declare early in this treatise that I am not a Christian, nor do I subscribe to any faith of any color, although up till now I considered myself the yuppie version of "spiritual," ambivalent to landing on any particular "side."  I was told I didn't have to go to Chapel each Wednesday, for which I was clumsily grateful.  I did bow my head in prayer at the opening and closing of faculty meetings, staff of seven, and I did go to Play, Pray and Praise day and help run relays.  I presented really cool stuff at back to school night.  And all along I kept my philosophies and attitudes to myself, as I'd professionally done for the previous 33 years of teaching at a public high school.

I was stoked excited to be in a classroom again.  I started the year with my typical gusto and pizzazz... went shopping for supplies YAY!!  (had to have more than old Crayola color pencils, had to have some paper, and had to have some watercolor paint pans.   Indeed the room was a white room with 35 desks.  Period.  Not a thing more.)   Things were coming along swimmingly.  The kids were excited and challenged, the classroom was filling up with creative type stuff, art was on the walls, and we were considering an AP elective!  And then I got the teaching contract.

I was asked to sign a teaching contract and a statement of faith. I guess the contract was in there somewhere.  I couldn't sign it.  I couldn't betray my core beliefs, I couldn't lie, and I couldn't sacrifice my belief in absolute freedom of speech and thought.  I handed it back unsigned, markless.

I came home that night not so much in a quandary as, yeah, maybe... in a quandary.  I'd been asked what I believe.  On my feet, I said I believed in the power of compassion in a classroom, in education as being the "savior" of the human race, and in professionalism.  But I knew I believed way more than that.  I came home and voluntarily wrote an agonizing couple pages of "core beliefs."  It was so hard!  I sent it to the principal, the vice principal, and I'd like to think it was forwarded to the the board of directors.  I received no reply.

A week later, five weeks into the semester, I wrote a letter of resignation and submitted it at the same meeting during which I was released.  The root reason was "precedence."

During this fascinating adventure, I was challenged, appalled, and learned that there was nothing "spiritual" about me, thank god.  haHA!!  Clarification had rained down on me!  I embrace the words of critic and curmudgeon Christopher Hitchens, in his book God is Not Great, when he compares atheists to Christians:

We [atheists and Christians] may differ on many things, but what we [as atheists] respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake....  We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.  Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and- since there is no other metaphor- also the soul.  

Although I hate the title of his book, Hitchens' (hit and miss) eloquence rocks my world.  Great book.  My thinking is finding a resting place.