The Atheist Who Is A Spiritual Director
Britt Hartley no longer believes in God, but still believes in nurturing the inner life.
One of my favorite folks on Instagram and Youtube these days is Britt Hartley, author of No-Nonsense Spirituality and the forthcoming Everything Is Stupid, the World Is on Fire, and Nothing Matters: A Nihilist Survival Guide. Raised Mormon, but after converting to mainstream Christianity as an adult and getting a master’s degree in theology, she lost her faith. Now she identifies as an atheist spiritual director.
Some observers might raise their eyebrows at such a pairing, but I think it’s worth our consideration. Even though I don’t choose to identify myself as an atheist or an agnostic, I have long sensed that mystical spirituality can be a path to a place where the walls separating belief and disbelief just fall away.
By definition, an agnostic is someone who believes they cannot know for certain whether or not God exists. Meanwhile, an atheist is someone who has decided that God does not exist. What they seem to have in common, at least from where I sit, is a sense that belief in God is, at least for them, simply not possible.
Mystics and contemplatives are sometimes seen as people who have such strong experiences of God that for them, faith is simply unnecessary. Toward the end of his life Carl Jung was asked if he believed in God. Apparently his reply was along these lines: “Difficult to answer. I know. I don’t need to believe. I know.”1
Jung later tried to clarify what he meant by this, but the genie was out of the bottle. For the aged psychologist, belief simply did not matter as much as embodied experience. Whatever it was that Jung encountered within, he felt confident in labeling it as God. And thanks to that inner encounter, he felt no need to “believe” in anything else.
That may seem to be a far cry from atheism or agnosticism, but I think they are actually much closer than they appear to be on the surface. As best I can tell, Jung did not consider himself to be a mystic, but rather a scientist. Still, his logic — that experience matters more than belief — is very much a mystic’s perspective. And it is precisely this where I see the common ground between mystics and agnostics or atheists.
Both the mystic and the nonbeliever place more trust in experience than in faith itself. But mystics are more likely to find God in their experience, whereas atheists or agnostics seem more likely to find simply emptiness or nothingness where they might be looking for God.
But here’s the kicker: to mystics and contemplatives, “emptiness” and “nothingness” can be meaningful ways to encounter the mystery called God.
Here’s how I framed it in The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism:
Perhaps one difference between a mystic and an atheist is that the atheist sees the emptiness of God as proving a negation, whereas the mystic, in open-minded and heartful seeking, avoids making any such proof statement, instead seeing the emptiness of God as simply an invitation into an ever-deepening mystery of pure being itself, including the mystery of silence and life and love.2
In other words, mystics actually seem to have the most in common with agnostics: since both are hesitant to make a final statement like “There is a God” or “There is no God.” For both agnostics and mystics, humility matters more than certainty. But even atheists still seem to have something in common with mystics, since they all rely on experience first, before falling back on the supposed certainties of doctrine or dogma.
I don’t know enough about Britt Hartley’s spiritual journey to be able to comment on why she identifies herself as an atheist rather than an agnostic. It seems to me that as she defines atheism, it’s simply the conclusion that one must reach when deciding that there is not enough persuasive evidence for belief in something as consequential as the existence of God. In other words, her atheism sounds pretty agnostic, at least to me.
I don’t remember who first gave me this idea: that when a contemplative has a conversation with an avowed atheist, it might be helpful to say — in all humility — “please tell me about the God you don’t believe in; chances are, I don’t believe in that God either.” Contemplative spirituality involves an ever-deepening process of ripping away beliefs about God that simply don’t stand up — not only don’t stand up to the hard questions posed by logic, science and philosophy, but also cannot stand up to the challenges posed by personal experience.
How many people are discouraged when God simply appears to ignore our prayers? We pray and pray and pray, and yet our loved one dies anyway. Theology has developed plenty of sophisticated arguments to try to square God’s infinite power and goodness with the devastating experience of God’s apparent indifference. But to the person who is grieving, such theological arguments come across as pointless, if not callous.
No matter how deep contemplation and mystical exploration takes me into the mysteries of the cloud of unknowing and the dark night of the soul, I have not yet felt any need to simply jettison the concept of God altogether. Perhaps this is because I so strongly identify “God” with “Love.” But in all honesty, it doesn’t bother me that the Britt Hartleys of the world reach different conclusions — just like it doesn’t bother me that some people prefer Buddhism or Taoism to Christianity. Atheists who have a chip on their shoulder about Christianity or who always want to get into debates about God strike me as rather boring: the “mansplainers” of the spiritual community. But an atheist like Britt Hartley, who is candid in admitting what she doesn’t believe, while continuing to seek meaningful and relational ways to take good care of her interior life, strikes me as someone worth listening to indeed.
