Are you there, God?

ruminations on heaven, eternity, and faith

I want to believe in God but I’ve never known how. 

I’ve been reminded that I don’t know how by the number of Christians that have long surrounded me. Not because they tell me so but because their faith flows from them like the River of Jordan while my faith exists like a shallow pothole-filled murky rainwater that dries up every other day. 

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As a child, I went to Catholic bible school once a week, watched Veggie Tales, and learned I was a sinner. I sat in the front of the classroom, trained like Pavlov’s dog to shoot my hand in the air every time a question about the bible was asked knowing I would be rewarded with dollar-store candy. Why does God allow suffering and evil in the world?, the teacher would ask and I would respond parroting back the response she taught me. Something, something, something, salvation, and redemption. Meanwhile in the back of my head, what I truly believed fought for my attention. 

God doesn’t exist, my logical brain splurged. Yet viscerally I felt this unexplainable sliver of Knowing within me - a knowing that life extends into eternity beyond the physical world; a knowing that God lives within me.  

Clutching to my beautiful childhood rosary I prayed for answers. It had 59 opalescent pearls. Each night before bed, I would sit upright, embracing the rosary between two hands sliding my tiny fingers along every bead. I would hail Mary 50 times before tucking the rosary back into its tiny, delicately embroidered white sleeve. I would pray and pray and pray, whispering in the hope that someone was listening on the other side of the darkness. 

In my catholic bible school, I asked a lot of questions. But how? But why? I was slapped on the hand for asking questions that couldn’t be answered. Where there is no answer, there is faith, my teachers would say, only to be reminded that faith was elusive to me. My malleable childhood brain that was learning basic math and the periodic table of elements couldn’t process the intangible. The unseeable. The mystical. 

Days before my confirmation, I was condemned to hell. A priest from a small Catholic community in Ohio came to visit my church to prepare us to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. My satin dress fricated against the creaky pews. The overhead lights were dimmed until the last sliver of daylight dappled through stained glass windows. Candles of varying heights littered the altar bringing a haunting glow to the church. The priest was tall. He towered over us, his body casting a dark shadow on the walls behind him. His voice was commanding and menacing. A peculiar sense of fear turned to dread drawing my body rigid as he bellowed to the teenagers in front of him. His dark sermon didn’t instill the fear of God, it instilled horror from within. God condemns. God punishes. God will sentence you to hell if you sin, his voice boomed. 

The church smelled of hot effulgent wax, and like the candles, my sins wept into my memory. 

I recalled stealing one of my sister’s sweaters earlier that week. I cheated on a test I didn’t prepare for to maintain my class standing. My boyfriend and I were fooling around intimately out of wedlock.

My eyes welled with tears and pooled like molten molasses. I believed that moment was my final sentence. For weeks, I saw fire everywhere. I was preparing myself for hell. Houses were moments from turning blackened wood into ash. The smell of burning flesh created clouds that not even the sun could pierce through. What was not black, was white hot and set aflame. 

If this is what it meant to be God-fearing, I am out, I thought. 

And so I was. 

I floated through years of agnosticism, still believing in something except for one year that I was surely an atheist  - the Discovery Channel’s depiction of the cosmic dawn's resplendent birth was a pillar of faith in my life. God isn’t real, I told my younger sister as her face contorted into the same sheer horror that my face resembled in the church that day. I wasn’t far off from being convinced that we were put on this earth to endure pain and suffering. My world was grayscale - a horse tranquilizer-sized dose of “life is utterly pointless.” I slumped through it wondering if life would be better when I was buried beneath it.  

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I’ve always wanted to believe, but I don't know how. For a long while, I hoped my faith would arrive unannounced and ready for the taking. I thought I would wake up one day with a changed heart and a sense of clarity that can only be described as transcendent. My rebirth. But my faith has remained empty. The patchwork titles I cycle through - agnostic, or exploring Christianity, Roman Catholic, or spiritual - are titles with holes in their floorboards, titles that lack substantiality.  

That lack of substantiality courses through me with nihilistic venom. Flip-flopping in my faithless pothole feels like a tenuous existence. I live my life in service of loving - loving everyone, loving always, loving no matter what. But I wonder what the worth of my love is if it is based only on conviction. Conviction without faith dries like murky puddles, but conviction with faith goes like a river. 

Without faith, I am a fish confined to that murky pothole, unable to fathom the vastness of river beds as I navigate the shallows. I easily lose my way, am lured by temptations, and have morals and values only rooted in the concrete realm. I can’t answer the capital B, Big questions in life. What is Truth? What is the point of life? What are we intended to do in it? Instead of being shepherded by the tides, I flop around in my limited lived experiences. But staring up from under the aqueous surface, I refuse to believe the world that glimmers back at me isn’t one of a creation story. Viscerally I believe, but logically I flounder. I wonder if Truth exists. I fight the subjectivity of right and wrong until I am blue in the face. My brain rejects the concept of heaven like a fish rejects air. 

Heaven.

That has always been the hardest thing for me to believe in. Though, I admire those who do, for their faith allows them to recognize the eternity in everyone. I fear that not believing in heaven allows me to think of myself as though I will be discarded, and the same for everyone else. To believe in eternity means to believe in a world devoid of finiteness. I long to look upon others knowing I will stand alongside them into eternity. 

While I search for faith in a God, I have found faith in that it's unreasonable to accept that which is esoteric cannot be explained.

So here I stand, wanting to believe in God but not knowing how. I don’t know where to start, but I’ll start by talking with friends. I’ll buy a bible and read the C.S. Lewis collecting dust on my bookshelf. I’ll ask all of you to guide me. I’ll replace my long-lost rosary. I’ll ask the questions I am afraid of asking and I’ll open my heart more deeply than my logical mind. I’ll walk towards faith, intentionally and on my own time. 

God, if you’re listening, I’ll meet you at the river. 

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If you too are ruminating on faith, drop me a comment below, I’d love to chat. When this piece first appeared on paper, it felt like word vomit - words trapped inside of me for too long. I am glad they finally got to see the light of day with the help of

Tangent

and

Tommy Dixon

.

I can’t thank

Siesta in the Storm

enough for extending a hand to guide me in this journey, for the clarity, and for the friendship.

And thank you to all of you for being here. See you next week.