Dear God,
This deconstruction business can be so painful!
I miss you so much it hurts.
It feels like I’m losing my best friend. Or I’ve lost a massive part of myself. There are gigantic holes in my identity that I don’t know how to fill.
I feel empty and lost and broken all at once.
I’m malfunctioning. Can we hit some kind of reset button?
Nothing feels sacred anymore. Nothing feels pure, or right, or true. It all just feels confused and uncertain. Like the only things that are real are the things we have defined and dissected with our limited language descriptors and our heartless brains. But even that—even science—is subject to what we think we know and understand, assumptions we’ve made and experimented on, historical records we’ve analysed.
I want love to be real. I want God to be real because I want God to be love—as the Biblical Scriptures claim. And I want the whole world to be wrapped up in that love, to culminate in eternal bliss like I was taught…
I think my doubt comes from a lack of proof, a lack of consensus and my newfound understanding of confirmation bias. See, I can easily read the right books, go to church, commune with other believers and continue to believe as I have for the past decade… but it’s risky. We always have and always will risk being wrong. Being delusional. And being disappointed.
I guess we could argue that we won’t know we’re disappointed if we are simply dead.
We can also argue that this is what faith is all about. Faith has never been doubt-free. Faith has always been risky business. Unprovable. And too often unscientific.
If I want something to be true so badly, does that make it right and true?
And whether it does or it doesn’t, what about the fact that atheists also want what they believe to be the truest truth?
What do I do with my own desire for endless love and bliss, in light of people who actually want to cease to exist and rest in peace? Or what do I do with my own ethics in light of some people’s substantially different ethics? Or what do I do with my longing to be seen and known intimately, in light of those who have accepted that there is no “being” out there who sees and knows them intimately, other than their knowing of themselves???
Help me Jesus.
Oh wait, I don’t know if I believe in Jesus anymore. Again, it’s not that I don’t want to. I’m just failing to see why I need a savior anymore. I have not been spared grief, pain, suffering, evil, anxiety, deconstruction, sexual violence and trauma. And I have no way to know whether Jesus has made a way for me to live forever. Has he really resurrected all things to eternal life? Again, my atheist friends claim he has not. He had some good ethics. He challenged the systems of the day. He was a good bloke. And all good blokes eventually die. Do all us good blokes get to live forever?
And when I say “good blokes,” I have to insist that I’m talking about everyone. Those who have committed acts of sexual violence (rape, pedophilia, incest etc). Those of us who have perpetuated racist systems, who have excluded and overlooked our BIPOC friends, or overtly discriminated against them. Good blokes like the Hitlers and the Donald Trumps and the Popes and the Buddas and Mohammed and Jesus. Not to mention all the women, since I named mostly men. The wives and the ex-wives and the mothers and daughters and aunts and nieces and the witches on their broomsticks and the sex workers and the virginal missionaries—was mother Theresa a virgin?
Oh wait, virginity is a myth. I forgot.
It’s amazing how much weight we put into myths. Some myths keep us under control. Some unite us around a goal, a dream, a project. We can become so passionate about what we believe in—and none of it is proven or provable it’s just historical and habitual—that we might go violently to war, or become a martyr. Some myths bring us to our knees in worship. Some unite a community and help them keep each other fed, clothed, safe and relatively healthy. Myths aren’t all bad or all good. Stories keep us going. They wake us up in the night. They inspire and move us. They break us down into sobbing messes…
I want to believe the myth, the story, the Scriptures—according to my interpretation and understanding. I want to feel safe again. I want to feel pure unadulterated love, which seems like it can only come from the ground of all being. The God.
I want to believe, heal my disbelief.
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