Even before the grand jury’s report that found that the Catholic Church not only covered up child sexual abuse, but in some instances promoted the perpetrators, I had become sick of churches. I had tried to become a Christian several times in my life, each lasting a couple years of my life, but to no effect. I realized I’m not a Christian. I just don’t believe in it. I do believe everyone wants to be loved. Everyone wants to be forgiven, on some level. The Bible is a beautiful love story; a promise to be loved, to be forgiven, to live forever. It fills a psyche’s need for survival in a world that is too often not a love-able one. And if that works for you, great. I’m not here to convince you otherwise. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that for people that don’t believe in your story, it’s because deep inside it doesn’t resonate with their reality.
After years of searching, I’ve come to the conclusion that if you believe you are loved by a higher power, you will see the world and things around you in that light. Even when things are bad, it will be twisted as an act of love. Last year, when I was still attending a church, a woman shared how a friend of hers who loved to sing lost his tongue to cancer. She shared how great God was to enable him to write songs and continue to sing. I didn’t understand, if there is a God, why it was necessary to have tongue cancer in the first place. But if you see everything through the lens of love, the world becomes a much rosier place. And maybe that’s what we need in this world to survive and to feel a part of a community, even if that community is connected by a shared idea.
As my former religion professor once shared, if something were to happen to his sons, he would probably pray to God, but aside from that, it’s not a real part of his life. Same goes for me. If my plane was falling down, I would pray to God because I wouldn’t know what else to do. But searching for him every day for years, I don’t see Him. I can’t take someone else’s word that God is alive and taking care of us. If that’s your experience, great. It just hasn’t been mine. Do I have the essentials? Yes, sometimes by razor thin margins. I have also been through some incredibly tough situations in my life that I did not deserve. There were things out of my control. Did I cry out to God? Yes. Did anything change? No.
I went through a course on the law of attraction. Maybe I am the one to blame for all of my problems? This view is 180 degrees opposite from relying on God and also a convenient ideology. But if we are to blame for all of our problems, why are some people “saved,” (like the 300 priests found to have committed child abuse in six dioceses) while others are thrown into an emotional pit of hell for much less serious deeds, or no bad deeds at all?
Midway through the natural course of my life, I recently realized that it is not all dependent on me. I realized that God, who could have been there, wasn’t. And when I finally came to that realization, that I am not entirely to blame, nor is God always looking out for me, that is when I started to rely less on God and more on myself in my daily life.
