My mother used to burn candles for me like a good Catholic, burn a candle and say a prayer. There’s something powerful about that to me. Maybe it was all those years going to church, walking in through heavy wooden doors, into a small hallway of sorts, then through a pair of beautifully stained and sealed doors, with narrow rectangular shaped glass windows. Wooden pews with soft glow yet feeling like stone beneath you. Lining the wall’s sad figures, larger than life to a child like myself. With stacks upon stacks of candle to be lit, white candles sitting in red glass. Light a candle, kneel and say a prayer. Looking up to the front of the church, there hung Jesus on a cross, sad forlorn look on his face, blood dripping down his brow from a crown of thorns, a stab wound in his side. Held to the cross with nails, one in each hand, his feet pierced together. And there I was, in my little fine lined stripped collared shirt and blue cords, black shoes, hair parted to one side and plastered to my head. I was so small, so innocent. 4 or 5, 6, 7. I had been going to that church for my entire life by that time. I was baptized there, got my first communion there and was headed towards my confirmation.
Ever since I can remember I was made to fear god, I was a sinner already and hadn’t even committed my first crime. What good times we had in church, hanging with Jesus and mother Mary. I was Saint Peter on all saint’s day, my mom made me a brown robe, tied a rope around my waist and my dad cut me some big keys out of plastic. Saint Peter held the keys to the gates of heaven. See you roam outside the gates in purgatory till you’ve been absolved of your sins and when that happens Peter can see your soul is clean and lets you in. You can spend eternity in purgatory or 5 days, no one knows their time limit, sounds amazing right. BUT! You might get lucky cuz rumor has it Mary, Jesus’ mother opens up a window and lets people in when no one is looking, although Jesus can see that they have yet to repent enough – dirty souls – so he kicks them out. I mean, don’t the Catholics make religion sound amazing.
I think my time there taught me a considerable amount of fear and distrust for god as much as it gave me something to blame. When you feel as if you were a mistake for your entire childhood and well into your early 20’s and god was the creator of this, of you, well that guy is not on top of the list. But like every other good god fearing individual god is what I turned to in my darkest hours, praying for help, begging to be saved. “Please god please, I don’t want to be me, I don’t know why I was born this way but please take this all away”. God never showed up to fix me. Now I know, the believer in you, the god trusting person you may be will say, “look what god has done, look where you are.” I get that, through the fire rises the phoenix. Through the muddy waters grows the lotus. At 45 my perception is not of this “why didn’t you help me” point of view. My perception is completely different, but as a kid, if there is this all powerful, all mighty entity that’s a creator and savior of all and you were who I was, god becomes an awful taste. He is the bile that creeps from the depths of your sicken body and fills your mouth with the taste of acid and vomit. I wonder how it is for those who never had a god growing up or maybe one that was kind and loving. The Catholic church wanted me to believe that god was great cuz he died for my sin’s; I was 5 what kind of sin’s had I committed!? That so long as I praise him and beg for forgiveness I’ll be allowed into heaven and given eternal life. That’s some crazy shit man.
So many different religions, ideas of who or what god is. Does it matter in the end tho? I mean if this is an all loving power born of kindness, compassion and forgiveness – I mean if I don’t follow it I’ll still be golden cause of all the great things it is, right? Like if I don’t believe I still get a pass right? Unless there is a religion out there that says if you don’t believe in me alone then you are wrong, a sinner and you won’t make the cut… Oh yeah, that’s a commandment in Catholicism, oops. I think Islam falls along the same lines – propaganda makes that guy out to be pretty wicked. Is that what creates a loving god? The way we as a people project what god is. I mean an eye for eye in the bible ain’t to kind but in America we don’t bring that up much. Yet when we speak of Islam we talk about all the negative facts in the Quran. I know, I know – Catholics and Christians don’t really get behind the eye for an eye thing or any other act of violence spoke of in the bible so we use that as a disclaimer. I say they’re under-achieving, be about it right.
I have always struggled with God, with blind faith, with believing what some book tells me to believe. Does god grow in your heart cause you need it to? Do we come to believe cause we are that lost or in need of saving that we have finally found something to be everything that is unexplainable or to difficult to deal with. Like little kids, as much as they don’t like rules and structure they need it, they actually craver it and don’t even know they do. When you put rules and regulations on little one’s they feel comfort, they feel safe. Although they want to eat more cookies and watch more tv and play longer, good food makes them feel better, story time fills their dreams and hearts and sleep keeps them from getting agitated. In turn they are happier and unconsciously crave that happiness over the later. Is it the same with us, we crave that trust, that unconditional love, that one being to be the catchall of our lives so we find a god and believe. Do we connect cause we are at that point where we need to or is it divine intervention that brings us the forefront of religion, of god.
Mainstream society will have you believe that there is no god without religion, well mainstream America. But as we find in Narcotics Anonymous or Alcoholics Anonymous or any other anonymous for that matter that god can be created as we choose it to be. We write our own books on god there. Do we make a god out of thin air cause nothing else has worked for us? Cause we have tried religion or dealt with religious zealots and decided it wasn’t for us? Do we just go with making one because we are at that point where we need to be saved so we create what we imagine to be god and have that idea save us? I mean really is there a god? Is there an all powerful, life manipulating savior? Or is that we are all lost like children who indulge too much and don’t know a way out, we are so consumed in an unmanageable life that we cling to or create a god.
“The lord hears his people when they call to him. He rescues them from their troubles. The lord is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed.” Psalm 34: 17 – 18
A friend posted this, I read, ‘belief in the lord will set you free.’ If you just believe in god you will have salivation. I’ve never known a holy spirit to come into me and save me and trust and believe I was a believer. A devoted believer at one point in my tiny life, before I knew I didn’t have to believe. I remember being a kid and feeling loved by god, when I was young, before the cusp of my teens. It’s written all over my Good News bible how much I believed, I still have that bible. But I never felt saved in times of trouble, of pain and sadness. I have been broken many times over and uplifting never came. Did I not pray hard enough, were the tears streaming down my cheeks not loud enough for god to hear my prayers? My begging to be helped, to be saved from my myself. I wasn’t drunk, I was strung up – I was alone and craving death, not knowing how to live and believed I was part of the damned that the bible speaks about. Nothing came, no burning bush, blinding light, no consoling of any kind.
Do we not create our own salvation by belief in the intangible? Do we not give reason for the unexplainable by saying it must have been god, it was divine intervention, I was saved from a life of misery by Jesus himself! Or was it that I started to believe and that belief gave me hope and trust in something, cause we all know the beautiful chaos of the world around us and how there is no explanation for most things that transpire. I needed to know god at one point in my life, I needed to be saved, to feel loved, to have explanations. Some days I still do, in my darkest of moments I turn to the idea and ask for help, beg to be saved. I wallow in my insanity, my pains of existence; then the moment slowly subsides and I move forward. I cannot say god relieved me of my burdens, the recurrence of said feelings show’s that nothing was fixed, I wasn’t saved – it show’s a moment had passed. Are we really a creation of god, whoever that may be or are we the creator of a god? Even outside of NA where we focus on spirituality and having a god of our own understanding, do we still not create it by reading a book and building that image in our heart and soul.
I strayed from this whole idea, this concept long ago. Do I believe there is a force grater then I called god? I don’t know. I’ve always wanted something larger than life so I had some sort of explanation for everything, I needed to give/have reason. But I no longer need explanations or reason, I no longer need understanding. I’ve let all that go. Do I speak of god or a higher power, yes, but is that just a way of giving name to belief in spiritual concepts. Is my god, my definition of god, is me being loving, kind, compassionate and forgiving? Do the words “Thank god” roll off my lips at times, yes, but do I really thank god or do I really just say it cause that’s how I was programed since a young age.
I have always been intrigued with god, the concept of god, the feeling I get when I think of it. I have always wanted to be saved from myself, I have never wanted to be who I was and always felt god could fix me, after all if it created me. I’ve always wanted to understand it, to believe in it, to feel its love and kindness wrap me up like a tiny burrito, but none of this has ever happened. Did I not believe enough? Did I not try enough? Was I never worthy of this? I have said before I was closest to god when I was born, I could have been no closer. I knew no pain, no anger, no resentment, existence had yet to harm me. As the years went on I slowly started to stray from it, the older I got the more harm I created, the harm that happened, the more I drifted away. By the time I was woke I was so alone I knew nothing else but to find my way back to god, not even knowing that’s what I was doing. Through drugs, woman, money, adrenaline rushes, I clawed my way back to everything but what god was.
Now decades later of learning and growing and changing and getting back to who I was at birth. Finding false idols, finding my idea of god, finding my own concepts, letting go of god, surpassing the idea of it, ending up with that alone feeling, going back to crazy, more false idols, creating more harm than I ever knew possible, back to searching for god, more false idols, finding what I believed to be god again and feeling more alone and lost than ever before, to letting it all go again. There is a cycle to my life, a recurring theme, a pattern. We all have them, we are all on our own hamster wheels running in place. My search to understanding god, my fascination with the unknown and intangible has always been here. I will forever seek it out, question it and strive to be one with it.
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