God, If This is All

I no longer believe in God. Growing up religious, I viewed non-believers with pity. Their lives certainly lacked meaning and truth. Thankfully, I knew that I was a divinely endowed spiritual daughter of a Heavenly Father who blessed me with an ultimate plan for happiness. I knew following this plan gave my life worth. Without a higher purpose from a higher being to incessantly obey, life lacked significance. Even after leaving religion, I clung to this belief. I followed new spiritual teachers from vast, varied faiths. I searched for a new eternal truth, a new eternal meaning. I devoted myself to conceptions of divine love. I prayed to a God of my understanding. Life without God equated to life without a point. My life would not be pointless. 

One by one spiritual “gurus” proved themselves to be fallible humans, just like my former prophets; they disappointed in minute and monumental manners. I learned no one's beliefs should hold precedence over my inner-knowing. I divested from all or nothing ideologies. I ceased following any teacher, simply took the teachings that resonated, leaving the rest. Still, I offered my gratitudes to a God-figure, granting credit for all the joy in my life to a divine being. Slowly, I realized to believe in a benevolent God is to also believe in an ambivalent God. Tragedies struck at a global scale: an insurrection at our capital, the overturn of Roe, anti-LGBTQ+ policies overwhelming our nation, genocide in Palestine, inhumane wealth gaps, the rise of fascism. Simultaneously, studying psychology challenged my conceptions of a supreme moral code. Why would God create the human brain in such a way that the more trauma and cruelty was enacted on a person, the less their brain can comprehend morality or assert control? How could I claim moral superiority when my morality was a privilege of my safe upbringing? The brutality of the world shook my faith in a God of love again and again, leaving me in a state of utter despair. In these moments, I contemplated ending my life. If God does not exist, if we are only primates on a floating rock doing our inadequate best, why would I want to keep living? If this is all, what’s the point? 

Piece by piece, board by board, I deconstructed my house of belief down to the studs. I tugged the doors from the hinges, I flung each tile from the roof, I knocked out the walls with an earth shaking boom, and something remarkable happened, light came streaming in. I laugh at the phrase, “if this is all” now that I grasp what this is. A colossal explosion in space resulting in the right combinations of atoms to produce life on this planet, and the subsequent combination of atoms to evolve humans to the point of consciousness of our own aliveness, followed by seven million years of my ancestors surviving famine, natural disaster, wars, predators, illness, and all other untenable conditions long enough for my parents to procreate, and the right egg and the right sperm combining to give me the chance to be alive. The chance to feel the wind on my cheeks, the chance to love and be loved, to eat ripe strawberries, to marry Seth, to hear live music, to be heart broken, to see ocean waves crest, to lose my grandma, to raise my dog, to climb mountains, to make art, to travel, to mourn, to read, to write, to befriend, to cry, to create, to fail, to kiss, to laugh, to grow, to feel, to think, to be. If that’s all, well, that’s miraculous. 

Do not be mistaken that my life is now devoid of spirituality and awe. Quite the opposite, by circumventing the arbitrary camps of belief or disbelief in God, I discovered the mysticism innate to our natural world. By God, I refer only to a being ruling the heavens, proclaiming moral laws, while defining good and bad in distorted binaries. A God who exists outside the boundaries of our universe, granting and rescinding blessings to the people on earth. The God of human religions. That said, I no more see myself as an arbiter of truth or reality than any religious leader. I lack the arrogance to believe I ascertained the ultimate truth from my singular reality, or to declare with certainty there is nothing beyond the scope of human understanding. Especially when we know so little. Within the confine of nature, wonders and enigmas abound. Our world overflows with realities incomprehensible to human beings. A single paragraph of quantum physics humbles the brightest amongst us. Bees see spectrums of light and color unseeable to humans. Sperm whales use echolocation to transmit their actual physical feelings to each other. Even existing in the brain of another human being would obliterate any notion of objective reality. The suspension of belief, rather than limit the miracle and beauty of my world, expanded it tenfold. I relish in the mysticism of the unknown, the seeking and the surrender. Life is an ever unfolding mystery, divinity included. 

If you ask me now, the point of life is to be alive. To experience the fullness, the wholeness of living. The wonder and the anguish, all of it. I got the order wrong in seeking the divine to access spirituality. Seeking the spiritual elucidates the divine in everything. It illuminates the sacred space within, untouched by the world, which guides us with ferocious, loving insight. Spirituality became my link to life itself. Anything that adds depth of meaning and connects me back to myself, to others, or to the earth. From playing Dnd with friends to advocating for love to brewing an iced coffee to watching the snails trail through blades of grass, nearly every moment of my life is rooted in my newfound sense of spirituality. Heaven and eternity do not supply peace or hope any longer. A being in the sky who dictates my life offers no salvation to me. Please, leave my body to the dirt and the worms; allow me to feed the earth as she fed me. To live and to die is the cycle of the natural world to which I belong. In impermanence, the marvel of existence amplifies. In death, life means more.