Please note that inconsistent capitalizations of the word “god” are intentional and serve narrative purposes.
Have you ever craved a sensation you’ve never felt? Maybe you’re scrolling through a social media app and you find a recipe you absolutely HAVE to try yearning for triumph as someone else wins a spelling bee you studied day and night for or witnessing a friend in a successful romantic relationship and saying through grit teeth “I’m so happy for you!” Well for me, I ached for the presence of god. I was raised in a secular household, my mother having been raised Baptist and leaving the church in her early adulthood and my dad having been educated in a Church of England boarding school.
As a child, the max of my religious indoctrination was limited to a business week of ancient Egypt themed Vacation Bible School at 6 or 7 years old. The pastor was wearing a Party City Pharaoh costume—I remember a little bit about burning bushes, a snake handler came (I got to touch a boa constrictor, not to flex), and there was a day with water balloons and outdoor bouncy castles. Alongside this, Veggie Tales was a common occurrence in my house. It was entertaining, it didn’t annoy my mom, and it taught good lessons; however, I basically only remember Silly Songs with Larry. “The Cheeseburger Song” by Mr. Lunt is engrained deep into my memory. In the long run, I wasn’t brought up with any real fundamental beliefs in the world of god or religion. I’m thankful for this, but I can’t help but think about how different my life could have been were I to be raised in the church like my mom was.
My dad wasn’t raised very religious. He’s the son of a retired communications officer and base nurse for the Royal Air Force, never having mentioned any real religious inclination during his childhood. The Church of England boarding school comes from my grandparents deciding when he was 14 that he needed educational and social security, so they enrolled him in a boarding school in the midlands of England. He would stay the half term with his aunt and uncle and cousins and fly to my grandparents’ base for longer term breaks. My mom, on the other hand, was raised in a strict, evangelical baptist household in the Riverside desert of California. She was at church multiple times a week, almost all of her friends were baptists (or at least members of a church), and my grandparents were religious to the point of having the bakery write “Happy Birthday Jesus!” on a sheet cake every Christmas. My grandfather is a very tan man; I hope they assumed they were a family of Mexican Catholics with a son named Jesús who happened to have a birthday around Christmas. When she came into her adulthood, however, my mom started to deconstruct her thinking. She says she would have most likely raised my sister and I in a church, if nothing else, “for the community.” However, my dad wanted us to feel free to draw our own spiritual conclusions.
Throughout my childhood, I was praying to a nameless, faceless, policy-free kind of god—some kind of creator who must have made me the way I was. I had heard “God loves you!” as a child, so I took it at face value: “god loves me, all of me!” In a way, I was the only member of my own religious sect. I was left to find my own answers. In a way, that was great: I never had the pressures of religious life suppressing my sexuality, my moral code, or how I view other people. But on the flip side, I didn’t have the same guidance or assurance that I was a good person. I suffer from G.A.D., or generalized anxiety disorder, to a monumental level. I have the natural anxiety levels of a prey animal being hunted for sport. It’s always been this way, and I have to ask myself, would it be healthy if I had the invisible stare of a benevolent deity piercing into me constantly? I already had paranoid anxiety as a kid; if I had thought God was watching, I can’t imagine what I would have been feeling. However, not having a religion to feel a part of wasn’t all great. I learned about world religions as a pre-teen in England, to the point where if one clicked I would have known. But nothing did. Nothing felt 100% right to me. I asked too many questions, challenged rules and beliefs and led myself down rabbit holes trying to understand them. I love to learn, I always have. I tried desperately to understand the reason for every rule and law and story. But I didn’t have a skill that many raised in religion possess: faith. I can believe something, but I always have to know my odds. I beg for minute details and clarification; I can’t handle putting all my eggs in a basket and ending up wrong—so I carry my eggs in my arms.
But what do I do when I now have to come to my own conclusions? How do I start to draw those conclusions? I can look at the scientific and historical evidence we have access to and have a decent idea of what came before me, but what’s going to happen to me after? I have no idea what the outcome of death is aside from the scientific process. My body will go through a trauma, either a long-term trauma like cancer or an illness (the cause of death we attribute to “old age” or “natural causes”), or I’ll go through an acute trauma that will kill me. After that, what happens? How can you imagine an experience people don’t come back from?
I’ve had dreams where I’ve died. I’ve heard this is a common occurrence, but everyone’s outcome is different. My friends who are Christian have imagined some version of heaven, some talk about reincarnation, but I experience nothing but my thoughts in inky blackness. I don’t remember many of my dreams aside from one where I was being chased through a setting that felt kind of like a mall by people with authority and weapons. There was a split second of a flash bang—loud noise and blinding white—then nothing. I was in darkness, nothing to keep me company but my endless internal dialogue. There was something so eerie about waking up after completely believing I had passed away, and feeling like I finally knew what was going to happen.
But what I experienced is impossible. If my brain no longer has the power to transmit my thoughts, how could the afterlife be what I experienced? This brings me back to my lack of faith. I could take what I went through at face value and consider it a premonition, but what if I’m wrong?
There are times I envy those who don’t feel alone. Who dream up pearly gates and blurry hands and endless light. Who know where they’re going and sticks with it. Who feel a conviction to their faith. But the only thing I feel conviction for is my lack thereof. I want to believe in something, but I can’t just have faith.