Meditations On: An Atheist’s First Words to God

Hope y’all have recovered from your Holy Weekend/Easter celebrations. I thought I’d start this new week off with this prompt that popped up in my social feeds. When I first saw the prompt I posted a flippant response: “Greetings.” Then I thought, maybe a better response would be something like, “Do you have any idea what people on earth are doing in your name? It would be great if you could do something about that…” I know others resorted to the angry atheist response of saying they’d yell at god for all the cruelty permitted and committed in his name. Yeah, I’m not that kind of confrontation person to get in someone’s face like that, even adjusting to the realization that, in this scenario, I’d suddenly came to the realization that there is an existence beyond my current one. Being all disoriented having anything cogent to say would be a bit of a stretch. But the prompt got me thinking.

Even though I was raised Catholic and made a serious many decades investment as an Evangelical, I generally don’t think about death, or what might happen afterwards. At the same time, I have faced the real possibility of my own demise ten-years ago when my CIDP took away my ability to walk and I didn’t know how far the illness would take me toward death. I was fortunate in that the medical professionals whom I turned to did their thing, I recovered and though my illness was considered “mild,” my continued neuropathy in my feet is a reminder of the seriousness of those times. Add to that, the death of my oldest sister, who had a similar illness, while I was still recovering, while I was still recovering. It changes one’s perspective of when this might all come to an end.

In my teens and into midlife I thought I knew. My faith told me how things were supposed to go and how one was supposed to live and I believed it all. But there was something that just wasn’t quite right, something didn’t fit. And I do not make any claim to be smarter or better or anything like that. But for all of my searching and efforts, there were too many circular unresolved problems, too much double-talk and I had to take a break from the chase. After my divorce in the late 1980s I stepped away for over ten-years. Then I gave my faith another shot, during a questionable relationship that shook things up, which eventually crashed and burned by 2008. Then when I got ill in 2012, I was done with my prior “pray and hope” approach to life. I have fond memories of those prior adventures, but, if anything, I needed to be more deliberate in my own approach to whatever days I had left and be thankful to have the friends and family that I had in my life.

When I mildly expressed my skepticism, my mom accused me of thinking that I was too smart to believe in God. That was not the case at all. I knew many brilliant professors and scholars who were so much more intelligent who were devote Christians and Catholics, so this wasn’t about being “too smart.” When I went through my “radical Christianity” stage as a teenager, that’s when I did the whole angry (at the Catholic Church) thing, which mellowed out when I went to university and realized that there was so much that I just didn’t know that it was presumptuous to assume that the little I did “know” was the right stuff. The deeper I got as a religious studies major and then as a biblical studies major, the more I knew that I didn’t know. So, I didn’t get angry at God and saw the silliness at being angry at the church. There was just so much amazing stuff to learn that I felt it was wasteful to focus on the stuff that divides us. It’s so much more fun to observe and learn and appreciate the good in the world with the finite bit of time that we have.

So, it by some wonder that I should pass from this existence and wake up in another and see the God of this existence, I’d probably be more sympathetic that we humans have chosen to fight and kill one another over things that we just can’t be certain about and are continually fucking up the creation we’ve been given. I don’t expect that to happen, but that would be interesting. I haven’t done the best with what I’ve been given, so I don’t see the point in being pissed off at the creator because its creation is so screwed up. Who said that existence owes us anything? We did that. So, it’s kind of up to us to do the best we can and quit blaming the wind (or god, or each other).

I’m hoping that this “die and see God” scenario is not something I encounter any time soon, but I am getting at an age where I know that I have far fewer days ahead of me than what I’ve already pissed away. I appreciate those of you who maintain your beliefs and make an honest go at it every day. I appreciate our common experiences and differences and hope that we can help each other and stay on our chosen paths without getting in the way of each other. However this ends, I hope that it’s a good one.

Tags: encountering god, faith journey, meditations on, religious journey, what to say to god