I’m not entirely sure when, but at some point in the last six months I stopped believing in God. This is kind of a big deal, seeing as for most of my life I have been so wildly interested in religion and spirituality that it has dominated vast quantities of my internal life. I’m the guy whose read the Tao Te-Chang and enjoyed it. I’ve devoured most of the Bible. I’ve been to a Krishna birthday ceremony and chanted in sacred Sanskrit. At every juncture I’ve kept a safe intellectual distance, but responding the same to every encounter: ‘wow, isn’t that so fascinating?’
Tales of faith and affinity with the divine are life’s most moving stories. Or at least they were for me some time ago. In this past summer gone, when my days were filled with writing in Brisbane, I would take breaks by walking through the city streets and always spending sometime inside St. Stephen’s Cathedral, marveling at it’s beauty and stillness. I thought several times about going to mass, but it simply never happened. I was too afraid to be sucked into a vortex. It was a vulnerable time for me, and I didn’t want to strengthen myself through an external mythical force. I wanted to strengthen myself from the inside.
Somewhere between those walks and last week, I abandoned all of this abruptly and became swept up in a different vortex all together: the fashionably militant atheist movement. It wasn’t until a friend turned to me last week, and asked ‘Do you believe in God?’ and I stumbled, that I realised, in fact - no, I didn’t.
This is fine, in and of itself. But I’m unhappy about this. I’ve grown sour and bitter about religion. It isn’t so much that I don’t believe in anything, it’s that I don’t want to believe in what they believe in. I’ve had instances lately where I’ve come across people so blindly religious that they’ve hurt others in their blindness. This slayed me. I also, not insignificantly, kind of let go of any idea of an after life. I think we just die. And that’s it. How else could it be? That is life. But I reach these conclusions with such uneasy resentment that I’ve come to understand - I need God. Some concept of it. To be happy, I need to believe in something. Perhaps this is false, perhaps I am on the bridge of pure reasoned enlightenment, grounded in sanity. But I’m not that big a fan of people who are absolutely sane. And I do look for poetry and meaningless beauty in life. I don’t look for rules, structure and guilt, but I do look for grace and beauty. This is my God.
And in the past week, this God has showed up again, because I’ve started asking where on Earth He/She/It has buggered off to.
I’ll reveal a secret here now that will further damn my hopes of ever appearing like I actually act my age, or indeed my gender. Late on Thursday I baked for a sick friend I’d be seeing the next day. It had been so long since I had cooked anything. I had the kitchen to myself, I had Eat Pray Love on audiobook in my ear, and a pile of cookies to make for another. And my God showed up to help.
The sheer unadulterated bliss that this brought me, perfect and glorious in it’s solitude, was unfathomable. For the first time in months, my heart and soul were quiet, still, and smiling. A mysterious event in that it was perfect.
Yesterday, my car broke down on the side of the road. It was the most relaxed collapse I’d ever witnessed. (Fill in the layers of metaphor here for yourselves.) I was rocking along at 80 k, when the battery light came on and Biscut came to an ever so slow stop. I tried to start him again a couple of times. For the first time I can remember, I prayed. I spoke aloud:
‘God, I’m really really tired and I want to get home. It would be really good if Biscut could start again, and break down closer to home. I know you’re busy, and I’m grateful for all the wonderful things in my life. But right now, I just really need my car to start.’
I tried again. It didn’t start.
I made the necessary phone calls and sat on the hood of my car, waiting. It would be quite a wait. I was on a side road, just outside a service station, with the highway directly in front of me.
I didn’t see the crash, I heard it. A very real and heavy thunk rung out. I looked up to see a 4wd balancing on two wheels. Time slowed and I was certain it would tip over. It didn’t. It regained it’s balance in a way that only the law of physics can accomplish and slowed to a halt, revealing a ute with a tremendous dent in it’s passenger door just behind it.
The driver of the 4wd, a woman, immediately got out of the car, stiff and hobbling. She stopped in the road. ‘It’s a crash,’ I saw her realise. ‘I’ve just been in a crash.’ And she pulled out her phone.
I was about to run over when the RACQ mechanic turned up and we both looked on in awe. Two other witnesses had run over to help. One was a young father, whose wife and child had stopped at the side of the road to rest. I had smiled politely to them only minutes before. The other was the roadhouse owner, who ran out with a safety vest and a first aid box. Almost as if this happened every Saturday afternoon.
The events that unfolded over the next hour were dramatic: three ambulance vehicles, two police cars, and three towing vans. When the RACQ mechanic was finished with me, he went over and helped out. The young father was over the road for the full hour, giving a statement to the police before moving on. When all was cleaned up, one of the towing guys came over to me. He was to tow my vehicle back, he said, but I’d have to wait. I asked if anyone was hurt. An elderly person had busted a hip, apparently, and all were shaken.
The amount of reverence and respect I encountered and witnessed quite took me back. These strangers banded together to help. And there was something unexplainably regional about the whole scene. I don’t think you’d encounter this much care and attention in Brisbane. I’m not sure why.
If God is in either of these stories, then…
Well I don’t know. But it feels like something was. God or whatever.
That sums up my attitude at the moment.
God or whatever.
Better, for me, than: no God.
I wish I had a better conclusion to this blog cum essay, but I don’t. I don’t think I will for a very long time. So you’ll need to be satisfied with the stories themselves, and with your own version of God. Whatever that is.
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