I Believed in a God, Once

And then man ruined everything

Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash

We’re in Mexico.

My skin is streaked red with burn and I’m feasting on club sandwiches. We’re seniors in college and drunk in Acapulco. We sport our Señor Frogs t-shirts without irony. I yell solamente cheese to no one in particular and everyone laughs. At night, we climb into VW bugs strewn with purple blinking lights and house music and there are men outside pacing the streets carrying machine guns. I’m standing next to a man who could’ve been my age carrying a gun and I don’t know what to do with this knowledge so I laugh and laugh until we’re back in the hallway of our hotel and I’m lying on the carpet unsure of how I arrived on the floor.

There are five of us. During the day we get the idea of going out into the ocean in an inflatable raft. It’s small and we’re accompanied by a man in a small boat. Alisa, Liz, and I are the only ones who speak Spanish so we negotiate the ride out to sea. The men are concerned because the raft fits four. We point to Deirdre and say she’s so skinny she’s half a person so we’re 4.5 and what’s the big deal anyway?

The men motor us out to sea because we’re white women with money.

We ride fast and feel the spray of water on our faces and we never imagined a spring so perfect, so clean and beautiful and we’re young and on the verge and we’re laughing still until the raft flips over and the engine dies and we’re so far from the shore it’s microscopic and this is the first time I think we might possibly die.

We’re floating in the water, coughing out the sea. Our eyes are red and wet with tears and I panic and for the first time in my life I say the words out loud: I want my mommy.

Weeks earlier, I said to her over a phone line: You make it impossible for me to love you. I set the phone down and Liz tells me I made the right decision. To cut things off because what kind of mother fakes her own death to get her daughter to forgive her? What kind of mother gaslights before we even knew the term existed? So, here I am, in the middle of the ocean shouting for the one person I excised from my life.

Here I am calling out to her because although she was my first and only hurt, even though she was cruel, she would’ve carried me out of the ocean. No fucking way was I going to die on her watch. She would drown if she had to.

Finally, the man in the boat arrives and we climb onto it and we make our way quietly back to shore. We step on the hot white sand while kids clutch their Coronas and sway to the boom box beat. We walk back to our rooms while kids hatch plans. We close the door and sit in the cold, not quite dark, and think: we could’ve died.

But let me back this up…

My best friend at the time, a blonde, proud Republican from Connecticut was trying—not so subtly—to convince me that Jesus Christ was my personal savior. My only experience with the church was falling asleep in it, roasting hot dogs outside of it. I knew a god possibly existed but he, she, or it seemed so foreign to me I couldn’t feel the weight of it. Until Liz in that hotel room in Mexico said it was god that had saved us. It was god that had plucked us out of the ocean. And it hadn’t occurred to me then to ask about all the people who had drowned and died and exploded in planes—what about them? Had god forgotten them? Had we won the luck of the draw? Had we caught god on the one day he was paying attention?

Instead, I nodded and when Liz handed me the phone with her mother on the other line asking if I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and personal savior, I said yes. And then Liz pulled me close and cried a little bit because I was safe. I was saved. I wouldn’t end up like her father, who refused to believe, I wouldn’t end up swathed in fire and damnation.

After Mexico, I blindly followed faith. I registered as a Republican and sat silent while my friends claimed gays shouldn’t have rights and we were devolving into a welfare state. Even though I felt, in my heart, differently.

For the next five years, I cycled through churches in New York, but nothing fit. When I visited Liz in Connecticut until my early thirties I sat through service interested, but not tethered. I held her small children’s hands as they skipped into bible classes and smiled as women gave me leads about this and that church in New York. You’ll find your place, they said, but I never did.

I never quite believed what they were selling, but it felt safe to go through the motions. It was a hedged bet, a just-in-case, a what happens if you’re in Mexico and drown again? I read my bible and turned on the news and saw the hurt and the hate and I couldn’t make sense of it.

Away from Liz, I started to think as my own person and while it took forever to change my political status from Republican to Democrat, my loss of faith was immediate.

I didn’t understand a god that would view his children as unequal. I didn’t understand the fuss about gays (who cares if you’re gay, bi, whatever, I sure didn’t). I didn’t understand stealing a woman’s right to choose. It’s my body—I should do what I want with it although many men in this world would raise their hand and disagree.

It wasn’t the god that got me not believing, it was man who perverted the word for profit. Who mangled meaning to create an us vs. them. And did they truly believe I’d be snatched up, singed up, and dancing with pitchforks? Had we reduced our complicated, beautiful lives to base simplicity? A binary of Jesus = Heaven, Heathens = Hell?

And what about all the Jews and Muslims and Shintoists and Buddhists who had their own gods and faiths—why had they been duped and not us? What made us believe we had the answers and they didn’t? What made us believe answers mattered at all? I couldn’t make sense of hoards of good people plunged into darkness because what—they hadn’t accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and personal savior?

You’ve got to be kidding me.

And so I told the world and Liz no more. I’d sit out the church visits. I’d close my eyes through her grave concern. I’d throw the bible in the garbage amidst shrieks and tears because it was a book that meant nothing to me. It was possibly the finest novel ever written but I wasn’t a fan much like I wasn’t a fan of Melville, Pope, or John Updike.

We give meaning to the things we love but it’s just an assignment, one’s feelings and point of view. For me, the bible was a book like any other and since I couldn’t reconcile the story with logic or my faith or reality, it was a book that held no meaning to me. I cleaved more to the Shinto ideas of reverence for nature and the majesty of the world because that felt more real to me.

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I’m in Bakersfield and it’s a weird little place. While I love the home I’m in, while I pad up and down the stairs in socked feet and Felix sprawls out on the rug and sniffs the leaves on the towering trees that skirt the window screens, it’s the outside that unnerves me.

I order a pizza last night because why not? I’m slightly panicked about money (cross all applicable body parts that this big job comes through), but I splurge because I live in a house and I’m happy and cooled by the breeze at night.

After a half hour, I run out of the house in bare feet because the woman delivery person can’t seem to find me. She paces the street with a pizza box until I wave her down and she jogs toward me. We exchange perfunctory pleasantries and when I turn to leave she says, have a blessed evening.

I turn, caught off-guard and say what? Okay. And it’s been like that—people blessing my days and nights and while I don’t fault the kind words and the intention, it’s strange to me. It’s strange to look at me and assume I believe. I could be a Jew, a Muslim, an atheist. I’m an atheist who believes in magic, the large, sweeping wind of the world so maybe that makes me an agnostic? I’ve never been big on labels, but the label I shirk is Christian.

Because while there are many wonderful Christians, the loud and hateful have given Christ bad press, God a bad name. It’s sort of like seeing the American flag and associating it with white supremacists or fuckwits who scream about trans people and bathrooms and my god, what about the children? while the majority of convicted pedophiles are straight white men.

I don’t want my day to be blessed—I want to live through my days without screaming. I want to stand on the pavement in bare feet and watch the sun rise. I want to feel the chill of the gloaming and the hot wind of summer through the trees. I want to see cows cry out for one another in the pasture. I want to see a small child’s hand reach out to their mother, to love, to the safest of worlds they can fathom. I want to see an ocean free of rafts and college seniors swallowing seawater.

I don’t want blessed—I want the world I want to see on my terms.