God

The Darkness of Disbelief

At one point in my life, in fact it happened on a particular morning on a particular day in 2005, I realised I didn’t believe in God anymore. This wasn’t an intellectual thing. It was something I suddenly felt, or rather it was the lack of a feeling. Until that morning I had felt the presence of God every time I prayed, and from that morning I could no-longer feel it.

This ruptured the core of my life. It left me lost and viscerally depressed, deprived of my life’s meaning and purpose. Since my family were Christian and almost all of my friends were Christian, I also found myself feeling alone. But I could not hide from it, and I couldn’t pretend that it hadn’t happened. I wasted no time trying to warm myself on a fire that no-longer gave heat, and I stepped out into the darkness of disbelief.

faithful obedience to God stops you growing up

As a young Christian I constantly felt under pressure to discover what ‘the will of God’ was for my life. This is not so different from what people call ‘finding your passion’: it’s learning about who you are and what you most want to get out of life. But when it’s framed as the will of God, you really don’t want to fuck it up.

Creating life goals is the work of years, and for me this wasn’t the problem. It was the tiny things that got me stressed out. Did I just hear God telling me to give money to that beggar? Or to go and speak to that stranger about Jesus?

Christians know themselves as the children of God. While this metaphor has its uses, when it is pushed too strongly—and it usually is—the overwhelming freedom of the human condition is sacrificed for something less. The freedom we then know is that of a child who cannot leave his mother. It feels safe, but it’s not real freedom. We prefer this, however, because we never have to become adults, which would mean deciding for ourselves.

We were made for more than infantile clinging to what we think the will of God might be. Fear was not meant to be a permanent feature of our lives.

It is not enough to choose from a set of pre-packaged Christian options. It is not enough to hear the voice of God and trot along, the ever-faithful servant. Freedom requires that saying ‘no’ to God, or to any power that claims authority over us, be a possibility that is so real it is a razor’s edge. When we hear a compelling call to do something that we know is not true to who we are, and can say ‘no’, only then can we call ourselves adults.

on not knowing God

I always look for a neat answer; it’s just how my mind works. So when I think about who or what God might be, I want–when my thinking is done–to be able to say it all in just a sentence or two.

But God is not easy to pin-down and dissect. Our ideas of God are formed organically, marinated in attitudes and especially feelings from family and friends, from books and school and society. When we say "I believe in God" or "I don’t believe in God", we’re putting in a nutshell years of growth of understanding. We build intellectual arguments to justify the nutshell, but what lies inside is more raw, more basic.

When I read many theists I am confronted by their fear of unbelief (and what that might mean for the fate of their souls); when I read the new atheists (like Dawkins or Hitchens) I am bowled over by their anger at the theists. They paint their positions in the language of rationality, but their basic stuff is fear and a lack of peace.

I don’t want what I call God to be like that. That’s why, although I’m frustrated by not knowing who or what God might be, I’m also tentatively satisfied. Why? I want the question to be part of me. I want to infuse in the question. I want the question to change who I am, to slowly but persistently shift my emotions and grow me into someone more healthy, strong, and authentic.

If I’d found a simple answer, it would probably be a manufactured McGod, something I use to solidify the emotions and thoughts that I don’t ever want to face and resolve.