An Agnostic’s God

Posted on December 27, 2007 in Agnosticism

So many of my friends are in perilous places. I wrote this to one who is currently seeking a church that will fill her emptiness, give her a jolt of divine splendor. Maybe others need to read these words, too:

I fought God for many years, toying with the idea of a divorce, a renunciation of divine being. In the end, it was when I was in partial hospitalization and listened to the testimonies of patients who had been in the pit three or more times, yet still insisting that prayer and daily devotion helped them through, that I made the decision — as my therapist puts it — to let God off the hook. I chose to live as an agnostic (atheism seems so mean) and make my first order of the day being a good person.

I think understanding for yourself what God is helps. I realized that if there is any God that makes sense to me, it is the God of the Book of Job. Not the nasty bugger who makes a bet that unravels Job’s life, but the God of the last chapters who speaks to Job out of the chaos of the whirlwind. This is the God who is the Universe, who is forever busy moving stars around, causing asteroids to fall on planets as meteors, blowing up winds like the one that robbed me of one of my deck chairs on Christmas Day. And this God, I realized, doesn’t have it in for you, doesn’t put burdens on you for the sake of testing you. Things just happen and sometimes they happen to good people like us. There’s no malice in it. Just the spinning of the Universe.

We can get to desiring vision like we desire a fix or a drink. We can be addicts to ecstatic experience. I’ve found my best happiness in just being like a monk — going about my affairs, keeping each moment clear. You don’t have to live in a monastery to be like this.

If there is any part of traditional prayer that makes complete sense to me it is the four words from the Lord’s Prayer “thy will be done”. Things will happen. They won’t blow you away like a storm, cause you to shudder from head to toe with the blue electricity of communion with the divine. They will, however, refocus you on what before all else is important: be a good person and don’t waste energy or spirit trying to move the world in your direction.

[tags]agnosticism, God, belief, Christianity, Judaism, Book of Job, Job, atheism[/tags]