are you there, god

on lent and belief, on giving up and giving in

It’s Lent, or as I like to call it, Jesus Christ, Superstar season. It’s a time of year where I reflect, take stock of my life, and listen to the original cast recording (1970 version, on vinyl). I do a lot of thinking about Jesus and God. I also think about eleven year old Margaret in Judy Blume’s Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret prefacing her meditation to God with “are you there?” and how I wondered when I first read the book if she was questioning if God really exists, or questioning if he’s listening. I wonder that too, Margaret.

I used to give up things for Lent, mostly because I was forced into it as a kid. “Jesus sacrificed for you, now you sacrifice for him.” I wasn’t sure how this all worked and I tried to argue that Jesus wouldn’t want us to suffer like he did and my mother would remind me that going without candy for forty days is not “suffering.” So I would choose the thing I’d miss the least, mom would complain about me not getting the point, and she’d suggest something like giving up reading comic books, which, no. I inevitably landed on candy every year. As I got older, I started to understand the concept of giving something up for Lent, and I tried to be more meaningful in my choices. And then came the falling out with the church, the dropping out of Catholicism and religion in general, and the freedom from having to forego a vice every February.

So that’s how I find myself listening to “Overture” at four in the morning, thinking about God and Jesus and Margaret, as I do. I’ve been contemplating giving up something for Lent even though I haven’t practiced any kind of religion in 25 years. I think it would be a good exercise, if not in faith, then in self discipline. I run down a list of things it would take some fortitude to give up: twitter, weed, ice cream. The more I think about it, the less reason I have to do it. What would giving up ice cream for forty days prove to myself except how much I love ice cream? What ultimate purpose would it serve? Would it help me or anyone else in any way, would it make me grow or diminish my sadness or change the world?

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I tell people I don’t believe in God, and in theory, I do not. But why am I always thinking about him? Why does the idea of God take up so much space in my brain? I imagine the beginning of time. I think about the sheer amount of luck and timing needed to make something out of nothing and it makes my head spin. But then I think of God creating heaven and earth, conjuring up people and plants and animals, and that seems just as absurd. There’s a deep part of my that wants to believe in God, that wants there to be a place called heaven where I can see all my dead relatives, that wants to know there’s a life beyond this one. There are so many reasons to not believe in God. I could rattle them off a lot easier than I could reasons why you should believe. Yet, he persists in my life. I have to act like there is a god, because what if I have spent most of my adult life eschewing religion only to find out at the moment of death that there is indeed a god and he’s pissed at me? I try to err on the side of caution all the time, and behave as if I’m going to meet a god I really don’t believe in. It’s confusing as hell, and it plagues my entire being.

I’m not going to get into my feelings about God being an interventionist or not, about how my faith is non-sustainable because I don’t want to believe in a God that lets atrocities happen. I’ve written about my faith before; nothing has changed except I think about it more now. If I do something wrong, I think about how God is watching me - I grew up with an all seeing, judgmental god - then I remind myself I don’t believe in God, then I chastise myself for thinking that because what if he does exist? It’s a vicious cycle, and I struggle every day with what I believe in, and what I think is made up. I want to pray. I want to be prayed for. I want reconciliation with God. I want my solid atheism back. I want to ask “are you there, god?” and get an answer.

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Somewhere around “Pilate’s Dream” I have an epiphany. What if, instead of giving something up, I do something positive for forty days? What if I pick up a habit instead of breaking one, but a good habit? I could actually improve my life by addition, not subtraction. I’ve been really bad about reading and I have a large stack of books waiting to be read, so I’m thinking about reading every day for forty days. This could get me back into being a reader again. Or what if instead of saying I’d give up ordering in for Lent, I commit to cooking dinner every night for forty nights. I know this is blatantly ignoring the premise of giving something up, but I’m trying to meet God halfway here.

I think again about Margaret, about how she fought with herself over religion and struggled with her religious identity. She separates herself from God, but in the end reconciles with him. There are a lot of complicated issues in that book, and I don’t think I really got the gist of all of them until I reread Are You There God as a young adult. I know I have separated myself from God. But that’s because I don’t trust that he could be real. I don’t want to put my whole being into something that may or may not be. Margaret figured out her relationship with God at eleven. I’m sixty and still as confused as I was when I was Margaret’s age.

When I lay my head down at night, I want to pray. I want to ask to have my health looked after. I want to right my wrongs. I want to be forgive, to forgive, to put a faith-based shield over my loved ones. I stop short of saying actual prayers because it feels wrong of me to put all that out there when I’m not sure God exists.

I have to make some kind of peace with this because it eats at me. Do I take the leap of faith and reconcile with a god I once loved, or do I back off and let my agnosticism just be?

As I sit here once again at 4am, listening to “Gethsemane” and contemplating the existence of God and Jesus, I decide that I will read will every day for the rest of Lent but, more than that, I will really explore my feelings about God and religion and my place in a universe where God as I know him exists. I will better myself, and maybe even grow a little, and I am fully aware that there may not be an answer waiting for me. Like Margaret, I will deal with God on my own terms. I just have to figure out what those terms are.