Oh God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

Another song I played all the time on my radio show was Sarah Mclachlan’s Dear God.

It’s a cover of an XTC song, which is clearly anti-Christian. In the video to the song, a boy is screaming the words of the song to a bunch of people sitting in a tree, shaped interestingly, like a cross. And at the end, when you get the strong beats, he chops down the tree.

But clever person that I am, I turned it around. Prayer should not be interrupted by doubt or waning belief, I said. Look through the Bible, at the Psalms, at the Prophets, at Job, even Jesus Himself. They all prayed without doubt, all cried out to God asking for explanations. But the important thing, I said, was that none of them stopped praying.

And years later, that is exactly what I have done.

It’s a gradual process this falling away. It starts with questioning, leads to escape, and then to disbelief.

I used to pray. Even after I left the church. As I have said, I left the church because it didn’t match with my perception of God. I used to pray all the time. Every night.

I started using fewer words, and spent more time speaking in tongues. It was around then I wrote the piece I had published.

Then I started meditating more. Not saying anything, just remaining open.

But I can do that all the time, I thought. I don’t need to use a candle. So I didn’t.

And if God isn’t some mean old man keeping track of how many times I “pray” (for by then it was surely only a vague relationship to what most people refer to as prayer) then in the long run, it doesn’t matter how many times I pray. So I prayed less.

And when I did pray, I didn’t know why I was praying. The “opening myself up to God” thingy seemed like a worthless exercise. What’s the difference between that and, say, whacking off? Except that stroking my pole gives me a sense of pleasure and euphoria. So I tossed more than I prayed.

Slowly, I started to question my belief in God at all. I mean, everything that I felt when I prayed could easily be simulated, and seemed to lead people in contradictory directions. I had read lots and lots about how people are manipulated into experiences of spiritual ecstasy, which made me trust those experiences a lot less. The Bible wasn’t really a good reason to believe in God anymore. Logic didn’t support the existence of a God (or at least, no more than the lack of a God). What was left? I certainly didn’t have that driving sense that there was a God. I had nothing. Praying seemed pointless, so I outright avoided it.

There have been a few times when I have prayed in the past few years. Still no words. And not times of desperation, as one might expect. Times of quiet contemplation. I feel something, but nothing that solidifies a belief in God. It could be my charkas aligning for all I know (although I doubt that since my posture is still awful).

That’s part of the reason my lack of faith feels like a loss. For the longest time, I have had no firm beliefs to replace it with, no spiritual sense of the world, and no clear, concrete one either.

I have become a wanderer, in a dark woods, without even the Lord to guide me.