Is God Still this Big Silence in My Head?
Before now, my relationship with God has been a troubled and stormy one. I alternated between respect for Him and hatred for Him. Between belief and unbelief in Him. Between reading the Bible with an odd sense of curiousity and—in the same breath—being enraged at the little tryranies of the Bible. It was such an erratic relationship—full of fights (sometimes with something in myself that I had wrongfully construed as God), full of suspicions about religion. God symbolised a monumental enemy for me: an enemy I was coaxed into a relationship with when I was young, and whom I have grown to loathe. I argued with people who believed in Him, my eyes sharp with challenge, as I defended his inexistence.
But in all this, there had always been a part of me that was accepting to the possibility of God existing, a part of me that was patently awed by the idea of a Supernatural Hero looking out for us, a part of me softened by the long-gone years, from childhood to secondary school, when I actively believed in God. I had always been drawn to arguments about God, because I figured that if I finally arrived at a conclusion that deeply satisfied me, I would rid myself of the demons that lurked somewhere at the outskirts of my psyche, of my entire being. It was, to me, the key to a certain, nameless freedom—the freedom to begin to be myself, to begin to live life.
Now, however, these feelings and yearnings have been sort of surgically removed. The questions, the curiousities, the Bible-reading, everything has been erased. I no longer despise God (well, not as much as I used to), and I don’t feel any allegiance to Him either. I don’t read the Bible anymore. It’s been months since I stood in a congregation of sweaty, clapping God-worshippers worshipping God. I don’t argue God anymore, at least not with the same enthusiasm I used to. I just do not care—anymore. It’s not atheism. I don’t have the height of intelligence vital to the embracing and defence of atheism; I don’t even have the stoic temperament atheists generally seem to have. So atheism is completely out of the question. What I feel now about religion is nothing, a dangerous nonchalance about God, like feeling terrifyingly dead inside—like looking at yourself in the mirror and afterwards forgetting what manner of man you were.
In losing God, losing even my hatred for Him, I lost parts of myself, the components of my person. If you started an argument now about God, just to spite me, to get me talking heatedly like before, I would be minimally interested. Gospel songs no longer come to me as before with that numinous sheen, they don’t strike me as strongly as they do before. The short story I wanted to write—about a Christian girl helping an atheist boy, in the most uncommon way possible, to find his way back to God—has been abandoned. I feel no elated emotional connection to it like I did weeks on end, replaying unwritten dialogue in my head, giving the girl various motivations like a change of clothes, or fantasising the boy was me. I have stopped reading books or articles online, and the sorrow that comes with it bloat the sad stretch of silence that constitute the bulk of my days. I delude myself. I shirk pain and suffering; I seek out ease and pleasure in the most terrible of ways. I overlaugh; I’m under-sad. I cling to a multitude of things, a collection of pretences that don’t adequately represent me, and eventually betray me. I have, at this period, began to fearlessly obsess about dying, to teeter towards and grapple with the concept of death. And everyday, now, I nurse the fond hope that eventually I’ll begin the hard journey back to my estranged self.
