I wish I believed in God. I really do. I don’t disbelieve, exactly, but I’m skeptical, and have been since the night I lay in bed at age 13, when I decided I was never going back to church.
This was a radical decision, considering that my father had practiced as a Presbyterian minister, my mother’s parents had been Christian missionaries, and I was raised in a home where I was forbidden to take the name of the Lord in vain.
Despite getting confirmed into the Presbyterian church, spending Sunday mornings planted on a church pew staring at stained glass and listening — kinda — to sermons, I felt more and more estranged from religion as I moved into adolescence.
I felt estranged, period. I was the sole adopted person in my extended family and felt painfully aware of being different. A middle-class kid, I felt out of place in the elite private school I attended. And so, at thirteen, I sunk into what I realize now was a depression. A depression I didn’t have language to talk about.
That night, when disconnection morphed into the darkness that enshrouded me, I stared at the ceiling and decided that there couldn’t be a God. If there were a God, my self-absorbed adolescent brain reasoned, I wouldn’t feel so bad. And since there was no God, and going to church had become an excruciating ordeal, I decided to pull the plug on religion altogether.
But once you’ve had something — and I did have an early immersion in religion, with the organ music, the stained glass, the hymns — it’s hard having nothing. And so I developed a yearning for some kind of affiliation, something to move me, to make me say, yes, I believe that, I take comfort in that, I feel connected to that.
The closest I have come to that is through reading. The last paragraph of The Great Gatsby gives me goosebumps. To Kill a Mockingbird soothes my soul. And anything by neo-religious writer Anne Lamott gives me hope that I could, one day, have faith. Because she has it, even after years of bad choices, perhaps because of years of bad choices. And she writes about faith in her trademark blasphemous style, full of envy and despair and seeping neuroses, as she stumbles her way back to grace.
Many times during the past couple of years, when I have felt completely flattened by Prince’s shenanigans and by my inability to take my son’s pain away, I have taken out my copy of Lamott’s Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith and skimmed it. After reading just a few lines, I am buoyed by the power of her words, the theme that runs through everything she writes, of beauty in brokenness, of finding strength when you feel beaten.
So I guess you could say reading Anne Lamott, for me, is kind of a religious experience. But it’s still something that’s done in solitude.
What I want is a community. A community of people who lift you up when you’re down, who help you believe in something bigger than yourself, who need what you have to give in return.
But how do you get community if you don’t go to church or a 12-step Program or belong to a quilting bee?
Something happened the other day to give me an idea.
* * *
I was sprawled on the couch in my boss’s office, moaning about Prince’s latest threat to haul my ass back into court. I felt like someone was sitting on my chest. I envisioned piles of legal documents, sleepless nights, five-figure legal fees, bankruptcy.
My boss, who is a friend and has been privy to my post-divorce saga, shook her head and said: “I don’t know how you cope with the stress.”
“I don’t know either,” I said. “I don’t think I’m doing it very well today.”
Sitting next to me on the couch was one of my co-workers. She’s an unflappable woman, with endless empathy and a care-taking brand of strictness. She clucked, shaking her head at the news of my latest travails.
“I’ll add you to my prayer list. Then all the Prayer Warriors will pray for you.” she said. “It’s a group of people at my church.”
“But how do you know what to pray for?” I asked.
“You know people need help, so you just pray,” she said, with a shrug.
“So, a bunch of Prayer Warriors who don’t know me are going to pray for me?”
“Sure!” she said.
“Well, okay,” I said. “I need all the prayers I can get. Thank you.”
I looked back at my boss, who’s about as religious as I am.
“Don’t you wish you had that kind of faith?” I asked her.
“Do I ever,” she sighed.
* * *
I don’t know if the Prayer Warriors have had an effect on my life. Prince is still Prince, although he hasn’t — yet — made good on his most recent threat to take me to court.
But here’s what I do know: I like the idea of people praying for me. It feels like someone’s tucking me into bed, or offering me a cup of warm milk — which in my case would be a glass of Mad Housewife Merlot. What I’m saying is: I like feeling less alone.
How many of us feel alone, after all? How many of us keep heartaches to ourselves because we don’t want to burden others, or we feel too embarrassed to ask for help, or our problems just seem unsurmountable?
Glennon Melton, the brain-blogger behind Momastery, has created a kind of turbo-charged prayer circle that is really quite profound. Readers submit stories about people in need, and Glennon harnesses efforts to get her “Monkees” to meet those needs. Together with her followers, she has raised funds for people struggling to pay their medical bills or to buy their kids Christmas gifts. A recovering alcoholic, bulimic, and “bad love” junkie, Glennon is quite open about her own frailties, and is committed to keeping herself sane and sober by giving back on a grand scale.
I have nowhere near Momastery‘s following, but I still want to use Perils of Divorced Pauline as a vehicle to help people feel less alone. In the year I’ve been blogging, many people have contacted me to share their own lousy-divorce sagas and have told me reading my stories has made them feel like someone “gets” them.
Hearing from my readers makes me feel less alone too. It makes me feel that the pain my kids and I have gone through is worth something.
And that is the power of blogging, my friends. It brings strangers together and creates a community. I’m still not sure I believe in God, but I do believe in the power of community.
So I’ve decided to harness that inherent power in my new “Prayer Box” forum.
* * *
“Prayer Box” is a spin on a God Box, in which people write their worries on pieces of paper that they “give over” to a Higher Power when they drop the papers into a designated box.
Think of the Prayer Box in the same way. If you have a problem, a need, or a worry sitting on your head like a squawking vulture, just click here and write a brief description of your problem. You can be anonymous, or you can use your real name.
I will check the Prayer Box daily and pray in my own fashion: not to God, since I’m still on the fence about him or her, but I will send you good thoughts and envision you bathed in healing light.
Here is my only rule: if you ask for prayers, please pray — in your own way — for the person below you. If you want to pray for everyone, that’s great, but at least send one prayer reply to the person on the thread below you.
Let’s spread some good karma, shall we?
Karma’s good (I just wish some of it would swing back & bite MY ex-husband in the butt)
I myself lost my faith @ age 12, watching my grandfather die a slow tortuous death from congestive heart failure & emphysema (when the end came for him, it was NOT peaceful;’ basically death by slow drowning). Like you, I would LIKE to get it back (still draw comfort from some of the rites & rituals of Catholicism, dedicated to giving my son a good Catholic-school education), but my intellect gets in the way…
I don’t think I ever had the faith. We went to church , but by the time I was 13 or 14 I was 100% sure I didn’t believe. Sunday school felt like history class and I felt like it would have been more useful to practice kindness and love to others rather than sitting in a little room eating cookies with punch. My “faith” revolves around being good to others to be a good example, to live as stresslessly (yes, it’s a word now) as possible, and to just get outside into nature as much as possible.
I sometimes feel like my lack of religion ostracized me, especially at a Catholic college and with extended family that is pretty religious. In the end, it seems like we all want the same things from faith. We all want love, understanding, community, etc. We just take different roads. I’ll definitely be visiting your prayer box
Sounds like you have faith to me, Jen. I don’t think you need to sit in church to have it.
For my family, going to church was like watching football. They were both things that *other people* did on Sunday. So I’ve always kind of regarded religion is a sort of quaint ritual that lots of people do. But I do appreciate the value of having a community to be part of, and to participate in.
And I like the new look and logo.
Glad you like the new look, Stan! Thanks for commenting.
Love the new look! (I wasn’t sure where I was…)
And I think it’s the most natural thing in the world to “pray” to something larger than ourselves whether we know what that is or even “believe” – especially when we’re scare and tired and feeling so small.
Pauline—
I have the same yearning, and the same near-faith experiences with certain pieces of literature.
A Prayer For Owen Meany – John Irving
Abide With Me – Elizabeth Strout
Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
Angle of Respose – Wallace Stegner
The last is my absolute favorite. I re-read Stegner like a bible.
Peace,
AB
Hmmm, I’ll have to check out the Stegner. Thanks for sharing your list.
Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day,” comes to mind. It includes the lines:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
It is perhaps her most famous poem, and ends a few lines later in the best question ever. (Google it. You won’t be disappointed. I’ve read it hundreds of times now, and it still gets me.)
I like her version of a prayer. I like yours, too! Thanks for this, and for the discussion on faith…..something many of us struggle with.
Oh, what a wonderful poem! You have tantalized me and now I will have to google the ending!
I’m all for sending people positive thoughts and good wishes in a non-religious way. I don’t say I’ll pray for people, but just think good thoughts:)
Good thoughts definitely count!
Denise, I have had a very similar experience with blogging. Putting it out there, making connections. You are the second commenter to mention Stegner as a sort of religious reading experience…I will have to try him! Thanks, as always, for stopping by.
I feel the same sort of casting about sometimes, driving past churches and wishing that I had a community like that. I’m married to a Jewish guy and three of our four kids are Jewish. I came really close to conversion but couldn’t get into replacing my parents with Abraham and Sarah…it’s complicated. So yeah, I have a spiritual life but it’s pretty ephemeral and singular. People have prayed for us, actually, in the past. It’s a strange but helpful feeling.
I am testing comments. Are you being notified???
nope.
Just yours. Which is what I want anyway, right?
Were you responding to “test”? It was actually from my web designer referring to my notification issues…
Love is the same as God, God wants us to have all of these things, why not have God in your life..When you really believe in him and do all his commandments the Lord will be with you…Faith is not easy to have to feel, is the most hard thing to do when you love the Lord, but faith comes by reading and stying the word of God…we need something in life to feel the comfort and the love that sometimes we don’t have in our friends and family…God’s word is love…When you gather with brothers that believe in god and in faith, you have something beautiful…..Don’t take away God in your life…There is a God don’t forsaken him..love is God!
Does anyone have any advice on how I can pray without referring or using the term God You see, I do belief in a higher power but I just don’t like referring to It by that term. I want to develop a deeper connection with everything that is and I know prayer and meditation is the best way to accomplish that but I just don’t know how to do it without having someone or something to direct my prayer to. I’ve tried substituting God for Life and Karma but I don’t feel my prayers been as meaningful, but that could also be as a result of me not praying. I do meditate and it helps me a lot in dealing with life’s stressors but I feel like I’m falling short of attaining something greater and that the answer lies in praying, I just don’t now how to do it.This is why I now want to make it a habit. Any advice/suggestions would highly be appreciated.
I don’t know, Omar. But maybe reading CS Lewis (he had a book about his struggles with faith, although I can’t remember which one it is) or modern Buddhists like Pema Chodron might belp. I’m not sure that it’s important to pray to God exactly, I think you can also have a discipline of meditation grounded in accepting the complexity of life, which is what Pema Chodron writes about.
I just read parts of Plan B today…all my books are dog eared…
I don’t know if this is the right place for this but I need to write something somewhere…
Just a quick bit of info: I’m 25 now and was 23 when this first happened and male.
About February last year I was lying in bed trying to sleep and for some reason or another I suddenly realised that one day I’ll be dead. Gone. No more me at all. I suddenly and overwhelmingly felt like I was been crushed and couldn’t breathe. Turns out it was a panic attack. The next day I couldn’t shake the thoughts of death for love nor money. This continued for at least a month before I finely went to the doctors and just burst into tears. I was constantly thinking of death and what comes after and living in, basically, terror.
Long story short I was placed on medication, went to see a therapist and spoke to a church of England treasurer (who was brilliant btw and didn’t try to force his beliefs on me). The therapist said I was using these thoughts because I’m unemployed and so on. Maybe she was partially right, I don’t know, and when it did give me some temporary relief i have never been able to shake off that first thought of ‘not being’ and the afterlife (whether it exists or not). I brought a bible and tried to read it but only got through most of Genesis before giving up. Not because I though it was false but because some of it was rather annoying (noah cursing someone for covering him up whilst naked and drunk for example). I try to believe in God and pray every night but I feel like a bastard (sorry). Praying whilst not believing 100% seems so awful and I feel bad afterwards. I’ve recently been having these thoughts again and I really REALLY want to believe in God but I just find it hard (intellectually?).
I don’t know why I’ve posted this really but I would be really grateful if someone somewhere would be kind enough to pray for me. I tried the prayer box link btw but it 404′d.
Regards, Joe
Hi Joe:
Sorry about the Prayer Box, it never really took off. I relate to your ambivalence and this-doesn’t-feel-right atmosphere when I try to pray. I do feel that there are forces in the universe and it’s our job to bring out the good forces in each other…kind of a synergy. Have you ever read Buber and his Divine Spark theory? Might be more palatable for you. Anyway, I really appreciate your comment, and empathize with your situation, and, yes, am sending you good thoughts as I write this.
As the daughter of a Reform Rabbi, I grew up in a strict Jewish home. But as a teenage, I questioned my beliefs and as an adult, became more of an Atheist.
But after my husband of 34 years walked out of our marriage to me on September 16, 2014, crying into pilows with grief that my marriage died such a horrible death, without a clue that he wasn’t happy and nothing said, and…. only 4 months later…. finding out I was adipted, when my brother called me from NY to tell me he had found my French adoption documents hidden in our dad’s apartment. made me start thinking about why things happen, and maybe I have a guardian angel(s) watching over me, because I cannot explain it all.
Knowing now, just how much happier I am now without my husband around, to suck up my life, because he didn’t appreciate me, and treated me so badly too, and also finding out through taking a DNA test, a first cousin, living in CA and finding a family I never knew I had. To me, this is the happiest moment finding my family, and soon meeting my cousin in June, digging through all the photos of my family including seeing pictures of my brith mother who gave me up for adoption in August 1957. I even had an entirely differnet name, and might even change it to my birth mother’s last name after I get divorced.
When my girl friends and I speek, they tell me everryone had spirit angels, or guardians that guide them and if you listen, and watch, you will know they are around you, always.