God has never been my flavour. He seemed inaccessible, foolish and trite. I’ve often regarded his celestial clairvoyance with suspicion. The mention of God would have me yawning and rolling my eyes. The name Jesus produced an instinctual smirk that could only be remedied by tautly puckering my lips so they wouldn’t ping up in a feral grin. Religion seemed to be a tool to force-feed good morals. I used to smack the spoon away and turn my head away from swallowing even a teaspoon of amen.
I am still not a believer in God or Jesus, but as I grow older I increasingly believe in the value of faith. I now recognise the importance and heartfelt necessity for hope. Almost a year ago I started working at a Catholic charity and, I have to admit, it has significantly changed my understanding. There is comfort in faith, belief in a path and a sense of direction. I can imagine the relief of life out of my hands; thy will be done. Thy, and thankfully not mine. Faith strikes me as a conscious form of peace.
Even before working at the charity, my cynicism had begun to digress. When I first moved to London everything was intense. My hectic job, the clamour of the streets, the tube grime that coats your skin, the suffocating hoards of people—the chaos here is palpable. I used to work in London Bridge and once a week I would visit a church in the city. I stumbled upon it one lunch break and then found myself drawn back. Soon it became that I waited in anticipation for my Wednesday lunchtime visit. The Church itself was otherworldly in its tranquillity. I would sit on a hard pew, breathe in the musty church smell and listen to the organ seeping rich and airy from the back of the hall. I would watch a robe strike a match and drop it into a tea light then rest my gaze on the soft, lambent light. I prayed there only once. Mostly I would sit with my hands on my lap and observe stillness.
The one time I did make a prayer it was for a selfish and retrospectively banal reason. I had lost my retainer. I had spent the last week searching on my knees until they bled for two sleeves of hard plastic. Under siege of crooked teeth and wallowing in vanity I closed my eyes and prayed for God to send me a vision of its location. The prayer only needed one phrase “Dear Lord please help me find my retainer.” Instead, I laboured the point and meandered up and down endlessly on that same request. When I finally did trail off, I stamped the end with “thank you” rather than “amen”. I was confronted with the fact that I didn’t know how to pray. Another unwelcome revelation from this saga was that, like most non-believing but religion-conscious people, I only pray when I am desperate. Non-religious folk praying solely to express gratitude is rare. With all other sources exhausted, I turned to the divine for a wafer of hope. I asked God to change my prayer into my retainer the same way Jesus turned water into wine. There are more worthy crises to an all-knowing being than the arrangement of my teeth in my mouth. I simply hoped that God might grant my request a little time and glance down on my misfortune favourably. He is after all meant to be all-knowing and all-loving. I never found my retainer and the silence neither deterred nor ladened me with belief. It simply surprised me that welding my palms together in prayer was a gesture I reached for.
It seems to me that true believers find Godliness everywhere— for him and through him and to him are all things. God is a way of seeing, he lives behind your eyes and props up your eyelids to let faith in. It is not only in adversity that people pray, but I assume that hardship is a gateway into believing. If God and prayer gives comfort, it helps if there is something you are seeking comfort from. Even if that thing is only as small and insignificant as a lost retainer. Then there are other instances, when people are dealt a truly terrible hand in life, and through human nature or some ineffable mystery they still try to make good with what they have. They find joy and hope. They find time to dream. They ask for help. Imbued with religion or not, that is an act of resilience and faith as strong as a riptide.
These days I have come to see faith as something that waits to be recognised. It lives peacefully in the ether. It survives lacerations unscathed and simply floats. Some people have that moment of recognition and others do not. I don’t believe there is a right or wrong if it is what you truly feel and don’t enforce it on others. I have not had a moment of recognition and I don’t know if I ever will. I’m inclined to say I shan’t but life is full of cataclysmic changes so who knows? Now and at the hour of my death, I hope to live whatever I sincerely believe. God recognised or not, as long as I feel hopeful I think I shall be happy.
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That’s all this time. Leave a comment with your thoughts! Goodbye for now (◕‿◕)♡
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