God

God,

Within my being is some desire like that of a child - a desire for providence, a desire for justification, a desire for a warmth to compensate for my lack.

I find myself in recent days thinking extensively on this lack. Not within any inch of me is a “thirst for justice”; I am hardly “meek”; I convince myself that I am “poor in spirit.” I desire justice and personal virtues, but the only reason is that I lack those things. This struggle inspires equal parts joy and suffering.

But what may be lack is not truly lack; rather, it could be that all you are is of a state of incomprehensible abundance. The finite being is capable of looking towards the infinite, aware of that gap between them through intuition rather than the discursive intelligence.

I want to believe in you to an incredible degree, and I feel this pull towards abundance in my being, but I feel that it is only proper for me to never belong to any religious institution.

If you are all that is good, and that all good things are of them and not from them, then I have to ask the question: do religious institutions contain any good within them?

It should be no surprise to you that any collectivity, which is to say any abstract collection of things - and especially social systems - exists primarily to self-perpetuate. This is survival of the fittest applied to things rather than organisms.

In the Christian realm, it pains me to no end that what once started as a democratizing and liberating orientation towards all that you represent was slowly calcified, especially under Roman rule, into institutions of force. The accumulation of power and wealth manifested through the application of control, and thus many religious institutions that claimed to love you only loved their own survival. This manifests in the many poor translations of the Bible that embed this institutional capture, and especially in the common rhetoric that transforms actions (the act of man with man as an abomination) into essence (both men are abominations).

Shouldn’t the love of you, taken to its most devotional degree by systems, love you to the extent of self destruction?

Even calling myself Christian would feel like violating something essential within my condition towards you. Does it matter what I call myself, which implicitly excludes me from the fellow humans which I love, if I orient all my being towards all that you are?

What need do I have for claiming rituals like baptism if I orient towards you? Isn’t that enough? I find comfort and rejoice in prayer, a restorative mercy, and I also find a deep love for other rituals like Gregorian chanting. There exists something about baptism itself that feels like a mark on my ontology, and I don’t know if I can ever reconcile that. Do I need to carry the mark of baptism if we all “carry the mark of slaves?”

In a sense, if you are all that is good, and all good things are good in themselves, then religious institutions at their best are only capable of pointing me towards that goodness. This is an act that one performs through action, and any church is incapable of action because they are not people.

If in a glass cage was a kind and charitable soul, it would not matter however I stain the glass: the soul’s goodness would not change. Any shadows cast over something only obscures sight but does not transform it.

But what of human souls which are transformed through force? Do you, God, believe that humans are inherently good unless acted upon?

I have seen the eyes of a woman abandoned by her earthly father, and although she grew into a strong and successful woman I could only see the world-shattering pain in those same eyes. I saw the hope of a child who wants love, the pain of a child whose love was destroyed, that fundamental orientation towards having no harm done to them. Abandonment in this sense is catastrophic because it violates this inherent belief in goodness.

If human souls believe in goodness from their start, then I must believe that humans souls are orientated themselves towards goodness. What could fundamentally be more good than a finite and limited thing which orients towards what is truly good?

In all honesty, I grapple with the idea of original sin constantly. I do not find it to be such an adequate idea. Humans are born with a fundamental love and longing for good. I must believe then that the structure of life itself - that struggle for domination to preserve our earthly bodies - is the original sin which is the root of force.

Lord, have restorative mercy on all us humans which, through force, have slightly changed our trajectory from goodness. We mistake material things for goodness because that is what is taught to us. But the truly good things, like community, love, transcendence, and our earthly roots, orient towards ideas higher than the material realm.

What an excruciating thing it is to pry all the pain within myself wider to unlearn what has been taught through institutional and physical force! I can only have hope that our fundamental goodness is the same light which the “darkness has neither overcome nor comprehended.”

David