My Religious Hubris

I used to criticize people who searched for God in this world. "How misguided they are", I thought. I believed that the search for God, something fundamentally unknowable, was foolish. I mistook their affirmations that God did exist as hubris, when in reality I was the blind man pretending to see clearly.

My mistake, the scaffolding of my hubris, was that I believed I saw the full picture but in reality I only saw snapshots. I saw a woman with a rational mind worshiping something irrational, not the widow searching for something infinite to hold her endless pain. The hubris was believing that we are something more than just humans.

Even in the most haunting, horrible moments of despair I found strength in my own spirit. I found strength through the consent to be destroyed by affliction, so I could reconstruct myself anew and walk forwards.

But this is not the reality for most.

And to believe others should be capable of the same is a telltale sign that I lacked empathy.

But even I have a breaking point, just like others.

There exists an unrealizable amount of suffering all around us. Children silently abused on your street, murders in your city, wars and famine abroad. The feeling of the atrocities done to those fragile human souls is suffocating.

When I feel the weight of everything, it feels too much for one person to carry. Most notably, it feels like there is a fundamental lack. That there is something missing. I wrote this in July:

I walk each day feeling the weight of this world on my essence. I wish for nothing more than to scream into this empty world to force it to resolve these contradictions.

Yet all my attempts have met pure, deafening silence.

To be human is to suffocate under eternal contradictions.

Vertigo.

I may only describe this cosmic loneliness as a lost soul waiting for divine love that may never arrive.

The defining presence in my life during my darkest moments is the absence of some god.

I don't know if I am religious. But even if I did become religious, I don't think I could become a member of a church. It would feel like abandoning my fellow man in the favor of some institution or system.

At this point, all I see are humans.