About God...

“What if it’s not so much that I don’t believe in God, but that I do, and just haven’t accepted it yet?"

A few years ago, I wrote something about God:

I didn’t believe in God most of my life, but for the purpose of getting sober in 12-step I faked it. For AA meetings, I’d wait a beat before I began the Serenity prayer: “__, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change . . .”

I didn’t believe in God for all the usual reasons decently-educated grownups didn’t believe in Santa. In my mind, they were the same. Both doled out punishments for arbitrarily bad behavior, but instead of coal, God brings earthquakes. How is that helpful?

Plus, let’s not forget about science. Or Christopher Hitchens.

So for me, it was definitive: There was no God.

I know — what an original take. To follow-up on this thought, my God does not originate from any organized religion, unless you consider sobriety a religion, which I do not.

However, almost nine years into my spiritual journey/awakening/resolution, I have comfortably settled into believing in a Higher Power, one I choose to call God. And the God of my understanding helps me process all the bad days and keep the good ones in perspective. I also believe in God Shots — those little unexpected coincidences or signs that transform into profound, life-altering moments. I believe in faith over hope. And my favorite prayer is this:

“Let your thoughts be my thoughts. Let your words be my words. Let your actions be my actions.”

This, for me, is enough and I do not need any proof one way or another.

But I know others struggle with a belief in a Higher Power, especially one they call God. One person I know who was having a crisis — or, perhaps, a concern is a more appropriate description — is Sarah Miller. She is one of my favorite writers and, frankly, one of The Small Bow readership’s favorite writers, so I figured it was an easy assignment to ask her to “write about God” for us and feel entirely okay about it. The fact that she accepted such a daunting, open-ended, kind of impossible assignment and trusted me (and you) enough to follow through with it is a high point for our little publication. Great job, everybody.

Her newsletter, “The Real Sarah Miller,” is one of the best parts of Substack, and you’ll be happy you subscribed to it. — AJD

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Our Father, Who Art In Something Whatever Maybe

by Sarah Miller

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I am not super close to my parents. I am not not close to them, but I don’t call them every day or consult them on every decision. I have made many breaks with them, taste-wise, geography-wise, politics-wise, not-having-a-family-myself-wise. Now that I have told you how not close to my family I am, I will tell you that there is something that binds me to them that I don’t think I can or will ever give up on, and that is a lack of belief in God.

Their minds are flexible on many things but in this regard there is no movement and no engagement. God and belief in God is the very last thing my parents would ever think about, discuss, or respect. When I was a kid, I asked my mother if there was a God and she said “No,” and even though I have spent my entire life seeking God I am pretty sure this moment, and all the ones piled on top of it, under it, and around it, make this impossible.

I first realized I was searching for God when, as a young kid, I allowed each of our approximately twelve thousand fundamentalist Christian nannies (there were two Christian colleges, or, as my parents thought of them, cheap babysitter warehouses, in our town) convince me to “take Jesus into my heart.”

I tried to blame this on the fact that they simply broke me down but my brother never took Jesus into his heart, not even once, and he even ratted out one of the babysitters for asking him if he would. I heard my father reprimanding her: “Hey, Bonnie, can we, uh, lay off the Jesus stuff? All right, great, heh heh.” This same babysitter warned me not to tell my parents as I asked her endless questions about Jesus: Was he real? How did we know what he looked like? How did God get Mary pregnant? I took in her answers with disappointment because they all sounded so implausible, and just kept asking with the hope she would finally say something that seemed like it might actually have happened the way she said.

I joined the church choir, I went to the catholic church with my friends, I made my mom’s only Jewish friend start having seders. I still didn’t believe in God. As an adult I did Kundalini yoga, even getting trained as a “certified teacher.” Kundalini yoga is now regarded mainly as a cult, and this is no surprise as what I think I have really been seeking out is magic.

When I think of some of the spiritual experiences I have had, what I really liked about them was not the idea that I could feel the loving presence of God but the iridescent glow of the magic I sought: When I was writing a book a few years ago, I wrote myself a check for the amount I wanted to receive for an advance and posted it on the refrigerator. This was the exact amount of my advance.

A few years after that — the same magic that had brought me that money had made it disappear — I wanted a pair of Frye harness boots but was too broke to buy them. I went to a Kundalini yoga class where the teacher led us in a chant where we were supposed to ask for something and think about it the whole time we were chanting. Part of me thought this was fucking stupid, but part of me was fervently chanting and thinking about how badly I wanted a pair of Frye harness boots. And lo and behold, the next day I was, quite out of the blue, presented with a brand-new pair in my size.

My blue heeler, Merle, came to me much similarly. She belonged to someone else, and one day I looked right into her eyes and said, one day I will have a dog just like you, and three years later, her owner died and Merle spent her last six years with me, and made every day beautiful with her presence.

One day, during the 2014 bout with being broke, I begged God to show himself to me, if I was really supposed to believe. That afternoon, I went to a — guess — Kundalini yoga class. We did some meditation at which point the floor spun around, faster and faster. Afterward, I asked a few people “when they put the spinning floor in.” This is a true story. I didn’t believe the first and second people I asked who said, “There is no spinning floor.” By person three I believed it, and believed God had shown themselves to me.

But it took them a long time to do it again, and not since have they responded with such fervor, so I went back to not believing.

I have begged God for love and money so many times. The love shows up most of the time — what a surprise, keep coming back. The money does not. Otherwise — otherwise! I might decide God was real — solidly, foreverly. Money. Money. Money is my real thing. I always think love is my thing, but it’s not. It’s fucking money. Goddamn you money.

I’ve been at a loss lately about what to do about being a writer, money-wise. I have rebuilt my career three separate times, once after the 2008 recession, once after losing a good gig several years later and again after Covid. I don’t know if I have another comeback in me, plus, this business sucks more and more each year and the written word is worth less and less than it was.

I have never felt so secure in my ability to write, but I have never felt simultaneously so positive this ability means so little. I know that many people are feeling the same way. There are people who aren’t working now about whom I’m like “HOLY SHIT THAT PERSON ISN’T WORKING WOW OK, I GIVE UP.” There’s not much else to say about that.

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There is a person in my Al-Anon program and I wanted to reach out to him about how frustrated I was about all of this because I did not know what to do. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was afraid he would somehow belittle me for not knowing what to do about my future, or tell me I was not humble enough, or just be bored or dismissive. I thought talking to him might make me feel better. Or move the needle a bit. But I felt like I couldn’t talk to him until I felt better until I moved the needle. I felt like there was no way that talking to him in the state that I was in would be helpful.

And then he called me. I thought he was calling me on Al-Anon business, but he was just calling to say hi. I tried very hard to avoid what was really going on, but it was impossible. I could not keep myself from sharing with him the depths of my despair.

I had hoped that the emotional tenor of the conversation would be a certain way, the way that I needed it to be. Not an answer to all my problems, but simply where the things I had to say were met with compassion. I hadn’t called because I was too afraid the conversation would not go as I wanted it to and that my disappointment and fear would then increase. But then, the conversation was the way I wanted it to be, but better, more profound, and more helpful, even though it did not immediately solve my problem.

It turned out this person had been in the same position as I had been in before, not in the same industry, but just the same feeling of having no idea what to do. What he told me was until he faced just how powerless he was, or how powerless he felt, how much pain he was in, there was no movement in his situation. He wasn’t saying that I had to do that, he was just saying that it happened to him.

That night, I went to a meeting in Spanish. I started going to the Spanish language meetings because they are at a convenient time, and I kept going because even though I do speak Spanish, I can’t control what comes out of my mouth as well as I can in English. And so, I find that words just come out, and I don’t know what they will be. They are closer to what is in my heart or body than what is in my mind. And what I said at this meeting was I don’t know what to do and I just want help and I don’t know where it’s going to come from and I found myself just saying out loud, God, please help me because I have run out of ideas.

The other woman there (it was a two-person meeting) just nodded like this was the most natural thing to say. Whenever I profess or imply a belief in God in front of a person who believes in God, I feel a little guilty afterward, kind of like the way you might feel after you masturbate to pornography.

This was a week ago and I feel so much better. Nothing has changed, but I feel like the problem is in someone else’s hands. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe this is stupid. I wonder how much time will pass before feeling this way makes me feel guilty and bad and wrong and like a sucker or like I am letting down my parents.

I don’t want anyone I know reading this to think of me as not an atheist, not because I don’t want them to know I might believe in God, but because they would think it was silly that I kept trying to do something that’s never going to work. Also I feel I am faking it to everyone. To people who believe, I emphasize I might believe, even though I feel somehow that I never will. To those who don’t, I pretend I don’t, never will, and am not even all that invested in it.

*****

I was in an Al-Anon meeting the other day and someone was saying that you don’t have to believe in God. All you have to do is believe that there’s something “greater than your will.” Well, that’s easy for me — I think there are a lot of things that are greater than my will.

But that’s not enough for me. For me, I either believe in God or I don’t. I either have complete faith that something is actively watching over me, or I don’t.

What if it’s not so much that I don’t believe in God but that I do and haven’t accepted it yet?

I don’t know the answer. I just now thought of the question.

The truth is that I don’t.

I don’t think someone is looking out for me. I can buy that there’s a Higher Power and that’s not me. But I truly can’t picture it. I have concluded so many times that my parent’s atheism is just too much to get over, as impossible as getting over whatever else, good and bad, they imprinted on me as an infant, toddler, etc., whatever age the imprinting ends.

I went to the Spanish language Al-Anon again and someone shared that if you don’t really have a Higher Power, you can’t get over your disease, your obsession with people, places and things. It made me scared because I know I don’t really have a Higher Power yet, and I know I am not cured of my obsession with people, places, and things.

The friend in Al-Anon I mentioned above asked me if I had a person in my life who had died that I felt like I could talk to. I said, yes, my grandmother, who died on my 8th birthday. At the start of each day, he suggested I ask her for help getting me through it, and at the end of each day, I should thank her for doing so.

So this is what I am doing right now. If she appears to me in a dream, maybe I will decide to believe in God. Or if she mentions this article, how about that? I think that’s a reasonable request.

*********

Sarah Miller has written for The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Cut, and many other places. Sign up for her newsletter here.

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ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN

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This is The Small Bow newsletter. It is mainly written and edited by A.J. Daulerio. And Edith Zimmerman always illustrates it. We send it out every Tuesday and Friday.

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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:

After We Saw What There Was to See

by Lawrence Raab

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After we saw what there was to see

we went off to buy souvenirs, and my father

waited by the car and smoked. He didn’t need

a lot of things to remind him where he’d been.

Why do you want so much stuff?

he might have asked us. “Oh, Ed,” I can hear

my mother saying, as if that took care of it.

After she died I don’t think he felt any reason

to go back through all those postcards, not to mention

the glossy booklets about the Singing Tower

and the Alligator Farm, the painted ashtrays

and Lucite paperweights, everything we carried home

and found a place for, then put away

in boxes, then shoved far back in our closets.

He’d always let my mother keep track of the past,

and when she was gone—why should that change?

Why did I want him to need what he’d never needed?

I can see him leaning against our yellow Chrysler

in some parking lot in Florida or Maine.

It’s a beautiful cloudless day. He glances at his watch,

Lights another cigarette, looks up at the sky.

— “ via Poems With Teeth”

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ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN

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