Life After God

• "I am reminiscing here. Forgive me. My mood is everywhere today, like the weather. The sky is doing four things at once--raining, hailing, sunning, and, it would seem further up the mountain, snowing. It just doesn't know what to do. And here is why my mind is all over the place: your mother left me a week ago and she took you with her. She phones me from her mother's house and we talk ever day. This is better than nothing. She says she has fallen out of love with me. She says she is confused. She says she feels lost, sort of like the way she felt when she was younger.

  I told her everybody feels lost when they're young.

  But she says there's a difference. She tells me that at least when she was younger she felt lost in her own special way. Now she just feels lost like everyone else. I asked her if she was unhappy; she says it is not a question of happiness. She says she remembers another thing about when she was young--she remembers when the world was full of wonder--when life was a strand of magic moments strung together, a succession of mysteries revealed, leaving her feeling as though she was in a trance. She remembers back when all it took to make her feel like she was a part of the stars was to simply talk about things like death and life and the universe. She doesn't know how to reclaim that sense of magic anymore."

• "I began to wonder what exactly I had believed in up until now that had allowed me to reach my present emotional circumstance. This is not an easy thing to do. Precisely artiulating one's beliefs is difficult. My own task had been made even more difficult because I had been raised without religion by parents who had broken with their own pasts and moved to the West Coast--who had raised their children clean of any ideology in a cantilevered modern house overlooking the Pacific Ocean--at the end of history, or so they had wanted to believe."

• "Time, Baby--so much, so much time left until the end of my life--sometimes I go crazy at how slowly time passes yet how quickly my body ages.
  But I shouldn't allow myself to think like this. I have to remind myself that time only frightens me when I think of having to spend it alone. Sometimes I scare myself with how many of my thoughts revolve around making me feel better about sleeping alone in a room."

• "Being alone here now, all of my old fears are erupting--the fears that I thought I had conquered forever by getting married: fear of loneliness; fear that being in and out of love too many times itself makes you harder to love; fear that I would never experience real love; fear that someone would fall in love with me, get extremely close, learn everything about me and then pull the plug; fear that love is only important up until a certain point, after which everything is negotiable."

• "Now--here is my secret:
  I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God--that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.
  

  I walk deeper and deeper into the rushing water. My testicles pull up into myself. The water enters my belly button and it freezes my chest, my arms, my neck. It reaches my mouth, my nose, my ears and the roar is so loud--this roar, this clapping of hands.
  

  These hands--the hands that heel; the hands that hold; the hands that we desire because they are better than desire.
  

  I submerge myself in the pool completely. I grab my knees and I forget gravity and I float within the pool and yet, even here, I hear the roar of water, the roar of clapping hands.
  

  These hands--the hands that care, the hands that mold; the hands that touch the lips, the lips that speak the words--the words that tell us we are whole."

You Are The First Generation Raised Without Religion

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