I Miss God

By Anonymous This article appears as a part of the Consultation on Re-envisioning the Relationship between Evangelicals and Gays. The Consultation invites a broad variety of perspectives on what that relationship ought to be, and how it can be made so. It also includes stories that illustrate the potential tensions between faith and sexuality. The below is offered in the belief that even stories of the loss of faith are important for Christians to hear and seek to understand, and in the hope of informing and sustaining our conversation on how we, as evangelicals, should respond to those who are attracted to people of the same sex. I miss God. There. I've said it. Although contemplating God and the countless questions a person must sort through to speak intelligently about God has become so stressful for me that I no longer engage in the process, I nevertheless miss God. I miss the sense of connection with other human beings. I miss the notion that we are all caught up in a divine drama that ultimately has a happy ending. I miss feeling as though existence is more than merely competition, a scramble to the top of the pile where I clutch my gun and prevent anyone else from knocking me off. I miss the brotherhood of man. I miss the fatherhood of God. I miss God. I studied religion at Harvard. I worked as a ministerial assistant to Peter Gomes. I wrote my senior thesis under the guidance of one of the world's leading theologians, Sarah Coakley. I shipped off to Germany to enroll in the final course taught by Jurgen Moltmann at Tübingen. I studied Protestant theology with Bruce McCormack at Princeton Seminary. But all of this reflection on God ultimately led me further from my goal. In hindsight, maybe I should have listened to the ministers back home in Montgomery, Alabama, who warned me that leaving my Holiness Nazarene background to go to godless Massachusetts would destroy my faith. Apparently they were right. The problem for me has come in the questions that seem necessary to ask, but which lead to undesirable conclusions. For an evangelical, two truths are foundational. The Christian God exists, and He makes himself known through the Bible. The second claim was the first to unravel for me. My senior year in Religion 42: The Christian Bible, I wrote a term paper on Oswald Chambers and his famous devotional, My Utmost for His Highest. I noted that Chambers had such a high view of scripture that he believed the simple act of reading it constituted a sacrament that provided the faithful with sufficient grace to combat sin. But in truth I found this assertion troublesome. In my own life I had been instructed that "Quiet Times" alone with the Bible and prayer would transmit this grace to me. But why did life never seem easier? Why did grace never seem given? To suffer through life with the assurance that aid comes to assist the pilgrim is one thing; to feel the tangible absence of that assistance is another. Furthermore, I could not understand why, if God was speaking through this book, we cannot agree on what it means. So many fundamental terms and ideas are thoroughly contested, sometimes with violence. I never saw God sending texts to people. I saw people pulling texts to themselves and claiming God had sent them. As I furthered my study and watched my friends and my church -- I became an Episcopalian in college -- be positively torn apart by scriptural interpretation, with one group favoring one verse and another group favoring another, I gradually lost all hope that anyone, least of all the most powerful voice in the universe, could be speaking so chaotically. Not insignificant to this loss of hope was the process of confronting my own sexuality. That topic is made frustratingly simplistic in present debate, but the general realization that everything a person says about himself is somehow more argument than discovery was extremely depressing for me. Was I really born gay? How do I know this? Was there a tag on my toe at birth? And how do we describe this attraction? As a natural predisposition toward a certain gender? Or as a moral struggle against a sinful nature? Decisions, decisions. The decisions made clear the meta-decisions that were most troublesome. If you decide to view the world from an evangelical Christian vantage point, then you accept several smaller narratives that your own struggles are automatically described by. Or if you decide to become a liberal Protestant, your new meta-narrative has its own accompanying neuroses and support groups. But then you see interviews with elderly Muslims in Afghanistan who talk about their God just the way your grandmother talked about hers and you can't ignore the similarity. So, which religion do you choose? If you attempt to use "reason" to select between the competing meta-narratives, you arrive invariably at the scientific conclusion that only what can be quantified can be spoken about rationally. And that led me to my senior year of college, when I took the course that destroyed my capacity to believe in reality itself, Steven Pinker's Science B Core: The Human Mind. In every session, I was confronted by arguments that were the logical conclusion of positions forwarded by Kant three hundred years before. The universe is not as rigidly ordered as we suppose, but rather our minds filter information and predispose us to conceive of reality in the terms that have historically been most beneficial to human advancement and evolution. Why can a human differentiate between two faces, but not between two crumpled balls of paper, when to a computer the angles and shadows on the paper are infinitely simpler to compute than the angles and shadows on a face? Because the minds that made infinitesimally small advances in their predisposition toward recognizing human emotions had infinitesimally small evolutionary advantages. Why do we look for meaning in the cosmos? Because the hunter who interpreted footprints as meaningful was likely to eat better than the hunter who was not predisposed to seek meaning in nature. Our minds have evolved to find meaning and to find human characteristics in chaos. Why else would every issue of the National Enquirer have another "Jesus" in the clouds or "Mother Teresa" in a cinnamon roll? A few million years of mental predisposition coupled with emotional turmoil could easily have gotten us to where we are today. I watch my sisters with their children, doting and anticipating every need, and I am amazed. Parents might see signs of independence and self-assertion growing daily, but to an outside observer what seems obvious is the mental conditioning. How could a child possibly grow up without believing that some parental functionary exists to meet his or her every need? A baby cries and his mother burps him. A need is met without being expressed. Are we not thereby programmed to believe that someone knows us better than we know ourselves? But when countless studies suggest that infants would shrivel and die without this attention, I am not surprised that our deeply felt need for an enduring parent is so pervasive. Richard Dawkins and his ilk believe that religion is a social ill. Perhaps it is. But religion is the natural outcropping of a human instinct. We crave meaning. We crave a benevolent, omnipotent parent. We crave group cohesion. These cravings are the product of countless generations, selected because of their benefit to the species. We cannot simply wish religion away. Atheism is like Esperanto. It never manages to satisfy the need it exists to critique. And so I miss God. I say this in no uncertain terms as a scholar and not as a person of faith: human beings cannot thrive without God. God is written into our very genes. God is present, yet only as a ghost. The astounding capacity to explain God away does not simultaneously satisfy the need anymore than the awareness of obesity and cholesterol and an expanding waistline makes French fries taste bad. We are who we evolved to be, and we cannot change it. My sexuality is, at best, a secondary concern for me. If I were offered the assurance that the God of my youth were real, in exchange for surrendering my sexuality, I would take the offer without hesitation. I would be a fool not to. Yet no such assurance exists, and in the absence of God, reality can only be an effort to make oneself happy. Someone once said that all we can hope for in a materialist universe is easy work, a painless death, and good orgasms. I conclude regretfully that this is true. The $64,000 psychological question is whether desire to have satisfactory orgasms gives me an incentive to question. It's possible. Biology predisposes us to faith in God unless something else gives us incentive not to believe. But when belief is reduced to a matter of biological incentive, the battle of faith is already lost. I have little to say to gays or to Christians. Gays dismiss Christians as dogmatic, oppressive, and heartlessly self-righteous. Christians demonize gays as rebellious, self-centered, and selfishly revolutionary. Neither is true. As a Christian, I learned to be compassionate, to "suffer with." When my mother cries and worries, I can commiserate with her anguish over my sexuality. Perhaps I should reject anyone who seeks to manipulate me in this way, but that would mean rejecting the fundamental part of myself that is compassionate. That, at the end of the day, is the root of my struggle with sexuality: being openly, politically gay means rejecting the kind of gentle, compassionate, self-effacing portions of my personality, portions which I prefer to any sort of "I'm here and queer, GET USED TO IT!" rebellion. But that doesn't make women attractive to me or settle my overpowering desire to share my home and my bed, my joy, my anguish, my life. I experience an existential loneliness I cannot even describe. I have had to build a thick wall around myself to keep getting up in the morning. I can barely expend the psychological energy required to engage these horrific and unfair questions, so I have ceased. There is no category for me, and trying to forge one was draining my life away for far too long. And so I miss God. If there is a God, I hope he very soon gives me a lifeline to cling to. Away with all the posturing that people make about surrendering the mind and taking things on faith. Why not take Hinduism on faith? Or Zoroastrianism? Why have faith in God? If he's listening, that last question is not a defiant roar but a mournful plea. Yes, God, if you're listening, I miss you. The author is now a young businessman in Montgomery, Alabama. For more articles like this, see our Consultation on Re-imagining the Relationship Between Evangelicals and Gays, or see the Evangelical Portal.