When I was twelve years old my Father, your Great Grandfather, died. Actually he died right on my twelfth birthday. He suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage on a Wednesday morning and immediately went into a deep coma. He never woke up. Two days later he was gone. My last image of my Father was of him lying on the bathroom floor, his face partially covered with shaving cream, snoring loudly as if he were asleep. An ambulance came and took him away and I never saw him again. My life changed forever on that day. From that day on I was the kid that didn’t have a Father. I was the kid whose “Uncle’s” took him to any Father/Son events. I was the kid whose Mother worked all of the time. I was the kid that didn’t have anyone “rooting” for him at Little League baseball games. From that day on, Father’s Day and my birthday became the two most dreaded days of every year.
It should come as no surprise that, as soon as I understood the concept of bitterness, I developed a massive amount of anger surrounding my Father’s death and, having been raised in a semi-religious environment, I immediately directed that anger toward God. How could God have done this to me? How could God have taken my Father away from me just when I needed him the most? What kind of a mean and nasty God was he?
Everyone I knew offered me their unsolicited explanations. Our Rabbi said it was all part of God’s plan. My Father’s closest friend said that God was “testing” me. My Mother’s friends told me that it didn’t matter why God did what he did and to stop questioning and become the “man of the family” my Mother needed me to be. My Mother, on the other hand said that I was being punished for being a “bad boy” – whatever that meant. I believed none of these explanations and my anger just deepened and solidified with each passing day.
I remained intensely angry at God until my sophomore year of college. In my second year at Miami of Ohio I took a theological philosophy course – the first of many. The course was taught by a retired minister. He had a very different perspective on religion in general and God in particular. Religion and the “gods” that went with it, he said, were tools created and dutifully maintained throughout history by a frustrated people, a people unable to explain the pain they were feeling, and unwilling to accept the premise that they themselves might be the source of their own agony. He said that we invented religion as a convenient place to put our anger when life hurt us. Without religion, he suggested, we might need to dump that anger on something or someone that just might kick back. The God’s we created, he pointed out, never fought back, defended their actions or shirked responsibility. They didn’t say “I didn’t do anything to you – you did it to yourself”. The God’s we created gave us a convenient place to hide from reality – a shelter from our own failings.
That made sense to me and to this day it remains my understanding of the true purpose and meaning of religion – a man made safe place where “believers” can lay blame for all of the hurt that life does to them, comforted in the fact that their faith will always take the bullet for them – always. For “believers” there is never any personal culpability for life’s hurt because for culpability to exist there needs to be an element of control and for those of faith “God” is in control – not the individual. “How”, they ask, “can any of this be my fault? I am just an instrument of my faith. I am simply doing ‘God’s will’”. True believers tend to blame their God for everything from bad traffic to passes dropped in the end zone to the loss of a job and yes, the untimely loss of a loved one.
That is not the life I have chosen for myself. I have not and will not live my life hiding from life’s pain. I choose instead to confront life head on knowing full well that my successes or failures will be of my own doing – that I and I alone am the only “divine intervention” that I can look to. My religion has no “will” other than the “will” I give it. I own the “will”. It is my will that will see me through life’s hurt. I need to absorb all of the hurt that life holds for me, examine it in the clear unholy light of day, figure out how to manage my way through it and then go about doing just that. If I have “faith” in anything, it is a profound faith in me.
When I was a sophomore in College I finally realized that no religion or angry God killed my Father – a cerebral hemorrhage took him away from me. God didn’t give my Dad a stroke; high blood pressure caused a blood vessel to burst in his brain. And, though I probably couldn’t prove it my Father’s two-pack a day smoking habit and his obesity probably caused the elevation in his blood pressure. Not God.
That works for me.
Comments are disabled for this post