Prayer

September is National Suicide Awareness Month. I’ve stood on that edge of life and death many times and every time, I questioned whether or not God was there. I wrote this piece because I was confused. I still am, but I think I am a little more at peace now. Because I understand a little better. Not God or religion or Buddha or anything. Myself. And what I want all of these things to mean to me.

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Dear God if you’re there,

I spent a long time piecing together how I felt about you. How exactly you fit into my life, how you watched over me, how exactly faith worked. I spent countless hours at school as a child poring through the Bible. I devoured the stories, dancing through the Old Testament into the New. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to look up to you. Was I supposed to fear you? Revere you? View you as an equal? Talk to you regularly? Keep you at a distance? Were you a friend? I didn’t know. 

Prayer was especially important  to me–not that I always listened and processed the pastor’s words but rather because I could truly feel a presence. For just a split second, I thought Jesus was right by me as I prayed. So I prayed every night before I fell asleep. I developed templates for my prayers. Prayers for when I wanted to show gratitude. Prayers for peace in my household. Prayers to find love. Prayers to protect myself. Naive little girl prayers who didn’t understand your place in my life. 

I always wondered if you disguised yourself and visited us earthlings in your spare time. And I always wondered what you thought if you did. Do you feel in the same capacity we do? Do all our daily instances of pain bite your core? Or do they ricochet off you and create more blank boxes in your heavenly agenda instead? Do you ever wish you could just fix this world we live in instead of letting us wallow in our misery and finding our own way? Does it ever become too much? Do you ever want to give up too?

I believed in you more than I believed in myself. I believed in you more than I believed in anybody else. I believed in you even when no one else believed in me and I just needed something to hold onto. The older I got, the longer my prayers became. The more I asked for, the more I hoped for, the more I wanted, the more I thought I needed. And the more I came to you, the more I realized that you weren’t quite there the way I had grown up thinking you were supposed to be.

Because to me, you seemed neither punitive nor giving. No, to me, you just seemed indifferent. I realized that I knew nothing about you. I’m sure you knew everything about me. So the fact that I didn’t know a thing about you–that just felt unfair. I didn’t feel like I was communicating with you. Because I always thought communicating meant listening and responding. I didn’t know if you were listening. You certainly didn’t respond. 

Farther down the spiral I fell. But you know all that. I left that old Christian school. My prayers grew shorter. I stopped talking to you. I questioned your existence. In fact, I denied it was ever there. It hurt me to say that. Did it hurt you?

I thought you let everything happen. I thought you had paved this path for me to learn and grow. I thought you were in control. I thought you maintained a delicate balance in this world. I thought you determined fate and how we led our lives. I thought you were the reason I didn’t want to live anymore. I thought I didn’t deserve to. 

The farther I drifted from you, the closer I held other coping mechanisms. I found my hands around a bottle and my lips around a joint. I set out to un-feel everything I had learned to feel. I wanted to destroy every trace of you in my life because I didn’t want to admit that I never understood you. I threw faith and belief out the back door because it meant that your memory would be longer. 

I tried so hard to forget you. I stopped praying regularly. I put away my Bible. I even went to temple with my mom. A temple, ironically enough, that was refashioned from a former church. So the stained glass above with its proverbs still haunted me when I chanted. 

The Buddha was never meant to be a god. But people still treat him as such because worship is so deeply ingrained in human nature. If history and discourse are true, he was human, just like me. He wasn’t any more relatable than you were because he found enlightenment and inner peace. I never seemed to be able to. No matter how deeply I tried to meditate, how many spiritual guidances I went to, how loudly I chanted, I couldn’t help but wonder if he, too, had something to do with you. My brief stint in his world opened my eyes to the possibility that my understanding of faith had been quite shallow all along. 

Faith is confidence and trust. It does not necessarily have to be in a religion or a person or entity. It is a risk we must choose to take, a gamble that if we don’t give in, something better will come along. Sometime in the future. Maybe not in the next hour or in the next day. But one day, in this lifetime or the next. Believing in you is a choice we make for the sake of ourselves. 

So dear God, if you’re really out there, I just want to know if you see me. Do you still hear me mumble on my darkest nights? Do you still remember that I am so scared of the dark that I cannot open my eyes when I lie awake at night? Do you still feel my heart breaking when I do finally open my eyes in the morning? Did you hear me cry myself to sleep the night before? Can you feel how tense and fatigued my body is because it took so long to fall asleep? Can you sort through all of my wandering thoughts and feel the panic rising in my throat? Are you still there? I’ve asked you so many questions, but do you have any answers?

Dear God, this is my first real prayer to you. This time I won’t ask you for anything. This is me defining your role in my life, because for once, I think I am beginning to understand a little better. I expected too much of you, wanted too much from you, thought too much of you. I know now that my autonomy and freedom are not determined by you. In order for me to believe in you, I had to first believe in the idea that the risk comes from within me. Before you could exist, I had to believe in myself first. I had to believe that I should exist.

I don’t know any answers to any of the questions I asked you. But I know that to me, you are the personification of faith. Or at least what we want faith to be. And faith is strengthened when we question and adapt. You rest in me, around me, as a way to motivate me to maximize my life and reach personal fulfillment. Even though you didn’t give me life, nor are you the reason I live today, you helped breathe life into the world and the people around me. You gave people a reason, and you taught us to give ourselves a chance.

My faith in you, in the Buddha, in some being up in the fabric of the universe, I will now turn to faith in myself. Faith that I can wake up tomorrow morning looking forward to something. Faith that I can pick myself up when I fall down in another spiral. Faith that I am worthy enough to untangle the demons inside me and fight to see one more day. Faith that you are by my side, listening. Faith that even if you are not, I will be strong enough to move forward on my own. Faith that I can forgive myself for past sins. Faith that I can be gentle with myself. 

Dear God, I don’t need you to save me. I don’t need a promise of an afterlife. I’m just thankful to reconcile you and me in the here and now. 

Amen.