Essay: How to Make a God and Kill It

 

How to Make a God and Kill It

an essay on organized religion: a childhood of repentance

There are many things that go into the fashioning of a prophesy, the smithing of a vision. I know that now. I did not know it then, and it stung, sitting in that wooden sanctuary with its mesh-chair pews, peering in as if through a looking-glass. This is the church, this is the steeple, my mother had shown us, lacing her fingers together, pointing index finger and thumb. Open it up, here’s all the people, her fingertips wriggling as if moved by some inaudible hymn. Or, Open it up, you’ve scared all the people!, cupping her hands to reveal the strained tendons of her palms, the congregation having fled.

But the people were here, and they were crowded together like a clotting heart, air thick and filmed with sunscreen and sweat. They were pressing into each other - chanting, chanting. Sometimes, they chanted in a language I did not know, a language it seemed they themselves did not know, either. I had cried all of my words out hours ago. I had no language at all, my tongue incapable of curling consonants, and I sat on the pilled carpet, watching. I wondered how much longer it would last: the humming, the chords riffed without sheet music, the rounds of hallelujahs and Jesuses, the promise of revival, revival, revival.

I peered out the window into the New Hampshire forest. Somewhere, there were mountains, but I could not see them anymore, the sky having long-since inked over with night, and I wondered, too, if the anger that had rooted itself in my stomach would ever unknot. I missed my eyeliner, my phone, my notebooks full of poems. I missed my black clothes, my morning coffee. I missed my mother, and this realization was accompanied by a pang. It was only Tuesday, I thought. I had not cried, and I was still alone, and God still had not reached down and touched my heart like everyone said he would, and I did not want him to.

The weeping and the chanting and the songs lasted for two more hours. We trudged back to our bunks, group leaders ushering us like wayward sheep. I half-expected one of them to be holding a staff, a crook. I half-expected us to bleat, mercy, mercy. Some of the girls I had been friends with long ago (back when the pastor had dedicated us and said we were a generation of very special girls who would one day change the world, back when I was nested into a wooden box and made to play baby Jesus, back when I did not cry until the last show, back when everyone had thought I was a doll), decided to look for the objects our counselors had hidden. If we found them, they’d explained, it would be fifty points apiece for our team.

They invited me to search with them, but I stayed back, watching their blurred forms dart between run-down vacation homes. Their voices, strained and husky from crying, wove through the browning pines, and I knew, again, that I did not belong. The sand from the volleyball court rubbed against the tender skin of my ankles, and my mouth was dry. I knew I would not sleep well. That I would be pulled from my dreams by these same girls in just a few hours to decorate bunks, or serve runny eggs to the rest of the campers, or look, again, for these objects. I wondered if I would ever speak, and if it did, what it would sound like. Would my voice be different, having kept it to myself for so long? Would someone come along tomorrow, place their hand on my shoulder, and tell me of my life? I tipped my head back to the stars, pockmarked and dull against the clouds, and I knew I had deceived myself. I knew nothing. For God would part the heavens, fumble his hands over the mountains he made, and he would seize my heart. And that would be the beginning: not of my salvation, but of my long and terrible fall.

On the last day, I spoke. I did not stop speaking. The girls I had been friends with long ago would joke about this later: on Friday, she finally talked, and she has not stopped talking since! I would keep the green-ink Bible my mother had made me buy, and I would read it. I would start with the books of the prophets, because the prophets thought how I thought. They saw that I saw. The first book I loved enough to destroy was the Bible. The lineage of my annotations did not begin with Wuthering Heights, but the Song of Solomon, of Job and Micah and Jonah. I had not loved Heathcliff as much as I had loved the fish that swallowed the doubter, because the doubter was me, and I wanted God to want me enough that he would bear me through an entire ocean, just to prove that I had been born for something. Anything.

The girls I had been friends with long ago liked to sit in the front pews, and they liked to spring on the balls of their feet during worship, and they liked to sing loudly. I liked to sit quietly, beneath the pulsing yellow and orange lights, and I liked to be alone. I liked to ask God questions, and I liked to write them down. I did not like to lay hands on the shaking backs that curled like shells. I did not like how it felt to speak my prayers out loud, even to myself, even though I had not stopped talking since the last day. I felt strange when the girls I had been friends with long ago asked me to go evangelizing, and I felt stranger when they twisted their purity rings. 

When I came home from camp that first year, I stood in the kitchen and wept into my mother’s shoulder, and my father stood in the corner, watching. I wept because Jesus had come into my life after all, and because now I could understand why my mother had sent me away without a phone and with the green-ink Bible. 

My sister was never sent away. 

I would go to every summer camp for the next few years. I would speak in a language even I did not know, and I would weep: big, snotty cries that stuffed my nose and doubled me over. I would watch the other girls do the same, and we would blot away our mascara in the bathroom, giggling awkwardly in the mirror at each other as if to say, God has moved me, and he has moved you, and we are the same. The girls I had been friends with long ago would confess traumatic things, and everyone would say that was the devil at work, and we would nod, nod, nod. The devil hardens hearts, just as he hardened yours. The devil seeks to separate us. The devil wants to see us lose, but with God, we win, win, win. But how lucky we are, to have a Father like ours, who sees us, his children, in the fire and shields us, his sons and his daughters, from the flames! What a good, good Father!

Eventually, I would give away the green-ink Bible to someone who did not have a Bible at all. I would write poems about being a creation, and I would try to bend my angry heart into submission, but it would not soften. I would watch everyone receive a prophesy, and when the seer came to me, they would lay their hand on my shoulder and say this one needs understanding, and I would know it to be true. I would watch Jesus speak through a boy, a boy everyone loved, and I would watch him bless the others, and he would not bless me, because he did not know my name. I would see demons breathe through the lungs of little girls, and I would hold my arm out from afar as they were cast-out, and I would pray very quietly, in case the demons heard my voice. I knew if they heard my voice, they would hear how it shook, and I knew they would take me, too.

I would ask my family to leave that church. I would leave services in tears, and it would happen one too many times to be considered growing pains. I would find other churches - we would learn to stand and rise at prescribed times, we would come to settle among a Baptist congregation with prim smiles - and we would leave them, too. I would go to college, write a thirteen-page paper on God-language for a class on Grammar and Style. I would buy a King James Version of the Bible many months later, during Covid. I would not be able to justify the purchase, staring at the purple cloth-cover for a few months before stowing it away in a desk drawer, too ashamed to return to Jonah and Micah. God would return, slowly, in other forms. In oiled rosary beads and stained glass windows, in incense sticks and Arabic poetry and fat Victorian novels. Boys and essays and strange coincidences, music that keeps me from crying.

I saw one of those girls at my college graduation. I have bangs now, and I don't believe in that God anymore. I still wear cross necklaces - I still pray, but without words. She looks the same. I think of the time I told her I believed that God was a card dealer. Maybe God knows all of the possibilities, but not what we will choose. I don't remember how she'd responded. I only remember the shape of her mouth, illuminated by bonfire, lips parting like an ocean. Like a sea I'd been raised to believe in, splitting like a prophet.