God appeared in my poetry.
I had grown up a strong Catholic and had seriously considered the priesthood in high school, but my belief eroded over time, and by the time I left college I was agnostic. And I was quite happy being one. It left me space to consider all possibilities. It was like walking in a sunny park on a weekday afternoon when everyone was at work. I don’t regret that place.
Then I began writing poetry four years ago and God showed up, mostly as a silent presence, but He did occasionally have things to say, mostly understanding, encouraging things. Occasionally He’s a cold presence. He’ll bring storms and misery and I won’t understand why, and this will make me feel small. But then the sun will shine again, and I guess that’s what relationships are like, even poetic ones.
And that’s the thing: I realized it was a relationship, as real as the one I had with God as a child, when I was an alter boy and said the rosary every night. Before He spoke to me with the mouth of the church. Now He spoke through my own mouth, and I don’t see that communication to be any less valid.
Theology bores me, on the whole. God as prose. It sucks all the magic out of Him. I remember my uncle Paul, a priest, asking my siblings to explain the trinity. One of my brothers would try and Paul would say he was wrong, then he’d shoot down the next kid who tried. Then he told us the “truth.” But how did he know? Because he read it in a book, and we weren’t to question that book.
Now I know that the trinity, to many religious leaders and educators, is one of those confusing concepts such people use to make themselves seem superior to others. Ooh, it’s so mysterious, they say, and you simply aren’t educated enough or close enough to God to understand. The trinity can be poetry, but you must allow people, even children, to express it themselves and not hogtie them with dogma.
Ask me if I believe in God and I’ll say yes. Ask exactly what I believe and I’ll stare at you stupidly, because you’re asking me to describe God, to spell out my theology, and I don’t have one even in the broadest sense. Is God a person? a force? Is He simply a metaphor for a potentiality within us all? I don’t know. I’ll never know, at least in this life. And if at some point I latch on to something for comfort’s sake I’ll feel uneasy about it, like standing on a weak step, waiting for the wood to collapse.
You can believe what and how you want; far be it for me to judge. But I’ll stick to poetry and stories, to works of the imagination, because that’s where God walks tall, where He sings the strongest.
