I recently went to get a physical checkup and it turned out to be an unexpected monumental episode for me. Part of it was just the whole hospital culture of being surrounded by older people and sick people and the unavoidable crashing into your mortality by being around so many of them. When I got to the doctor my head just swirled with the different afflictions that I could have or I could be incubating only to be harvested at a future appointment.
I remember after the examination and putting my clothes back on in the doctor's office. It was completely quiet and peaceful and I remember looking out the window to the Los Angles Skyline in the distance. These amazingly soft and deep clouds, hung low underneath this vast sky that spread across different muddy shades of blue and turquoise. I remember seeing a crucifix or something that vaguely resembled a cross on top of a building. I looked further and realized that it was attached to that creepy electric blue Scientology building on Sunset. Through the whole scene that just seemed to expand forever all I kept thinking was, “God is real.” I felt this natural and immensely powerful need to have God in my life. I realized that... in my entire life, it is what I have hung everything on; my hopes, my aspirations, my strength, my belief systems, just everything. I definitely have been questioning things and investigating what exactly is God and what does that mean, even to the point of trying atheism and naturalism out a little. But there was something in the calm of that doctor’s office with all my doubts and all my fears running around my feet and ankles like little kittens, threatening to infect me with HIV, or cancer or Lupus, or Alzheimer’s or heart disease, or the thousands upon thousands of other ailments humans have succumbed to over the years that made fully realize that all of my hope in all of my life has always been outside of myself and outside this life and outside of this existence and what I know to be physical and tangible and that there is a validity to it that I just don't want to give up. At least not now.
I have been trying to ridicule and mock these beliefs with logic and science and in that office that mocking just felt so… unnatural and wrong. I definitely have a certain disbelief and distrust in religion but as far as God is concerned, I actually do believe. I’ve been fighting against it so adamantly lately but looking out that window it was just as plain as day for me. It was almost like s/he whispered in my ear, “Look around you. Look at what you have. What the fuck else do I need to do prove this to you!” Now what does this existence mean, how can I honor and harvest it? I don't know. That’s something completely different and I think that’s where religion slips in (and fails). But I do believe something… something… is binding all of us together, making sure we’re looking at the same sky, bleeding the same blood, there is a consistent order to it all and personally I find it all to be mystical and magical and quite wonderful. And I’m finding it easier and easier… to call it God. Again.
