My God Don’t Stand No Cheatin’

I have given a lot of thought to my beliefs surrounding the issue of God and religion. Raised staunchly Catholic, I was given the firmest foundation of religious practice and background imaginable. I attended every Sunday mass for the first 18 years of my life. I was brought up to appeal to Jesus when life got too tough for me to handle on my own, and vividly remember doing so on my knees with my little hands forming an arrow to the sky…
”Dear God (I always sent God’s secretary my dictation for a letter to Him), I have a math test tomorrow and fractions scare me more than Ms. Gray. I was hoping I could call in a favor and you could miraculously make this kind of easy, or maybe let me sit by Erica Puccetti. Thanks, hope every thing is cool up there. Tell my dog Shooter I say hi. Love, Trisha Ann Duffy (Just so He didn’t get confused)”.
I was baptised, reconciled, communed and confirmed and still hold the highest esteem for the faith that my family and culture instilled in me. But in the midst of all this higher education and just life in general, I noticed that religion, while an excellent moral compass, was exactly that….just a convoluded way to morally guide the ancient peoples of the world before the advent of mass literacy, and codified law. All of the major faiths ask similar things of their adherents. “Thou shalt not kill, steal, covet thy neighbors wife”….It’s all pretty much the same, though some get more specific than others. So somewhere around my 18th birthday, I decided that I believed that Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, Ghandi….all of them were pretty exemplary dudes who I should try to emulate in my daily life. Those are truths that I thought were indisputable….unless someone would care to uncover the Buddha’s secret double life as a Tibetan druglord, or Ghandi’s moonlight career as a narcissistic pimp-daddy.
These truths I held to be self-evident….but then, suddenly, nothing else was. I had to start from scratch. I know I’m no atheist. I believe in a higher power. I will always be a spiritual person….but now, after boiling my religious beliefs down to the bare bones, I was left without a spiritual foundation….Lately, I feel as if I have been groping in the darkness, trying to create my own spirituality…my own Tao.
René Descartes insisted in his “Discourse on Method” that math is the path to understanding certainty. He believed that certainty was the closest thing to perfection, and God was the only perfect being. Hence to him, math was the closest way to understanding God. So I suppose through the eyes of Descartes, people like Francis Bacon and I were ungifted beings that were not deemed worthy of the capacity to find God through math. ‘Sokay René, I wouldn’t want heaven to just be the one and only conclusion I drew at the end. While I’ll give him points for originality, I ain’t converting any time soon.
In fact, I think my God is perfect in HER imperfection. She isn’t just one conclusion—She is every possible conclusion you could come to. She is the pot of gold at the end of every rainbow, the lake at the top of the mountain, the diploma at the end of 4 years of hard work. She is the beautiful, conclusive epilogue at the end of a turbulent romantic epic. Dessert after dinner. Cigarette after passionate love-making. Applause that follows a grand finale. Paycheck on a Friday afternoon. Guinness on a Friday night.
She embodies my every victory….When Failure makes me her bitch and knocks me to my knees, I look up to the heavens, as most people do, searching for God….If I look hard enough, maybe now I’ll see Her….Most times, I imagine that she looks just like me….but with the eyes of my Uncle Eddie, or my Grandpa Don, or my Grandma Marge….because I see my successes best through the eyes of those who love me most…my own eyes reflect things back like fun-house mirrors---all distorted like.

That’s all I got for now…more on this later…