On Feeling Godless

CW: SA, Greggs, disconnection, Jesus stuff.

The blue sky rough as your cheeks,
flying high, full of life’s electricity.
The kind of day in which I can imagine 
God might speak, so much speaks of him already.

Did the voice echo from the walls,
Still warm from the day’s heat? 
Weighted like a commandment – 
Here is the path – walk in it. 

––– from ‘Our Father’ in Hymnal – Julia Bell 

I am fourteen. A bad thing is happening to me and I know that God is not in this room. His truancy is apparent not because I believe that God would otherwise strike this man down or send me a sign relating to how I might escape or make the time pass quicker. It’s more of a knowing, an absence of something that is usually there. The lack of natural light is probably italicising and underlining this unholy reality: the windows are closed, make-shift curtains drawn and the artificial light is weak. In its place is the man’s intent, which has filled the residence – it’s going to smoke us both out. When no one trusts my account, my knowing is validated: not even God saw what happened.

If God is mostly just a simple name for a connection to something greater, then it follows that the connection to “Him” can be severed without much difficulty. Many people feel like isolated units operating autonomously.

My theory is that someone else can sever your own connection. When something dark enough happens between two or more people in one place, I think a person can let go of the tie for you so they are able to do what they need to do. I’m talking about those occasions in which a piece of you is taken and stashed away. That’s what is happening: a theft, and to commit one, there has to be total privacy. 

But it’s easier and more relatable to experience a severance of the bond alone. Recently I saw a person involuntarily change whenever he went through temporary states of mental and emotional crisis. It was in his eyes: something of his humanity would vanish, the light went out. He had no recollection of who he really was. In those minutes or hours he understood that he was all alone in the world; not communally – he is loved and popular – but abandoned by spirit. And that was where the true horror lay, I realised; he was not just unknown to himself, he was unknown to his maker.

I’ve not been feeling that Godly presence so much lately. That’s what depression often is, I think: some sort of spiritual breakdown. It’s different from when you’re living the blue and purple colours on Plutchik’s Emotion Wheel. Rather than the nothingness of depression, misery – boredom, grief, disappointment! – has some substance to it. Oddly, misery can be when you feel the most alive and in communication with something larger than yourself. It’s like Mary Oliver wrote, “If God exists he isn’t just butter and good luck”. He’s the shit parts of life as well: loss and illness and death. 

I’m definitely far from depressed but everyday it’s like I wake up anticipating an invitation. The other day I told a friend that I am romantically, emotionally and spiritually ran-through. It’s a fallow period. I need work and money and to meet the right people and to understand why certain relationships had to play out the way they did to bring me to this point. I want to be given that direction I periodically have that feels like it’s coming from somewhere up there. When it returns I’ll know by the gust of circumstance that brings with it impossible encounters, weird synchronicities and a feeling of purpose. 

Or maybe it’s just been winter in London. That is God’s annual leave; He usually seems – to me at least, a sincere winter hater – to go on the piss for three months and return when England’s not hell on earth. 

I decided to go for a walk with a new 35mm camera to test if it worked. I’d shoot a roll of film in a couple of hours, properly look at whatever I could see. Maybe, I think, I will take a photograph, and instead of brick walls and parked cars and threatening weather, God will come through in the development process like my own personal Where’s Wally. I’ll accidentally double expose a shot and there He is at the pub with His mates, Jesus’ finger over the lens.

While I wait for divine intervention, any indication that I should do something or go somewhere or be some new kind of way, I find fish, dead and on ice, their shiny bodies waiting to be picked and fired up and eaten; I watch the women in the nail shop get their diamanté armour, probably bunking off work or on lunch break; some elderly friends have gathered on a bench around the clock tower, laughing and gossiping (God is probably with them); pigeons are doing what they were created to do, being shifty round fucks, an ambient public annoyance. Conversely, the sky spits with rain and no one seems to notice or care about that. 

It would be a nice thing to write that I found God but I don’t think God knows about Lewisham. I wish I could write that the fattest pigeon flew up into the air and spontaneously combusted to become six white doves. Or that the doors of Greggs started glowing gold and an elevator pushed through the fake tiled floor and I realised that heaven is all around us. Or that one of the old men on the bench turned around and winked at me and said, “Hannah, it’s me. Don’t worry about it, love, you’re gonna be grand. You’ll write another book soon, your money troubles will be a thing of the past, that guy is properly into you and, by the way, you’re looking hot today. Don’t report me, ha ha ha! Just kidding – there’s no one to report me to.” 

I don’t know how to get my elusive relationship with this entity back but I’m trying. I’m hugging some trees, sitting on my window ledge watching the now-native green parakeets until they fly away, and being nicer to my family.

At night I take off my make-up and pray. If I want to supercharge it or I’m being dramatic I get down on my knees next to my bed, prop my elbows up on the duvet and press my hands together. I’ve heard that’s how He likes it. I pray for safety and happiness for my best friends, I pray for my parents to feel unburdened and at peace. I do the special bonus round and pray for whoever I love that’s most in need of help. And then, because I’m selfish and want to see some benefit from all this extra-curricular altruism, I pray for myself. What about some success for me, God? What about paying my credit cards off, big guy? What about sexual intrigue, king of everything? 

And more recently: do you fancy strengthening that psycho-spiritual connection for us? Can you turn the light on, fill the room and pick me up from my knees? God, can you give me some more of your attention?