A Confession, part 12
I had learned that the meaning of life cannot come from reason alone; it must come from faith. And I had learned that faith only works when we are ready to change our lives to make them agree with our faith. I had learned this from studying the poor working people.
This was happening at a time when I was asking myself almost every minute if I should not be better off to kill myself. This went on for a whole year, and between my thoughts about killing myself, and my thoughts about the faith of the working people, my heart was filled with a pain that I can only think of now as a hunger for God.
This hunger for God was not reasoning. It was only a feeling. It was a feeling of being alone and afraid in a strange land, and a hope for someone to come and help me.
I had learned from Kant that no one can prove that God is real, and my mind agreed with Kant's reasoning. But it did not stop me from hoping that I could find God. I tried praying, as I had when I was a young boy, to a God that I did not know, but that I wanted to know. I said to myself that, if I am here, I am here for a reason. And there must be a first reason for all things. This first reason is what people call "God". When I started to reach out to this force, that I believed controlled me, I started to feel that I had a reason to live.
But then I started to ask myself: How am I to think of this force? What does he want from me? The only answers I had were the old answers of the church, and when I started to think of them, this hope started to melt away. I was losing what I needed to stay alive. In my fear I prayed to the one that I wanted to find, that he would help me. But the more I prayed, the more it seemed that he was not there. Fearing that there was no God at all, I cried out, "Lord, please help me! Please save me! Please teach me!" Nothing happened, and I had the feeling that my life had stopped.
But again and again I returned to the truth that there must be a reason for my being here. I felt like a baby bird lying on my back in the tall grass after falling from the nest. I could not be here if I did not have a mother who loved me and gave birth to me. But where could she be now? And that someone who gave birth to me must be God. He must know and see that I am lost and that I need him.
"He is real!" I said to myself. And again hope and happiness returned. But again I tried to understand him through the teachings of the church; and when I did, the happiness left me. The river of life in me dried up and again I believed that there was nothing left for me to do but to kill myself. But worse than this was the feeling that I could not kill myself. I must go on living without a reason.
This did not just happen two or three times. It happened tens and hundreds of times. I would start to feel happy and full of life for a short time, and then I would fall back into the same old feeling that I was without hope. Then… I remember that it was just after winter had finished… I was alone in the country, listening to the sound of the wind in the trees. I was doing what I had been doing for three years by that time. I was looking for God. "Okay," I said to myself, "So there is no God. There is no way that I can prove that he is real. Even miracles prove nothing. For they are all in the mind.
"But" I went on, "where did this belief that there should be a God come from?" I answered myself. "It must have come from him." As soon as I said this, happy waves of life moved inside of me. Meaning was returning to me again. But again it was short lived.
"Thinking about God is not the same as God himself," I said to myself. "What is happening inside my mind is only real inside my mind. If I were to stop believing, that would not destroy him if he is real; and so my believing in him does not make him real if he is not. If God is real, he must be bigger than what I think." And again I started to die, and again I wanted to kill myself.
But then I turned my thoughts toward the pattern of what had been happening to me again and again over the past year. Hundreds of times I had been through this. Each time that I had started to believe in God I had started to live. And each time I had stopped believing in him I had started to die. I would long ago have killed myself if I had not had a weak hope that one day I would find him. I lived only when I felt him and when I looked for him. A voice in me then said, "What more do you need? This is God. When you believe, you have life. When you have life you have God, who is the Maker of all life. If you do nothing more than live your life looking for God, you will live your life with God, because looking for him is what brings real life to you." And a light filled me that did not leave me from that day to this. I was saved from death.
After this, I returned to a faith much like the faith I had when I was a young man. I believed that God wanted me to do my best to be perfect, and I believed that he had worked through history to show his will through what most other people believed to be true about him. The big difference between my faith at this time and my faith as a young man was that I did these things without questioning them when I was young; but now I knew that I could not live without doing these things.