In pursuit of another epiphany

When I go home to America for Christmas, I’ll go to church — the one my family and I used to attend every Sunday, a few towns over. I visit intermittently throughout the year when I’m back home, but I always go on Christmas Eve. The routine is the same: I sit quietly in the pews, sing along to the carols and hope to have a second epiphany.

I had my first epiphany — that God exists — when I was a child. This, I’m sure, is the result of having two religious parents who raised me in the church. When I tell my British friends that I was brought up a Methodist, they tend to flash me a nervous look. I must assume that going to a Methodist church in the UK means something different than it does in liberal Connecticut. Mine is the kind of church where people hug you longer and harder if you haven’t shown up in a while; where the pastor tells you that hell is more of an allegory than it is a place any departed soul actually ends up.

‘Thanks a lot,’ I would yell at God. ‘Why didn’t you bother to perform a miracle?’

When, as a teenager, I was confirmed, I “accepted Jesus into my heart” as they asked us to do. But this was a formality. I had already accepted God’s existence years ago. Believing in a higher power has never been the hard part. It’s everything that follows as a consequence of having faith which I find difficult.

For many people in my life, their faith in God gives them strength and comfort. For other people I know, not believing in God also seems to provide some degree of assurance: there may be no light at the end of the tunnel, but they feel no pressure to reach it either. I imagine it’s trickier to be agnostic, to grapple with the doubt of it all. My late godfather, who was fairly sure there was no God, would still pray every day. “Just in case,” he would say.

I envy them all. Each of these options seems better to me than where I’ve ended up. Somehow, I’ve managed to develop a belief in God that comes without the comfort.

When I was ten, six months after my mom died (she had been in and out of hospital for a year already), it finally really hit me that she was never coming home. That’s when my one-way shouting matches with God began. Looking up at the ceiling, I spared no insult.

“Thanks a lot,” I would yell, with all the perfectly delivered sarcasm and anger of a pre-teen. “Why didn’t you bother to perform a miracle?” I knew He could hear me, that I wasn’t yelling into the abyss. That made it so much worse.

Why do we look up when talking to God? He’s supposed to be everywhere. Yet I struggle to find evidence of his interventions up, down or anywhere else. “If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him,” says Job when it’s all going pear-shaped. “On the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.”

It probably comes as no surprise that these are the verses in the Bible I’ve turned to most over the years. Yet they provide no solace. A man sees his life fall apart and ends up with a shiny new second family. What about his ten children who get offed along the way? Job’s faith may finally reward him, but the ratio of happy to dreadful endings doesn’t exactly inspire hope.

I understand we need to suffer, that some types of trials and tribulations are necessary to grow our character and reaffirm our faith. But do we need to suffer so much? Surely broken bones, heartbreak or a life cut short by twenty years is enough to test us. There’s simply no making sense of natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or children who don’t make it to their first birthday — especially if you know there’s a power out there that could stop the cruelty.

So far, my hardships have fallen on the tolerable side of the line. When I was young, grown-ups used to insist that I had had a terrible time of it. I could sense their uneasiness when I told them I was actually very blessed. Yes, I had lost my mom, but I was raised by a wonderful dad, in a supportive community. Many people experience so much worse. Looking back, I was largely correct. But I wasn’t blessed, I was just lucky.

Suffering is short, I’m reminded, and God understands what we go through, having sent his son to live, die and suffer among us. Perhaps this makes me a little less lonely, but it also deepens my frustrations. God understands our pain yet still stands aside? He sends his sympathy, not his strength?

I once found consolation in the idea that God didn’t answer my childhood prayers because he was busy performing miracles on a much greater scale. As a grown-up, I look around and see little evidence that He was up to much else.

A friend tells me I need to turn to the Serenity Prayer: to acknowledge and accept what I can and cannot change. This isn’t my problem, I explain: as a lowly little human, I am under no illusion that the world’s problems are in my control. My issue is with the Omnipotent One, who has the power to change things. The God who can make the lame walk and raise people from the dead could surely have spared those babies in the kibbutzim. That He didn’t doesn’t make me believe any less. It makes me angry.

Every year, when I return home for Christmas, I take that anger to church. I sit in the pews I ran around as a kid, looking out the window into the garden where Mom is buried. I pray for a second epiphany — an epiphany that not only allows for faith, but for some joy and peace to creep in too.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.