God In The Void

And so it was that I again found myself smeared against a smooth, nearly featureless wall of stone, praying to what god there might be to restrain his whipping winds, and to help me get off of this blasted rock alive. It would seem that I may be woefully bad at assessing a rock face’s climbability since, yet again, I was desperately clamping my index fingers and thumbs down onto nothing more than ill-defined undulations in the stone, with my clunky work boots mashed sideways against the barren cliff face. Minuscule notches in the rock prevented my boots from slipping, and myself from tumbling down, down.
In my defense, what other choice did I really have but to bravely trudge on, regardless of the lack of grips and footholds ahead? I had already put myself into a predicament the moment that I stepped out onto that cliff, and there was no direction to take but forward – trying to retrace my steps backwards would only send me soaring into the afterlife.
I had successfully inched my way to the halfway point that lay between the ledge on which I’d found temporary refuge and the vertical crack which I felt would take me up this mountain and, eventually, home to see my family again. And it was here, at this midpoint, that the rock revealed to me just how inhospitable it was to a bumbling, ill-prepared climber like myself. Smaller and smaller grips to cling to, narrower ledges to stand on. I finally looked down at the boulders strewn far below – as going down had become enough of a likelihood to be considered. The wind tore into me and my bulky backpack in another surging wave. In a fierce fit of panic, I yelled out – or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I cried out – to something which I could not see, yet that I somehow still knew was within earshot. And I remember the words that I had called out, on the side of that desolate mountain wall.
“God, I’m so scared! I am so afraid, of everything…”
And it was in that moment that God finally reached out and spoke to me. He told me to have faith, and to go get some real climbing shoes. Then, as though two angels had each taken hold of one of my arms, I was heaved by the wind across the featureless chasm of bare rock, over to the base of the crack.
Upon reaching it, I thrust my hand into the fissure and made a tight fist, thus wedging it in place, and securing a moment of reprieve for myself. Three butterflies floated past my face in the gentle, upward-flowing breeze (the fierce gusts having suddenly subsided). They fluttered up the crag, and disappeared over the crest of the cliff. It felt like a clear sign – and so I climbed.
I did reach the top of that mountain that day. And in an instant, my life was transformed. I recognized that I had called out to the God of my youth, and that He had answered me. So I mended my Christian faith, repented of my many obscure sins, and have gone on to spend the past decade serving as a missionary around the world, sharing the gospel with the starving masses. And the girl from Columbus has faithfully stood by me throughout all of it. She forgave me for my many betrayals and flaws – as did God – and we’ve since adopted a Tanzanian orphan boy named Mwongo.
I can trace all of the blessings in my life back to that one moment of crippling panic on the side of a cliff; a moment of fear, which God utilized to carve a path through my own inner-deceit, so that he might come into my soul.
Of course I’m fucking with you. Alas, if only contentment and inner peace were to be so easily attained. Unfortunately, this simply wasn’t to be my path – most of it didn’t happen like that, save for Mwongo. He’s a cool little dude.
I did, however, shout those words out aloud. “God I’m so scared…” And a moment such as this certainly does remind me of the many similar ones which I have heard accounts of, spoken from pulpits in the testimonies of other Christians (“testimony” is the awkwardly lofty word which Christians tend to use in place of “My story,” or “How I became a Christian”). I’ve heard many accounts in which individuals have suddenly felt touched by the hand of God – often in their darkest, most frightful moments – and were thus inspired to change their lives and begin treading a new path. Don’t get me wrong, these moments do certainly occur in real life, to real people (of all religions), and to wondrous effect. Great men and women around the globe have had stories like these, and have gone on to lead impactful lives following their rapid religious transformations. But that simply wasn’t what this moment was for me, even though, out of context, that admission to God might be misinterpreted as precisely that.
This moment – and those words – as I clung to a rock and battled against the wind (which was begging me to come play with it, out in the open, blue sky), was not to serve as my defeated return to the domineering, Christian God of my childhood. This wasn’t a come-(back)-to-Jesus moment, so to speak. I had already experienced one of those in the months prior, even though I might not have recognized it at the time. My own come-to-Jesus moment (so to speak) didn’t come in the form of some harrowing, near-death experience, in which I finally cried out to God in desperation – bargaining with Him to spare my life in return for obedience and subjugation. Mine came to me quietly, as I walked through a graveyard, imagining myself as a bubbling corpse.
Words fascinate me. That much might seem obvious, as you are reading a blog post which I have written. However, not all writers appear to perceive words as the multi-functional tools which they are. Just as there are many different ways in which one might use a flat-head screwdriver, there are many ways in which one might use this word, “god.”
I was raised in a firmly Christian household, and the act of discovering and defining my own faith has been a lifelong battle for me, since about the age of fifteen. That was when I first began to recognize that there was little left for me in that religion. Make no mistake, Christianity laid the foundations for my interactions with others (for the better, mostly), my moral compass (for the better, mostly) and the pursuits towards which I would strive throughout the first portion of my life (for worse, mostly). But even at that young age, I sensed that there was something off about this idea of ‘God’, as it was being presented to me. It was essentially just a jealous, prissy human, demanding loyalty, obedience and worship. It was in the name of this God that I was forbidden from experiencing certain aspects of my own being – my body, my uncensored mind, and my magick. And I would need to exclude certain peoples from my life’s journey in the name of this God – Muslims, Hindus, pagans (both those in hooded robes and those on motorcycles), and, most egregious of all, those who played with Ouija boards and tarot cards.
Or if I didn’t exclude these peoples, then I would be duty-bound to attempt to convert them to my own faith.
I still remember Ashu – my Hindu best friend from down the street, whom I aggressively and childishly ‘witnessed to’ in an effort to save his soul. He never played with me again after that. That may have been my first notable heartbreak.
What truly cemented my understanding that Christianity might not be for me was the thought of death. Fifteen, for whatever reason, was a particularly morbid age for me, during which I deeply contemplated my own eventual demise. And death, for a believer (as depicted by modern pop-Christianity), is that final stage of our linear existence in which the soul goes to a perfect place, and worships and praises this jealous God, ad infinitum.
It was the contemplation of this eternal worship which finally broke my religion. I realized that the threat of a fiery hell was somehow less menacing than the promise of endless perfection, and eternal submission to yet another king (no matter how majestic and wonderful this one might be). What was there to look forward to in heaven, if perfect harmony had been attained and death had been conquered, and all that was left to do was to sing praise to my authoritarian maker?
And I do feel the need to point out – though I’ll try not to get too sidetracked here – that if you want an experience to be truly awful for a human being, then human nature necessitates that the situation always be progressively changing; the hellfires couldn’t simply be cranked up to an 11 at all hours of the day. Otherwise, those of us being punished for our agnosticism would eventually grow used to the consistent torment, which would considerably dampen its effect. Human beings are defined by our incredible ability to adapt physically and mentally to nearly every situation which we’ve ever found ourselves in – happiness and inner-peace was somehow even present in the Russian gulags. And so, reason would suggest that some days in hell would have to be made more bearable than others, so that the punishing agony would be felt whenever the heat was inevitably cranked back up. Perhaps Wednesdays in hell might be ice cream day? If nothing else, it would at least dangle a bit of false hope for us prisoners.
Of course, I wasn’t really contemplating the psychology of torture and human suffering back at that age – that was just a bit of hellish ice cream humor. My point is that the eternal, steadfast, worshipful paradise that I was supposed to be striving towards sounded sooo much worse to my fifteen-year-old brain than the speculative possibility that a hell might exist. Even back then, I had begun to understand that the concept of hell might actually be nothing more than a childish gimmick, concocted by mashing together ideas from various cultures into a fear-tactic, designed to frighten the greatest number of Abrahamic plebeians into religious submission.
The teachings of Jesus Christ should be observed simply for the fact that they contain many (often misinterpreted) nuggets of wisdom, which feel true and self-evident when they are contemplated. But if my only real incentive to pledge allegiance to the church was some infantile threat of eternal bad things, then I should probably go seek out a different belief system – one which wouldn’t insult me with such a juvenile “carrot or the stick” impetus.
Fisher-Price Presents: My First Belief System
Just as toy producers develop colorful keyboards and xylophones which can arguably be referred to as “real instruments”, pop-Christianity has provided a large portion of humanity’s developing intellects with a simplified, colorful, and easy-to-grasp summation of the divine (by the by, nearly all modern Christian churches fall under my categorization of “pop” – those which didn’t, such as the Christian mystics or the Ascetics, were largely quashed by the more organized sects, alongside their equally difficult-to-control pagan/druidic counterparts). Accept the carrot of peaceful salvation in heaven (by praying the fealty prayer), or face the painful stick of damnation in hell.
But even though this simplistic means of persuasion might have been insulting to a fifteen-year-old who had given it a few moments of unshielded contemplation, it still would appear as though the underlying concept of god had yet to leave my brain those nine years later, whilst I clung to the side of a Colorado cliff. For in the moments immediately before my high-flying demise (or so I thought), it was this concept of god to whom I cried out, and to whom I admitted my fear.
After my faith was broken at fifteen, I did, of course, go through the obligatory staunch-atheist phase, as do all of us disillusioned deep-thinkers. If pop-Christianity is a toy xylophone, then atheism is the triangle, which is at least allowed to sit on stage with the rest of the orchestra. Not a very expressive instrument just yet, but perhaps at least a gateway into that world. Though…I should amend that statement. There are actually two distinct phases of atheism which I progressed through. The first was an oddly religious position, in which the word “God” was simply replaced by “the science”, “pastor” with “researchers”, and “the bible says” with “studies have shown.” The parallels between this form of atheism and its birth mother (Christianity) are astoundingly obvious to those of us with an outside perspective. This form of atheism doesn’t get to sit on stage with the big kids…this one just angrily teethes on a bible in the nursery, next to the Satanists. “Trust the science.” Really?
Thankfully, I did progress from this phase of atheism – certainly not everyone does – into the phase which I consider to be actually useful for spiritual development: cold, dead nihilism. The universe is black, and I exist to become a corpse which will at least feed the worms, before entropy destroys all that ever was. It was sometime within this extensive nihilistic stage that I went through my Downward Spiral. And likewise, it was towards the end of it that I finally uttered those words, “I will be here soon. So nothing that happens while I’m on this earth actually matters…” The nucleus of freedom, born from the vacant dark – the Big Bang.
“…the earth hath existed waste and void, and darkness is on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God fluttering on the face of the waters, and God saith, ‘Let light be;’ and light is.” (Genesis 1:2-3 YLT)
God did speak to me in that moment on the cliff, just as it had been whispering to me throughout the course of my road trip, and even before. Take the seats out of your car and go explore. Climb a mountain. Meditate. Climb a tree.
I don’t know what god is. And I don’t particularly want to know what god is. I don’t care one way or another if I ever understand what it is that I have sensed, whispering from the margins of my fearful mind. And no, I don’t want to join your club, or share your vernacular (I actually loathe the way in which many religious types pretentiously discuss their religious understandings), nor do I wish to say your prayer or observe your rules or follow your rituals. I don’t have any desire to claim spiritual superiority over you or your perspectives on what this thing is, nor do I feel an impulse to apply any definitions or constraints to it – “god” is enough of a descriptor for myself to be happy and content with.
All that I do know is that my nihilistic atheism (or better put, my absence of rigid spiritual belief, which would have otherwise obscured and distorted all incoming life-lessons), along with my introspective mindset during that road trip, somehow created the right conditions for me to finally detect the influences of something very real, and very quiet. I would liken it to a subtle candle, flickering somewhere out in the dark before me – where it always has been. But it was not until this moment, when my own flood lights had burned out, and all of my many distraction had been momentarily set aside, that I finally noticed the tongue of the flame, and heard it’s crackle.
“…but I am safe.”
Those were the next words that I spoke out loud, after having admitted my fear to the Mountain. I spoke them calmly, in contrast to my emotional cry only moments prior. This was a callback to My Beliefs – the series of novel ideas which I had been attempting to cement within my mind. It was the very first of those beliefs, actually. “I am safe.” I was reminded that, even though death might be fast approaching, I was safe.
It was these three words which inspired me to slowly trudge across the smooth cliff. The wind didn’t die down, and no angels carried me across the frightening bits. No bargain with any jealous deity was struck, and no butterflies served as a sign that I would ever see my loved ones again. Just this one, subtle crackle from the candle, whispering “I am safe,” lured me forward.
With several more stretches and heaving pulls, I managed to reach the base of the vertical crack. It provided me more than enough leverage and handholds to begin to slowly haul myself upwards – up the last 15-20 feet of cliff, towards the waving branches and leaves that danced above me.

