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queerprayers · 11 months

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hello, i hope you are having a lovely day! thanks for having this blog! 💖 my exposure to faith has mostly been through mainstream doubt-unfriendly environments so it felt eye-opening to follow your blog and a few others that are quite welcoming to it!

do you possibly have any recommendations for nurturing faith when one has so many doubts, including the existence of God or belief in the events of the Bible? or possibly even reading recs?

i was raised agnostic in a Muslim-majority country and i have a diverse friend group with Muslims, Christians, Pagans and agnostic friends so whenever i wish to believe i find myself both doubting and also not knowing how anyone chooses any religion or denomination to follow, but i like to think everyone's faith/religion is valid and connects them to God. anyway that was a bit long, thanks for the blog and answering asks again! :)

Welcome, beloved! I'm so glad you're here and it brings me so much joy to know that people can be honest about their doubt here—it's an integral part of so many people's experience and to repress it or pretend it doesn't exist is misleading and painful.

I'm currently reading A History of God by Karen Armstrong (which I'll probably quote from a couple times) and thinking a lot about how conceptions of God have changed over time, and therefore how doubt has changed—we can only doubt when we have something to doubt! For some people, this book would probably increase their doubt (just a fact, not a bad thing), but for me, learning about how culturally-specific and constructed and interconnected religion deepens my faith in a God watching over it all.

One way that I see people talk about doubt (and I've definitely done it myself) is address it as if it were a stumbling block on the road to faith. That it's something we get over. That there's a linear path to certainty. Even when people praise doubt and call it holy, sometimes they imply that that's only because it strengthens the faith that always comes afterward. Doubting Thomas was the first person to name Jesus as God—we know this, this is all true and is very meaningful to so many. But I've learned to accept other ways that doubt exists, because not everyone has this experience. Doubt is a companion sometimes, not a temporary roadblock. Sometimes it's an inherent part of faith, and sometimes it doesn't lead to religious faith at all. In case you need to hear this: don't create some imaginary end of the road where you'll be certain! Maybe you will, but don't expect that of yourself. Your doubt is your questions and your desires, your creative thinking and your love for your friends, it's you caring about finding something meaningful. It's proof that this matters to you, and even if someday doubt is no longer a major part of your religious experience, don't lose it all. Doubt does not need to be cured—it needs to be listened to.

I'm thinking a lot about the existence of God while reading Armstrong's book—how she presents a constructed God, used as a tool for good and evil, and how beautiful and terrible ideas of God can be. While talking about medieval Islam, she tells us this:

. . . [T]he Arabic word for existence (wujud) derives from the root wajada: "he found." Literally, therefore, wujud means "that which is findable" . . . An Arabic-speaking philosopher who attempted to prove that God existed did not have to produce God as another object among many. He simply had to prove that he could be found. . . . [T]he word wajd was a technical term for [Sufi mystics'] ecstatic apprehension of God which gave them complete certainty (yaqin) that it was a reality, not just a fantasy. . . . Sufis thus found the essential truths of Islam for themselves by reliving its central experience."

What if God is more than existence? What if God is more than we could ever believe in—and so instead of believing in Them, we seek to find Them, see Them a little bit more clearly every day? There's such a Christian emphasis on believing the right thing, and I do think it matters what we believe. But there's more than that—there's how we believe, and what we do about it.

C.S. Lewis believed that the fact that we desire something this world can't satisfy is itself proof that we were made for and by something more. I can't talk you into believing in God, and I don't want to. But the desire for more is a space where God can reside, if you let Them. The desire to believe is a kind of belief. Wanting to believe in God is wanting God, and I'm not claiming proof of anything, but I am saying if you connect with that desire, God is already a part of your life, whether because They're there, or because you can't find Them. The lack of God is still a relation to God. Doubt in a god existing is still a relation to God. God exists in relation to you, in you. If we can only doubt when we have something to doubt, if we can only disbelieve when there's something to disbelieve in, that means we have something.

The Bible is more specific than God's existence, and for some this makes it harder to relate to. It is a more clear presence for many people, though—it's something we can hold, memorize, study. Every person of faith relates to their scriptures differently, and I can't tell you exactly how to do so, or which way is "right." But I will say it is not a thing to believe in—"it" is a living, breathing library of transcribed, collected, translated, loved (and hated) books. We could talk about taking the Bible literally vs. metaphorically, or whether it's "historically accurate," or whether God wrote it or told others to write it or had nothing to do with it. Ultimately where I am, the foundation I come back to, no matter how my beliefs change, is that I believe God wanted us to have it. I believe it matters. Once someone asked me whether a psalm was "theologically accurate" and while that's an interesting conversation, my first instinct when reading a poem written thousands of years ago by someone I've never met is not to theologically analyze it but to say, "Yes! I've felt that way too! I hear you! And God hears both of us!" I don't think you believe or disbelieve in myth or poetry or oral history or prophecy or personal letters—I think you listen to them. Before asking yourself whether these things happened, or if we can prove certain figures existed, or anything else super useful but very overwhelming, especially without a history degree, first ask yourself what they would mean if they mattered. What would change about how you move in the world if these books were close to your heart? If you listened across centuries to find people also believing and doubting and searching and finding?

While recommending the Bible (as well as the other books closest to his heart) in Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke tells his student, "A whole world will envelop you, the happiness, the abundance, the inconceivable vastness of a world. Live for a while in these books, learn from them what you feel is worth learning, but most of all love them. This love will be returned to you thousands upon thousands of times, whatever your life may become—it will, I am sure, go through the whole fabric of your becoming, as one of the most important threads among all the threads of your experiences, disappointments, and joys." Don't believe in a book—live in it, love it, let it weave you together.

Reading A History of God, I'm being reminded how much dialogue there has always been between religions, especially Judaism/Christianity/Islam, and how so much of the Bible is built on traditions outside of it. The writers of the Bible were also living in diverse communities, interacting with and reacting to other faiths, sometimes with hostility but also with synthesis—so much of all three of these religions is built on the local pagan traditions of where they evolved, and all three incorporated Greek philosophy in various ways. None of the major religions of the world are solitary faiths that sprang up out of nowhere—we have always lived with each other, and we've been alternately mad about it and inspired by it.

Having relationships with many kinds of people is beautiful and fulfilling, but it also inevitably brings up questions! I've found myself saying, "I love this person, I think they're intelligent and well-meaning, and they genuinely believe in something I do not. What does this mean for me? Am I doing something wrong?" Embracing others' faiths is, to me, a really important part of loving them, but it's also often a challenge to work through. It has ultimately been beneficial to my faith for me to work through this, but sometimes it just feels hard, and that's okay.

Although I never really questioned the existence of a god, there have been moments in my life where I had no particular conviction that Christianity was true or especially holy. I've been captivated by Jewish and Muslim traditions/beliefs/scriptures, and admired countless philosophies and practices. Christianity has hurt me and so many others—does that mean it's inherently wrong? But in every season of my life, I've said a Christian prayer every night. Everyone experiences religion differently, but for me? I am not a Christian because I think it's better than all other religions, or because I reasoned my way into it, but because it's where I'm from, where I live, where God meets me.

Your statement that everyone's faith is valid and connects them to God—it's a beautiful belief and it opens us to explore and love what we might not be able to otherwise. Reading A History of God—I do believe it's all God. If God cannot hold contradiction, why would I honor Them? How could I believe They encompass the (paradoxical, contradiction-filled) world if They can't exist fully in paradox and contradiction? This Sunday is the Feast of the Holy Trinity for me, and I love its mystery and its acknowledgement that God is always past our understanding, that God has more than one face, that God comes to us in more than one way, can never be pinned down. I and Christians throughout history encounter God as Trinity, but the day that I limit God is the day I have thrown away everything I've worked to build in myself.

The good news for you is if you believe all religions connect to God in some way, then you also believe that you will always be connected to God—no matter how your beliefs change, no matter where you call home, no matter what your practice looks like. We can't let ourselves believe one thing for others and another thing for ourselves—I did this all the time, believing I could never be forgiven but never dreaming of saying that about someone else. Give yourself the same grace and openness and hope you give your friends. You know they are valid, you know you love them—what can that help you learn about yourself? your own validity, your own ability to be loved?

I'll let you in on a secret (in case you didn't already know): the majority of people do not sit and look without bias at the major world religions and decide which one is "true" and convert to it. I'm sure people have done that, and maybe that's what you want to do (I won't stop you). I don't even know to what extent we can "choose" a religion—I think often one (or many) finds us—but for me and so many others, religion is a culture and a practice as much as, if not more than, a belief. And often it's wholly or mostly inherited—I don't know if I would be Christian if my parents and grandparents and ancestors weren't. I don't know exactly what you've inherited, but we all inherit beliefs (even if the belief is not believing in something), and yours are also built on tradition and ideas throughout the centuries.

This all means that doubt is part of any inherited culture and practice. It means that doubt and participating in a religion have always gone together. If religion is action and community and music, you don't have to believe anything in particular to live in it. My Jewish friends have shown me this most clearly—I know of many Jewish people who don't especially believe in the existence of a god, but eat kosher and observe holidays and say prayers. If you ask them why, they say it's because they're Jewish, because it makes them a more fulfilled person, because they're connecting with their ancestors. If religion is connection to God, as you've said (and I agree), then you don't have to have belief to connect with God.

I am absolutely not saying that we should never question the traditions passed down to us, or that conversion is not a valid choice, or that if you weren't raised religious you can't have religion. I just wish to point out that many people do not first believe in a system and then join a faith practice, but the other way around. They practice their way into faith. So often we cannot know what a belief means unless we first do it. Unless it first has meaning to us. From A History of God:

[Anselm of Canterbury, the 11th century theologian] insisted that God could only be known in faith. This is not as paradoxical as it might appear. In his famous prayer, Anselm reflected on the words of Isaiah: "Unless you have faith, you will not understand":

"I yearn to understand some measure of thy truth which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand in order to have faith but I have faith in order to understand (credo ut intellegam). For I believe even this: I shall understand unless I have faith."

The oft-quoted credo ut intellegam is not an intellectual abdication. Anselm was not claiming to embrace the creed blindly in the hope of its making sense some day. His assertion should really be translated: "I commit myself in order that I may understand." At this time, the word credo still did not have the intellectual bias of the word "belief" today but meant an attitude of trust and loyalty.

If you haven't already, ask to go to a religious service/event with a friend, read/listen/experience the faiths of others. When you encounter things you're not sure if you believe, ask yourself what it would mean for you if you encountered it as truth. If God exists, if God is [insert attribute here], if God commanded [insert commandment here], if this or that book is something God wants us to have—how would that change your life? My belief in a loving God transforms my world. My prayer practice orders my days and centers my emotions. I am living (or attempting to live) my beliefs, not just thinking them. What can you trust, what can you be loyal to, what can you live, even if you don't believe it right now? "Lord I believe; help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24)

You can live as if something were true, even if you have no proof, even if you're not sure about it. I live as if there is a loving God—I have no scientific proof of this, I have not always been sure of it. But I live as if there is one, and there is more love in the universe because of it. I have only experienced a loving God when I was living in relation to one. You can go to a church without reading its whole catechism, without knowing all the words, without being sure. My pastor once told me he likes the Nicene Creed more than the Apostles' because it says "We believe" instead of "I believe." A creed not as a personal certainty, but as a communal agreement. I don't always know what I believe, but this is what we believe. I can leave it behind, but I cannot pretend it does not exist. It is my inheritance.

My advice for nurturing faith? Be willing to be wrong. Any god I've heard described is outside of our powers of description. It's dangerously presumptuous to think we can be right about God. Once I let go of the pressure to be right, once I accepted that I could be wrong about everything—that's the only way I got to faith. And the worst thing I can think of is coming to a belief through fear (of hell, of being wrong, of uncertainty, of spiritual homelessness). Fear is sometimes present, but come to it because you want it, because it fills your days with life and love. I'm obviously not a scientist or a philosopher—I've never really searched for capital-T Truth, and maybe it sounds like giving up to say all this, to think that I can never be right. But I have only truly come to Christianity when I've accepted that, as Rachel Held Evans said, it's the story I'm willing to be wrong about.

While it's definitely from a Christian perspective (I'm not sure how relatable that will be to you), the book that's calling to me right now for you is Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others by Barbara Brown Taylor. It's incredibly honest and interested in the experience of exploring envy in a religious context. It completely changed how I approach finding meaning in others' beliefs, and gave me so much peace in my own. And if you do ever begin to follow a religion/denomination, you might need a reminder that you are not abandoning everything else. You may be choosing a home, but you are not locking yourself inside it. We don't look for a home to denounce everyone else's—we look for a place we can live. Taylor says:

I asked God for religious certainty, and God gave me relationships instead. I asked for solid ground, and God gave me human beings instead—strange, funny, compelling, complicated human beings—who keep puncturing my stereotypes, challenging my ideas, and upsetting my ideas about God, so that they are always under construction. I may yet find the answer to all my questions in a church, a book, a theology, or a practice of prayer, but I hope not. I hope God is going to keep coming to me in authentically human beings who shake my foundations, freeing me to go deeper into the mystery of why we are all here.

What are you willing to be wrong about? What do you want to hold close even when you doubt it? What do you want to do, even if you don't believe in it? What brings you closer to the life you know exists for you, the one that fulfills that desire for God? There might not be one religion that is all this for you. Whether or not you ever create/join a concrete belief system, whether or not you're ever sure about any of it, God is with you. Many people live fulfilling lives outside of institutionalized religion; not all who wander are lost; your existence in a diverse community will serve you so well on this journey, which doesn't have an end and always includes doubt, and from which we can always find a new path, and is all encompassed by a many-faced Universe of Love.

And, as I find myself doing so often, here's some more Rilke to his student, which we can receive whether or not we're young or a Sir:

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

<3 Johanna

P.S.—As well as the things I've quoted from, I would also recommend Not All Who Wander Are (Spiritually) Lost: A Story of Church by Traci Rhoades and all of Rachel Held Evans' books.

P.P.S.—People quote this last Rilke passage a lot, but I'm not sure how many have read the full context? He's mostly giving advice regarding sex anxiety in that letter, which I think is great. It's relevant to most journeys in life, but in case you were wondering what journey it's originally about, there you go.

#i'm the only one who should be apologizing for length :)#asks #had fun thinking abt this one thank u for giving me the space to talk abt this stuff!#oh edit I'm fully aware this ask is like 9 months old but. trying to give myself geace. better late than never?

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rawrmeansilyindinosawr · 1 year

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ketamine is NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART (ty rat priest)

ladyfag is a kute venue w lots of kute boyz and u n ur friend dance on stage cuz why not. the dj puts the lights on u and ur friendz n sweat drip drops from ur head down to ur body and it feels holy. dirty magazine party is nxt and there's a human carpet who is coercing people into his kink to step on him like a carpet n gets mad when u ask him if he's ok so u get on him with ur 5 inch platforms and jump ttwice. cobra snake is snapping pix of everyone and the girl who u met a vivienne westwood last week tells u she likes ur kitty kat ears and u blush. u meet a girl that looks like the reincarnation of SOPHIE and spiel ur lil spiel ab how she changed ur entire life n stance on music/started ur party life. she asks to kiss u after and u let her. <3

ugh sigh eek ugh sigh eek meh blah ugh ooof. mi head is spinning and the come down from molly is never fun. found myself being v suicidal. wrote this cuz i wuz eating chicken wings and sad.

"im sucking the meat out of my teeth from the gaps in between. i used to pull my teeth when they started becoming loose and make sure they fell out the same day, i did it cuz i wanted the tooth fairy to make my wishes come true, to be in a loving family, to be happy. there's a gap from this tooth i pulled when i was 12 or so, it healed unevenly , so every time i eat meat it gets stuck in between ."

i've been talking so much lately i've lost my voice.

u leave dick appointment hungry af from burning all the calories dancing and almost k holing but u mentally pushed urself out of it, didnt think that was possible but ketamine is not for the faint of heart or mentally weak. kiss ur friend goodbye n r craving ur fav hangover food. u walk to the bodega and ignore the weird unwarranted comments from touristy men with boring flannels and cargo pants who just seem so fascinated every time they see someone who looks like a lil lolita goth. IDK why these tourists r hangin in bushwick, plz go to midtown or the upper east side so u can compare credit scores. u walk back to ur apt and BOOM. right underneath ur 400 dollar new new rocks u feel a MF LIFT and on top of that u hear a DEATHLY SQUEAL. yep. the sound of black metal REEEEEE's on loop. [also, EW if u ONLY ever cry while listening to dying fetus , get help. ] u just accidentally stepped on a fucking rat. but they just ran away underneath a car. yr convinced the rats here r superhuman or something like they have GOT to go to mandatory rat church or something underground with their sundays best and all give their tithes n offerings to RAT PRIEST to get this anti kryptonite. alana from broad city talked about RAT BASTARD [which is personally one of my greatest fears, never forget how i fking lost sleep for 2 whole days when i found a tiny mouse in my apartment a month ago, one time seeing it run across my clothing rack in the middle of the night, me responding by SCREAMING and running down my second story floor barefoot and out tha door] but id like to get to know RAT PRIEST. what does he wear, what do his sermons consist of, why do i even think hes a he. ive come so far as a nonbinary person and even helping build an anti-christian club at my christian college,writing a MF poetry book ab my deconstruction of God our Father into God our Mother. i hate the patriarchy and how its framed my sense of power insuch a male perceived worldview. speaking of men.

i am DONEEEE dating musicians and BOYS FROM UPSTATE!!!!!! ive been gaslit by 3 of them this year and its barely june?!?! why pollute something so beautiful n pure like music with a fragile ego!? ive never understood how that could happen…but imNOT stupid. tha softest boys are tha softest manipulators. DUH. i get having energy restless AF to create, express N give but how can U allow the round of applause n medal to corrode tht inner beauty?? or hold urself in so much pride they r stuck in karmic loops. but im no better cuz i never seem to learn either believing they actually think im special too. ive given sm love n attention away from myself lately n these ways of communicating w these kinds of ppl dont feel genuine when u are left empty handed. but NY was never a great place for ppl to date anyway. u find like minded ppl who connect to and they have reservations n avoidances. but falling in luv n getting hurt always happens without a warning.

PLZ PLZ PLZ RAT PRIEST dont let me fall for another musician!! ill bring u 12 bacon egg n cheeze's on cinnamon raisin TOASTED lightly with a side of coffee LITE N SWEET. PLZ RAT PRIEST i know ur there, omnipotent being. that sees the smol ones underneath ur the fluffy clouds u lay on in haven, i kno ur listening. PLZ RAT PRIEST, luv is worth going into a furnace of 1,000 flames for!! i just want pure luv. and if it's in u, u'll b the only boy ill ever be on mi knees 4 EVER again. [kross mi heart hope 2 die.]

#blog

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