Praying to a God I Don't Believe In

I don’t know if I’m an atheist or possibly agnostic or maybe just a very damaged Mormon/Christianish who is still really angry at God and refuses to communicate with him because I have boundaries, and as I learned with my earthly father, that means no contact. I used to tell myself that my relationship with God was very different from my relationship with my father, that I was able to see a healthy fathering model through my spiritual experiences with God in my church setting. But now I wonder if that was ever true.

I still weep a little silently when I hear people tell me about a beloved father who helped them grow into who they were meant to be, because I don’t know how to explain what it is like to someone like that that I had a father who seemed to steal all of my best features to claim them his own property and who at the same time beat me unless I was absolutely perfect in every way he wanted me to be and then told me over and over and over again that my one unique and shining talent was worthless, that I could never be a writer and that women had to become mothers and also that mothers were not allowed to have any thoughts of their own or any time to themselves.

I am trying very hard to rebuild myself after a long and failed marriage, fifty years of being a devout and then a more progressive and nuanced Mormon—and then simply giving up. Giving up has been very useful for me to let go of the past and start a new future. And yet, there are still times when I ache for parts of my old life. I miss my dear Mormon friends I have no more contact with. I miss the sense of shared purpose in our assigned labor together. I miss singing beloved hymns together. I miss looking out for other people’s needs and being looked out for.

And I miss praying. I miss the ritual of kneeling or sometimes simply lying in bed and silently talking to God like a friend who is wise and kind and loving, who will actually be able to do something if something needs to be done, but might also tell me simply to hang on and wait for the unfolding purpose of whatever this trial happens to be. I miss feeling like someone is always listening who loves me. I miss sometimes discovering that the thing I thought I wanted isn’t what I want at all, and that actually, I’m not sad about this but about the other thing. I miss believing that everything I think and feel actually matters to someone else.

So a few nights ago, I decided that there is no reason that I can’t pray again. Even if I don’t believe in a god who listens to those prayers or acts on my pleas. I spent a few years after deconstructing Mormonism trying to imagine a different God in a different shape and praying to that God. But this isn’t that. I’m not directing my prayers to any being in the sky. I don’t imagine any shape to this God I don’t believe in, because I don’t believe in God anymore.

I can’t believe in God, for a couple of important reasons. One is that if I believed in God, I find myself circling around in suicidal thoughts. No wonder Christians had to tell people that suicide is a mortal sin because surely everyone would want to go to heaven immediately, without all the pain and trouble of waiting for life to end more naturally. Mormon theology is even worse in its depiction of the gloriousness of heaven and the promise for me specifically that my infant daughter Mercy is waiting for me there.

The second reason I can’t believe in God is that the idea that God chose for me specifically to lose my daughter, that He is in control of my world, and designed my special tragedies and traumas in order to make me “better” does nothing but make me hate Him. And when people ask me to think about how lucky I am and how much easier my life is than other people’s (which it demonstrably is, even with Mercy figured in there), I can only agree and again think that God is a sadistic bastard and I cannot forgive Him for any of this, from the first painful, screaming moment of living til the last quiet gasp of dying. All of us should hate God, not love Him.

But this anger is part of my prayer to God, you see. I don’t have to be nice to a God I don’t believe in. I don’t have to because I don’t need favor or blessings from Him. I don’t need Him to grant me entrance to heaven because I don’t want to be in heaven, thank you very much. Death seems like a fine ending to me, the end of all suffering. Paradise or eternal life (as Mormon style it) is the worst form of hell I can think of. More work to do, more children to raise, more striving and trying to do better. No, thank you. I’ll take death or whatever dark hell you can think of instead.

So I yell at God in my prayers. I also tell the God I don’t believe in about my children and what I hope for them, and my struggles with them. I complain about my current health problems, which do not seem at all fair since I work so hard to be healthy. I mention friends who deserve better than they are currently getting from family or from the world itself. I sometimes find myself talking happily about some good things that have started coming, and feel a brief sense of awe. But mostly I find that venting is the thing I miss most from prayer. I don’t need to believe that someone will fix it. I just want it to be seen, if not by God, than by me. To lay it out and show it. See this. This is what living is. This is my life, and the life of my beloveds.

Amen.