03.25.2004 - 2:54 p.m.

Among college kids taking philosophy and religion classes, there are two types of people: the kind who will lose any religion they may have, like me, and the kind who are already secure in it. I only once met an exception, a friend of mine who, during a meditation assignment for Early American Religion, actually found God. Wanting very much to find God myself, I asked him what he�d done to develop such a strong belief in so short a time�he said it was easy. He had lied down in his bed every night and thought about the room and the dorm and the trees and sky and universe outside, and tried to be open to feeling loved, and that after several tries, it was just there. From then on, he knew God not only existed, but also loved him.

It was a very disappointing story for me, because I knew I could never trick myself in that way; after all, even before I�d taken Systems of Formal Logic I�d known that choosing to believe something has no necessary relation to its truth, when actual, real truth was too important to me. Of course you can find God if you pretend he�s already there, just like you can always find a playmate if you�re a three-year-old with an active imagination. My friend was of no help to me.

I haven�t been much use to myself lately, either. Most of us have that one memory of the worst thing we've ever done. It is a problematic thing, this deviled moment, because once there gets to be a few years between yourself and its commission, it stops crossing your mind every day. You formulate some marginally healthy strategy for dealing with it, some party line like �It wasn�t my fault� or �We don�t talk about that.� You go on with your life, a different person in five or six subtle little ways, but if those five or six things keep the guilt at bay, then you don�t mind them at all.

In my case, the line is a self-help for when I screw up: �This sucks, but at least I didn�t do like my worst.� (You�ll have to forgive the lack of detail. This entry is not about the thing, but about its role in my life.) I am different in that I don�t drown myself in guilt over every little thing anymore, as I have a store of it already, thank you. I don�t count myself competent to handle certain crises in the lives around me. I no longer believe that all choices are voluntary, and I am not comfortable around the people who were there when that particular choice was made.

The problematic part is that when your strategy of marginal health works so smoothly, there is very little incentive to deal with it for real, even years later when you�re certain you have the tools to handle it, and you�d actually like to revisit those people. I couldn�t let it go myself, but I�ve known for years that the old process is of no more help to me.

But the other night I had a breakthrough. Not about God, but about belief, and about healing. I�ve spent days, months, years trying to understand something I�d done a long time ago, something that was not under my control, but for which I still felt responsible. I�ve actually explained it to a lot of people, always sort of hoping they could convince me to stop beating myself up, but always sure beforehand that they didn�t really understand, or that their suggestions wouldn�t work, or that I couldn�t be me without the shrine to that moment I�d built in my head. My boyfriend already knows the story, and I�d already disqualified him from helping me on the grounds that he just doesn�t think things through the way I do, but when I was upset about it that night we went over it again. But this time, I noticed with some surprise that I was waiting for his thoughts with no reservations at all, that the inquiring part of my mind was silent. And it is a funny thing, but it didn�t seem at all against logic to believe that he could be trusted to tell me the truth, even knowing that I was going to take whatever he said and turn it into the answer I needed, the way to put it all behind me. After all, in the years since that conversation with that college friend, I no longer believe in a hard, unbendable truth that needs scientific proof. Most truth, in fact, seems very hard to describe in terms of facts and numbers.

So it turns out that I am capable of faith. And�although I am not sure�I think it worked. I�ve got this wonderful light feeling, as if I�ve forgiven, or been forgiven, and maybe I�ve finally managed both.

In any case, that�s what I haven�t been writing all week.

-stonebridge

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