i spoke freely with my therapist a while back about my doubts in all religions. about all the crazy-town prophecies that have been thrown my way for not believing, living, knowing certain things in certain virtuous ways. and i remember as a child doing certain rituals so i would not go to hell. certain prayers and gestures. the psychiatrist, many, many, many years later, diagnosed me with adolescent anxiety & depression and mild ocd that had formed in my youth and slowly bled into the dark and thick kind-of blood into my adulthood. 

i used to pray that all the other children who didn't believe what i believe would not go to hell. it wasn't their fault. they simply did not know better. please, please deliver them. 

starts my first of many anxiety attacks.  

hail mary, full of grace. our father who art in heaven. 

one of my favorite writers i frequently mention wrote a particular essay that strikes me in regards to this dawn-of-time questioning/doubtful/hopeful idea of an existing, omnipresent deity. 

"What you learned is that your idea of God as a possibly non-existent spirit man who may or may not hear your prayers and may or may not swoop in to save your ass when the going gets rough is a losing prospect.

So It’s up to you to create a better one. A bigger one. Which is really, almost always, something smaller.

What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer to you? What if faith is the way it feels to lay your hand on your daughter’s sacred body? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through your window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?"

the story of a man who found a way to endure his suffering. 

endure suffering. 

the story of a man, of a woman, enduring suffering. 

they rose anyway.