divinity for freaks
By all rights, I should probably be areligious. It's arguably the state that I'm in when I make no effort to the contrary, or at least it has been in the couple of decades since I rejected the faith I grew up in. That I have plenty of secular concerns I could be spending my time and energy on is difficult to overstate.
Unfortunately, I am a hungry freak with a gnawing craving for the divine. After a few years of grappling deliberately with this craving, this makes perfect sense to me. The aforementioned areligious "default" state is as sustainable for me as not breathing.
This is obvious to me now, mostly because it is obvious to me now that religions fulfill functions. This was not obvious to me in the past; asking to get something positive and beneficial from religion would be ungrateful and unfaithful, and even the infinite benefit derived from eternal bliss in the afterlife was to be understood as the baseline outcome, as the absence of damnation. But religions—even my old one, and even ones that maintain social control through coercion—satisfy needs and serve functions for their practitioners and communities of worship. Without religion, a freak must seek alternative structures and technologies (social or material) to satisfy those needs.
Some of these needs are well-known. Religions can and often do aid in the construction of meaning, the maintenance of communities, and the analysis of phenomena in our internal and external worlds. Although I do indeed struggle to meet some of these needs without religion, more than most in my social circles, none of them underwrite my desperation.
My hunger is,
aesthetic? experiential?
It's an absence plastered against my back like heavy, wet cloth. It's the moments between moments that the clocks have been built to skip over. It's an organ they insist I never had, but the phantom sensations drown them out.
I cannot breathe in a universe that works the way I know it does. I need to dedicate some small sliver of the gift of my life clawing my way out of my own frameworks, if only to smell what the air outside is like, if only for a moment.