The simple life
There is no secret to life
It took me 25 years of living on this planet to figure it out.
This may be more than most people figure out before they die.
Sometimes I think they’re the lucking ones, going through their whole lives without finding out their lives have no point.
Mine does now, but it took me most of my life to find it out.
But for most of my young life I looked in the wrong places, especially when I was a young girl searching out every nook and cranny for it, believing that if I didn’t look hard enough I might miss it.
Most of those years, I felt very lonely and scared.
My parents were no help. They went to church on Sundays and Christmas, but didn’t seem to believe in anything, violating every rule the church taught whenever it was convenient.
I’m not blaming them for anything.
I tried to believe in their religions, too.
I went to their instructions and listened to their sermons. I genuflected when the priests told me, too, and crossed myself after every prayer.
Still it all seemed like empty gestures like I was some kind of puppet dangling on some kind of string, never quite able to grasp the reason for everything I did.
It took me a long time to understand I wasn’t supposed to understand.
Church was supposed to be a blind habit, one which we engaged in, but never said anything of substance.
I eventually understood, too, why my parents gave up on it.
I did, too, yet I still wasn’t convinced all faiths were as empty as that one was.
With so many religious to choose from in the world, I figured one had to have something beyond pointless words.
I needed something to fill this empty space I felt inside myself, a growing space that hungered for more than what I was.
I know this all sounds stupid.
Most of us have come to think of emptiness as normal. We all live with loneliness and that’s the way it must be.
I just wasn’t convinced.
So I questioned my friends and sampled their religions.
I questioned the scholars of each faith until I thought I could sense what each was about.
Each seemed to have secret information that made it better or different than the next, secrets which faith and practice would reveal to a practitioner if he or she was stupid enough to spend his or her life engaged in prayer.
But when I got down to the nub of each, I found that each religion was as empty as the last, lacking that central wholeness which religious is supposed to have.
None made me feel like I belonged to it, or owed anything to me for my investing my faith in it.
God was less an issue that experiencing God.
Each religion told me I would feel Him if I prayed for faith.
But I needed more than that, I needed to feel God first in order to believe.
Then, the Reverend came into my life, one of his followers pushing a pamphlet into my hand on the street.
When I went to their church, he took my money and told me I wouldn’t need it. He took my clothing and said we were all naked in the face of God. Then he took my virginity saying we all must share what the Lord has given us.
I couldn’t believe what he was saying at first.
Yet the more he took from me the more connected I felt.
The more he humbled me, the more exalted I grew.
I know others don’t understand it, seeing this faith as some form of sexual cult, and maybe there’s some truth to that.
But I am not being “used” or “deceived.
Nor am I brainwashed as my parents like to say.
They have disinherited me in the belief that I would give it all to the reverend. This is true.
What I have is his, and what he has is mine.
Sure people say he has exorbitant wealth and power. But this only increases me as well.
I do not need to live in luxury the way he does, and rages better suit the simplicity of my life and the purity of my soul.
People don’t understand.
I am happy and this is more than most people can say.
For all their mindless ritual and empty faith.