The Children's Hospital

20

I have never seen an angel, or seen a statue cry bloody tears, or felt the greater hardness that Elena Rauschenberg says that she can provoke by stroking the loincloth of Christ crucified in St. Mary’s church. I have never felt transported by prayer, or felt the immanence of God while caught up in a wave at the seashore. I went without sleep once for sixty hours — it was number twenty-three in a book called Forty Ways to See God, but all I saw was an imaginary angel, a naked man with wings crouched like a vulture at the foot of my sister’s bed. He was watching her sleep, and I knew I was only imagining him.

I have never seen anything that speaks even remotely to the existence of God, and yet I believe. I believe so hard it hurts — I consider it every night, the aching in my chest that comes from too strenuous exercise of an invisible unbodied organ of belief. It would be better to doubt, and if I could suspend my belief for just a moment I would be free — just for a moment! — of the constant, planet-heavy pressure of His gaze.

He is watching me. He has always been watching me, and every time I fail at going, or lose more understanding of my problem and the world’s problem, then the pressure only gets heavier, and some days I can barely get out of bed for the weight of it, and I have lain underneath a night sky awake all night, open to His awful gaze all night, asking all night, What am I, that you should always look at me? I think the great weight of it should drive me grave-deep into the ground.

For so many years I thought He was watching just to see me fuck up all the time, and the more I fucked up, the closer He watched, all my failures His entertainment. It is a marginally better comfort, to think He is watching because I might do something right one day. But what might I do, that would warrant a lifetime of heavy, heavenly scrutiny?

I say I believe and I say, Help my belief.