Like the deeply introverted Gifty, I held my experiences with God and the Scriptures I had memorized sequestered inside my being as I went into a world both full of wonder and discovery and also set against the idea of there being a God if his existence implies any bit of relevance or answerability.
"This is something I would never say in a lecture or a presentation or, God forbid, a paper, but, at a certain point, science fails. Questions becomes guesses become philosophical ideas about how something should probably, maybe, be. I grew up around people who were distrustful of science, who thought of it as a cunning trick to rob them of their faith, and I have been educated around scientists and laypeople alike who talk about religion as though it were a comfort blanket for the dumb and the weak, a way to extol the virtues of a God more improbable than our own human existence. But this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning."
"My mother crawled out of her deep, dark tunnel, but perhaps this phrasing is too imprecise, the image of crawling too forceful to encapsulate the relentless but quiet work of fighting depression. Perhaps it is more correct to say that her darkness lifted, the tunnel shallowed, so that it felt as though her problems were on the surface of the Earth again, not down in its molten core."
"'I think it's beautiful and important that to believe in something, anything at all. I really do.'
"She said the last part defensively because I was rolling my eyes. I'd always been annoyed by any whiff of the woo-woo, faux spirituality of those who equated believing in God with believing in, say, a strange presence in a room. In college, I'd once left a spoken-word show Anne had dragged me to because the poet kept referring to God as a 'she,' and that need to be provocative and all-encompassing felt to trite, too easy. It also went counter to the very concerns of an orthodoxy and a faith that ask that you submit, not in the kumbaya spirit of the Earth, but in the specific. In God as he was written, and as he was. 'Anything at all' didn't mean anything at all. Since I could no longer believe int he specific God, the one whose presence I felt so keenly when I was child, then I could never simply 'believe in something.'"
"We read the bible how we want to read it. It doesn't change, but we do."
"Like everyone else, I get a part of the story, a single line to study and recite, to memorize."
"I'd once been like that, so lonely that I craved further loneliness."
"I think we are made of stardust and God made the stars."
