It always gives me a pleasant feeling to know that people are reading me, regardless of whether they agree with my views or not. We can not expect all people to agree with us all the time. But one reaction that struck me was a series of questions: "Your god tested your faith? What kind of a god is that? Your god cannot even make his followers put up a church in Saudi Arabia."
The reaction struck a familiar cord because those were the same line of questions I used to ask when I became an atheist in my college days and a few years thereafter. I don't know the personal history of the guy who posted those comments and who signed himself as Edward E. And I don't want to speculate on why he lost his faith. He must have his own reasons.
But that made me hark back back to the time when I lost God myself. I was then fighting a bout of depression that started after my father's death in Bacolod City in the central Philippines when I was 13 and was forced to live with my uncle's family in a farm in Romblon up north. My depression led me to my search for meaning in life and my own identity. Who am I and why do I have to be born? I was a lost soul and, in my college days, had even written an epithet for my tomb - "Here lies the body of a man who never knew who he was and why he lived" - out of my desperation.
I lost my Faith after I enrolled in anthropology, which taught Darwin's theory of evolution, as an elective subject while I was pursuing a course in journalism in Manila. With my little background in philosophy, I found Darwin's theory more plausible than the Bible, which I found to be full of inconsistencies. But while I found "enlightenment" in science, I could not find meaning to my life.
My readings in philosophy and even pyschoanalysis did not give me the answers. I found solace in boozing, a vice that started when I was in high school, and coupled with my graveyard-shift job as a security guard that enabled me pursue a course in journalism on night classes, I contracted TB that forced me to leave my job and school.
With my illness, looking for a new job had been difficcult and I drifted from one odd job to another, including grinding tombstone, known as lapida in the Philippines, to survive. There had been times when I wanted to slash my wrist or take an overdoze of odinah - a brand of medicine for TB treatment that I failed to take regularly for lack of money - but I just did not have the guts to commit suicide.
One night, after a day's work of grinding tombstones, I blurted out a subconscious challenge to God, "If you are real, if you are there, I ask you to stregthen my life." It was a time when I sometimes entertained the notion that perhaps God was punishing me for my rebellion, an idea that I always dismissed as silly.
A month or so later, I found a job as a proofreader with the newly opened afternoon newspaper, The Evening Post. But several months into my job, the employees were required to undergo a medical checkup, including x-ray, at a mobile medical van parked outside the company premises. As expected, I was found to have TB but what was unexpected was that the company did not fire me.
When the medical results came a few weeks later, Kerima Polotan-Tuvera, the newspaper's editor-in-chief and the wife of the company owner Juan Tuvera, summoned me to her office and told me about my x-ray results. Instead of handing me my termination papers as I expected, she advised me to undergo medical treatment with the company taking up the tab.
That started my career in journalism and my journey back to the Faith, which was not easy because with my readings in philosophy, I have been accustomed to putting logic into my life. The book "Peace of Mind" by Jewish rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman helped me find God. Other coincidences later, including those I cited in the story "When God closes doors," streghtened my Faith and my belief that life often does not follow human logic.
When I read the online comments on my story, I know that it was part of the human quest to rationalize our lives. One comment, for instance, said that the story sent a wrong message that human achievements, opportunities and destiny are all dependent on God. Another comment suggested that it could have been better if the story ended with the fulfilment of our plan to go to New Zealand, as if life is like writing a fiction story which you can end the way you want it to end.
While I agree that we should plan our lives, as it is the most rational thing to do, experience tells us that life does not always go the way we want it. I want to agree with Shakespeare that our destiny is not written in the stars, but my experience tells me that my fate is not always in my hands; there have been times that I could not make things happen the way I want them to be.
I still asks the same hard questions that I used to ask before but have stopped arguing with my life. I have accepted the fact that life has a myrad of mysteries that have dazzled even science. In life's journey, I still use reason as my rudder but have learned to rely on Faith as my compass.
Author's note: Please read my blog "When God closes doors" to better
appreciate this blog.
The Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept things that I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.
- Reinhold Nieburh
