I've Always Wanted to Be Gods Favourite, but I Don't Know Him.

On growing up without a god.

I was not raised religious, and now in my twenties, I find myself drifting into a sort of film in my mind of what my life would have been like if I was. Who would I have been today? What would childhood have looked like? Would I have different taste buds? What would my journal entries be like? How would I sleep?

I have liked to think my love is a religion and my sacrifice in life is religious, but here I will be talking of spiritual religion only.

If you read my poetry, you will find talks of God and questions tossed to a God. On any one of my platforms, you will see crosses and churches; even in my room, I have beautiful cross ornaments hung and not worn. I have always found religion to be such a beautiful home in one’s life as an outsider looking in. The devotion, the passion—I ache for it at times, and I tend to reach a frail arm to who I believe God to be in my mind. This is who I speak to in my poetry.

“I talk to God, but the sky is empty.”

—Sylvia Plath

Beauty seethes from the crosses on my wall and shakes my arm when I sleep, reminding me that I do not fully understand them. Calling upon me to know more, but I find the depths of that to be extremely uncomfortable as I have never known such a practice. Yes, I do find not knowing to be just as uncomfortable, and I am aware that comfort is not always the best place to be.

When I talk of or to Him, I know what I see, though I am sure it entirely differs from who or what you may visualize. I see grey clouds, a sky, rain, at times bugs, nature as a whole, yet someone not wholly there. I want to remind readers that this is in no way meant to disrespect who they believe God to be, if you do believe, or their religion, but to describe what it has been like to have a vision in my mind of what I think it is to have exactly that but not be connected to it like you are. To absolutely adore the symbols of God yet have only a sense of imagination as to what it all means.

I yearn for the protective layer of soul I believe people of God have, because with God, they always have someone to go to and something they are living for. Something they wake up and always have, something that can never be taken from them, their religion. It is inspiring, really.

I am not religious, but I do hold onto God and grasp for the scraps given to those like me. I have heard Him to be quite giving.

Recently, I read Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. It is the first English book ever written by a woman, but that was not my main focus going into it. In this book Julian describes the visions she had in 1373 relating to Christ as she lived as an anchoress in a cell shut out, or rather shut in, from society to live in pure devotion. Safe to say, I was hooked.

“That pain seems to me the hardest hell, for he does not have his God.”

—Julian of Norwich, p. 26

I was able to explore her mind and be able to appreciate the words of someone so deeply rooted in Christ, so willing and trusting because she knows her God. Someone completely opposite from me in spirituality, but ever so similar in the way that love leads and comforts her.

I do not know if I will ever meet God and I assume that I cannot be Gods favourite because of that, though, Julian of Norwich said, “But no kind of prayer makes God pliant to the soul, because God’s love is always the same” and that helps me to feel like maybe the words I speak to the sky at night do not just fall from my lips and to my pillow. Maybe they do rise. Maybe we will meet.

By Sarah Shihab (Sarentries)

(Instagram/TikTok/X)