Our friend Karam used to edit for us. He's a real filmmaker — he produces for a living — and the podcast was a favor he was doing on the side. Eventually he got busy with the actual work. Honestly, we were lucky to have him for as long as we did.
He has the recording.
He never edited it. He never posted it. And I never followed up.
I should have followed up. It would have taken one text. I have not sent the one text.
The truth is I am not sure I want that episode to see the light of day.
I have not even watched the recording.
If memory serves — and memory is the only thing I have to go on, because I have not opened the file — I struggled on camera in a way I had not before.
Not in the usual way. Not the I believe in God, but humanity has bastardized religion way. Not the comfortable thing I usually say.
I went somewhere else. I said something like nothing is real. It is all made up. Nothing makes sense.
I said, on camera, that the more I learned, the less I believed.
Which, for a podcast that started as two of us trying to get closer to something — was not the result anyone was expecting. The podcast was supposed to be the thing pulling me toward. It was, in that moment, doing the opposite.
Rebecca's reaction was — to be honest with myself, finally — not what I needed.
What she said, more or less, was: if your answer to everything is that nothing matters, can you actually continue doing this podcast? That isn't really a useful conversation about spirituality and religion.
I have been turning that over for five months.
I think she was asking it as a practical question. The show is what it is, the show needs both of us to be participating in good faith, and she was checking whether I was still in it.
I also think — and this is the part I have not let myself say until right now — that she was uncomfortable.
Not with the questions. We are both fine with questions. The whole show is questions. She was uncomfortable with how far I had gone with them. It was one thing for me to question religion. It was a whole other thing for me to question whether any of it — including God — was real.
That second thing was past her line.
I am not blaming her. People have lines. She is allowed hers.
I am just naming, finally, that her line meant I was not safe in that moment to keep going.
So I stopped going.
Here is what I did instead.
In that conversation, I said everything is fine.
A few days later I sent her a message. I do not have it in front of me but it was something like: I had a moment. I thought about it. I am back to where I started. God is real. I just have issues with how religion is practiced.
I tied it up. I gave her the version that fit inside the show we were making.
The thing is — and I am realizing this as I type it — I do not know if any of that walk-back was true. Or if it was the thing I said because saying it let me get out of the conversation.
I think I compartmentalized. I am very good at compartmentalizing. I take the thing that does not fit and I set it down somewhere I do not have to look at it. The thing is still there. I just stop seeing it.
It has been five months and I have not gone back to look.
I am looking now, apparently, in real time, on the internet, for whoever is reading this.
Here is what I had been not looking at:
I said on a podcast recording that I think the whole thing might be made up. That God might be made up. I have never said that out loud anywhere else. I have not even said it to myself, really. I said it on a recording five months ago and then I told my best friend I had a moment and I tied it up with a bow and I have not let myself look at it since.
Woah.
I am going to leave that there for a second.
Okay.
Taking a breath. Doing some real-time thinking here.
I do believe in God.
Or I want to believe in God.
Or maybe I am afraid of the judgment that comes from not believing in God. The judgment from my family. From the people I grew up around. From the version of me who was very sure twenty years ago.
I will be honest: I judge people who don't believe in God. I do. That is part of what is making this hard. I would not let myself off the hook for what I am admitting right now if it were anyone else.
But also — and this is what I keep coming back to — I know what I feel when I pray.
I know love. I know that thing I cannot quite put into words. I feel God.
I see his hands on my life every day. I am crazy blessed. I am a living testimony.
As I write this, I am feeling that thing. I do not know the word for it. Joy. Hope. Comfort. None of those are exactly right. I cannot explain it. I cannot prove it. But it is real to me. It has always been real to me. Even in the moment on the recording when I said nothing was real, that was real. It was real underneath the sentence I was saying out loud.
So.
Maybe what I was actually saying on that recording was not that there is no God.
Maybe what I was saying was that the God religion has been describing to me is not the God I am feeling.
That is a different sentence.
I am not done thinking about this.
I think I am done journaling for tonight.
A last thing.
Whoever you are reading this — you are on the third one now. The Sunday post. The lazy post. This one. Each one of them is something I am doing on a blog instead of a thing I am doing in my actual life.
I am writing my real-life journals as posts for strangers.
I have not had the conversation with my boyfriend about the religion gap between us. I have not had the conversation with Rebecca about the recording or what she said or how I felt. I have published — or am about to publish — both of those conversations, in some form, before having either of them with the people they are about.
Talk about avoidant.
Do you guys see a pattern here?
I do.