This week, during a meeting, I was asked to write a letter to God. Here’s what I wrote:

Dear God,

I don’t know what you want from me. I don’t why why it is that I feel that I have been given very little control over my own life. I don’t know what you made me for or what you expect me to do, but I’m becoming more and more convinced that you aren’t anything more than a lazy artist, the kind that praises his best art and disregards his disappointments.

There are several moments of my life where things seemed destined to be. Going to Creighton for instance. The day I found out I would be going to College was one of the best days of my life. I didn’t think I would get into College, let alone Creighton — which was my reach school — seeing as how I had been rejected from almost every other school I applied to. My acceptance there was so unexpected that I wondered if there wasn’t some divinity behind it. I pondered the idea that maybe I was meant to go to Creighton and no where else. So I went. I studied, I took risks, I avoided complacency, and I went outside my comfort zone as much as I could. Above all, I grew. I am a very different person than I was before I went there, something I worked hard to do. Yet when I look back on my time there, all I remember is a string of failures, being depressed and suicidal, and being constantly reminded that I just wasn’t good enough.

Now, I am in a faraway place, a place I arrived at through circumstances that are strikingly similar to those that led me to Creighton (the last time I felt that God had a hand in my direction). But what does it mean? Is my being here divine will, or just simple serendipity? If I believed it was divine, would I find endless failures in front of me like before? Despite however hard I worked, would I still be reminded of how not good enough I am? Is there any reason for me to believe that I should be optimistic about the future, when all I know about the past is that I am just not good enough?

If this is indeed an invitation from you, I am weary of the consequences that invitation might bring with it.

-Patrick Keaveny

The second part of the meeting asked me to write a letter from God to myself, and try to discern what God would say. I sat there for an hour trying to think of what to write and I couldn’t come up with a damn thing. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that God wouldn’t say anything. Belief in a higher being brings with it an acceptance that said higher being exists without proof. If God does exist, He would not talk to us. Which is the thing that makes me so cynical about this idea of a “personal God.”

People always like to tell themselves that “God has a plan,” or “everything happens for a reason.” Over the last year, I’ve become convinced that these things are just what people tell themselves in order to get to sleep at night. People like to believe that there’s a reason for them to exist and that we can better ourselves if we believe in God. It is however far more likely that we’re alone in this universe, and the only reason to believe in “God” is to make ourselves believe we have a purpose other than simply passing on our genetic material. People don’t like to believe that our only purpose is to fuck as much as possible.

I don’t believe that God listens to our prayers. I think the only people that listen are ourselves, and that “God” isn’t someone that wants anything from us.

God exists to comfort us, not to strengthen us.