It’s over. Four years of bizarre beauty, ugliness, anger, academics — all tied up in a degree and a picture with an administrator I’m not particularly fond of. It’s surreal. It makes no sense to me, to blink and be here, questioning once again — why? Why? What’s the fucking point of all this, anyway?
Yesterday, my best friend laughed and asked, “But why did God…genocide?” I’m the resident Christiaan in our friend group, the only one who has thus far navigated our collective religious trauma to a strange and unexpected peace. I don’t know how I got here.
I asked what she meant, and they referenced the flood.
Fuck.
That is genocide, huh? I could not have labeled it such on my own. Noah’s Ark, to me, has always been a story of joy, redemption, and animals in pairs. But if I think further on the definition of genocide, I see how a beloved Bible story can be determined a massacre.
There are so many horrors of the Bible I’m still blind to. So many atrocious events I cannot see at face value because they’ve been tied up into nice little stories. They make us feel good in our absurdity.
Absurdity. Perhaps faith is just that.
I don’t know why I trust in God. I don’t know why I still pray, praise, pray open the sacred book, searching for the answers…why…God…genocide. It truly is absurdity.
But my life is empty without it, somehow. So I have to keep searching. And maybe I’ll find I was brainwashed along the way.
But goddamnit, maybe there is meaning here. Maybe there is meaning.
