God, Are You There?

Connecting With God

The trajectory of my life is toward God. Now. But it wasn’t always. My first few decades were spent racing in the opposite direction.

I was raised a practical atheist, by which I mean God was simply not a topic in our home. When, at around age 10 or 11, I asked Dad about the meaning of life, he handed me an illustrated copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species. I thumbed through the Victorian etchings, photos of Galapagos tortoises, and artist’s conceptions of hairy proto-humans. But what about this feeling I have that there’s something more? I wondered.Freud had an answer: “Mass neurosis.” But strangely, that answer didn’t satisfy my spiritual hunger. No doubt because, like the rest of the human race, I was neurotic.

So I asked Mom, who’d been raised vaguely Catholic. She didn’t own a Bible, but gave me her faded Sunday…