I'm tryin hard to reach you.

When I was a little kid, I had a lot of nightmares.  It's an active imagination not a response to abuse or everyday trauma.  My mother would always come to my room if she heard me crying or calling for her.  After calming me down, she would tell me that if I was still scared, I should pray to Jehovah.

But she wouldn't just say it; she would say it while pointing to the corner of my bedroom ceiling.  For many years, I thought God lived in my room.  In the corner of my ceiling.

What's he doing up there, I wondered.  I couldn't see anything or anyone up there but after she'd leave, I'd talk to the ceiling. 

"Jehovah...um...please don't, um, make me have any more bad dreams, ok?  Also, I don't like all the centipedes in our basement.  They are really, really scary.  My brother is a real buttwipe and could you, um, make him be nicer?  Or maybe send him away.  That might be easier.  Just for a little while."  And then, the line  I had been taught over and over: "I ask you through you son, Christ Jesus.  Amen."  But it came out more like, "Iaskyouthroughyoursonchrissjesusamen."   

Then I'd stare at the ceiling for a long time. 

My image of God was very adult and tidy.  He only existed from the shoulders down, wore a white button up shirt and a black tie.  He had brown hair that was parted on the side.  He was usually smiling but his face wasn't clear; it was like a muddy collage of all the middle aged white men I'd seen.  God was definitely white.  Everyone was white.  When I finally saw the status quo Christian representation of God, with a long white beard, robes and sandals, I was totally confused.  Wasn't God someone we were supposed to be able to talk to?  I wouldn't talk to some crazy old man in robes.  I was taught not to.  Wasn't everyone?

I had no earthly idea what Jesus looked like.  My mother used to say her brother looked like Jesus.  My uncle Mark had long dark hair and a beard, wore glasses and played the guitar.  I liked him, so I was comfortable with that image. 

Insatiably curious about everything, I routinely followed my mother around and asked her a million questions.  We were Jehovah's Witnesses and I had been told that "any minute now", Armageddon would happen and if we knew The Truth, we would survive and live forever on a paradise Earth.  I needed to know exactly what that meant.

"Will it still hurt when you comb my hair in the New System?  Will I be able to go to college?  Are my friends going to make it through Armageddon?  Will there be centipedes in the New System?"

No one could give me answers to my questions in terms I could understand.  Around 15, I discovered the joy of doing things I wasn't supposed to do.  There was no way I could reconcile my need to do naughty things with God.  So, in a very dramatic moment, I told my mother that  I was no longer a Jehovah's Witness and religion was stupid and I wasn't going to eat meat anymore.  It was a very dramatic moment indeed; I think I even ran out of the house in my combat boots, jumped in the back seat of my friends Citation and went to smoke weed in the woods in Plymouth.  

But when I take all that other stuff out of the equation--my parents and their choices for me and our family; what "the elders" told me to do; what Bible told me to do--then there's just me, a kid, talking to God, who I believed lived in the corner of my bedroom ceiling, asking him to comfort me.  Isn't that what the core of what God is supposed to be about?  I'm genuinely asking; I have no answers.  I have no idea what I believe.  But I do believe that the concept of God has been desecrated, dishonored, muted and muddied by man.  That's the part I can't deal with.  If I say I have a relationship with God, it needs to be on someone else's terms.   Why? 

Buddha said, "Never believe anything that doesn't jive with who you are."  It goes against everything I am and everything I believe to qualify who is a saint and who is a sinner based on archaic rules that make no sense to me and that I cannot reconcile my soul with.  No way.  Can't do it.

Call me a skeptic, tell me I'm lost, tell me I have no faith.  But here's the thing: if I choose to, I can call my God anytime, into the corner of any room and it would be enough.