Adolescence is strange. Stranger still was the seeping realization that she do not fully believe everything that she has been taught since childhood. She has questions. She has doubts. She has a swarm of thoughts in her head — each more draining than the other. For her, it began with questioning her mortality and ultimately snowballed into questioning divinity. It wasn’t instantaneous of course. She always had questions but questions such as these aren’t exactly welcome. Faith, after all, is supposed to be blind. Her wasn’t. She does not think she had enough faith to fill a thimble. Over the course of her adolescence, she heard friends tell her over and over to have faith or else. Of course they didn’t use those exact words but the implication was the same. Have faith or else…
It was amusing to her at first — an all-knowing, all-seeing entity would be enraged because an insignificant bacteria in this petri dish of a universe did not put forth whatever amount of their soul they could muster on to it.
Up until the age of 17, she was angry. She had a grudge against god. She couldn’t believe the sheer ignorance people put up with. There is so much pain, she often used to think, and I don’t know how to not notice it; so much pain, I can’t keep myself from drowning in it most days and God did nothing. God continues to do nothing in her life. What happened to divine intervention? What happened to the reign of the just? What was once innocent curiosity became fiery rage and in its own time fizzled into quiet desperation. She found herself begging. Not for herself. She was fortunate and privileged enough to not suffer — of course everyone suffers in some way but not to the extent of deterioration (be it physical, psychological or financial).
The same entity that created the light also birthed the concept of darkness (and of all that exists within that darkness). During those times of darkness, people around her prayed. She sighted their muffled sobs and whitened knuckles. All that yelling and pleading and sobbing… for what? She often questioned herself. The divine phone cord is disconnected at the roots. The amount of faith you pour into the receiver doesn’t matter.
She went through bouts of atheism to agnosticism to absolute resignation to her religion. Because what else? Anger is for those who have the energy to entertain it. She did for two years and it left her as a, quite frankly, hollowed version of herself. She wanted to believe. So badly. She came to admire those that had faith. It seemed so easy for them. They had a safety net and what did she have? Bitterness and resentment. It takes its toll on you when you’re raised in an society that heavily ingrains faith and religion in its youth, she often thought.
Her curiosity was not welcome and whatever role other factors played, the blatant disregard set her off on this rollercoaster of a journey faster than anything else. In terms of a solution, she doesn’t think she ever came across one (or even the vague idea of one). The problem had never been concrete. Is she faithless? Is she angry? Is she dissatisfied with the idea of organized religion? Does she believe faith and religion are not mutually exclusive? Maybe all of these. Some are answered easier than others.
She doesn’t know a lot of things but she does know this: she found a silver of faith in myself and she’s holding onto it as hard as she can. Humans wage wars in the name of religion. They argue, they fight, they kill. All in the name of Heaven. But no one entertains the thought that maybe God doesn’t believe in us anymore. Maybe we should.
BY MUHAMMAD SHAHZAIB TAHIR AWAN (PAKISTAN) | CLASS OF 2022
