Who Needs God?

My Journey from Belief to “What Is”

You are reading Shy Guy Meets the Buddha: Reflections on Work, Love, and Nature by Don Boivin. Thank you for being here. 🙏

Chapel in Keauhou, Hawaii. Photo by author

I have seldom been consumed by the desperate need to believe in God. Rather, that belief was handed down to me by my Catholic family and community, and I took it for granted, at least for the first eighteen years of my life. But that’s not to say I was never desperate. The consistent thread of my days, until rather recently, was the search for meaning, value, and some sort of affinity with at least a few sensitive, kind, empathetic people (a category that seemed absent in my formative world, where scarcity and anxiety often trumped love). Let me just put it bluntly; through most of my life, regardless of the big family, the marriage, the children, I was fucking lonely.

When I was a freshman in college, I was feeling it especially. My roommate happened to be a born-again Christian. He was a nice young man and I told him it was okay if he held his bible-study meetings in our room as long as he didn’t try to push his beliefs on me. He agreed, but that led to my giving ear to a lot of Jesus talk.

The bullying I had endured in high school had continued in college; I had taken a student job cleaning the dorm bathrooms and a group of boys thought it would be funny to break my mops, scatter my cleaning supplies, and leave extra special messes in the sinks and toilets just for me.

On my worst day, I stumbled through the snow to the school’s chapel. On my knees, alone and in tears, I begged the god I was beginning to doubt for some comfort. Of course, I had Jesus on my mind, considering my new friend group, and through my blubbering I thought I heard a soft, kind voice say, “My dear son, I love you.” I convulsed with fresh sobs, and that felt cathartic, but the feeling didn’t last. Within days, I understood that my own mind had turned my frenzied despair into the loving words I needed to hear. (Some will insist that I heard God and turned away, but in the forty years since that day I have not heard another word from him.)

I really wanted to be born again, like my roommate, to walk in the company of this benevolent, doting father figure, but it just wasn’t happening. My sense of logic and my need for evidence were too strong.* I’ve always had this deep respect for honesty and truth, this compulsion to separate what I need from what is. Not only did I respect that whatever truth was, it lay outside of my own interpretations, understandings, and desires (in the words of the singer/songwriter Greg Brown, “Life ain’t what you think it is, it’s just what it is”), but I actually suspected that if I could begin to discern this objective truth in some way, rather than finding it to be meaningless and depressing, it would be far more satisfying than any temporary ecstasy an unsubstantiated belief in God could provide. Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, seems to agree: “I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day,” he once wrote.

I knew that discovering the real truth (or accepting that I could never know it) would require the courage to face the consequences, even if that included feelings of hopelessness and disappointment. I was willing; I didn’t want comfort as much as I wanted facts. And yet, again, I also had this faint spark of a suspicion that it was actually humanity’s tendency to ignore the laws of nature in favor of the supernatural that was at the heart of much of the world’s suffering; not just the superiority, the judgement, the wars, but the seemingly ubiquitous personal angst—the inner suffering.

I turned to books first, then to mindfulness and meditation. And please note that my approach to a mindfulness practice was one of non-expectation. The point was not to find an alternative god, to achieve enlightenment or nirvana or any of that silly nonsense, nor was it even to be more loving, forgiving, and compassionate, but only to be as present and receptive as possible to what is.

Well, it turns out that what is—meaning the moment-by-moment world we perceive, and this aliveness we experience, even if we don’t completely understand it—is pretty darn amazing when you uncouple it from fear and desire, expectation and regret. Here is the geneticist Paul Nurse, upon presenting the 2006 Lewis Thomas Prize for Science Writing to the biologist Richard Dawkins:

“...rather than diminishing the myriad beauties of the universe and extinguishing wonderment at its mysteries, science reveals truths that are yet more awe-inspiring than the mysteries they solve.”

This has been my experience since choosing to sit with the “science” of direct observation, unbiased by needs, wants, expectations, judgements, preconceived notions, and conditioned beliefs and views. Life, though at times terrifying, is also deeply beautiful, as it is. It’s enough, as it is.

I understand that there will always be more to life and existence that I don’t know than that I do, but that is okay with me. It has to be okay, doesn’t it?

I recently wrote about how watching a decomposing animal carcass one summer shifted my understanding of death (essay). I not only realized, by direct observation, that when we die, we become everything, but I exalted in it. I experienced acutely the wonder, the privilege, the wholeness of being an entity, or a composite of entities, that transforms but never ceases to exist. I felt intimately connected to the eternal past and the eternal future and the entire material world. That is a religious experience, to use a term I generally avoid. I had found my god—in nature and in myself—and it was enough.

It is enough.

DB 🙏💚

*”Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if he died and found himself confronted by God, demanding to know why Russell had not believed in him. His reply: ‘Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.’” (quoted from The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins)

Don Boivin is a writer and carpenter living in Hyannis, Massachusetts.

For more about my first attempt at college in the Adirondacks, my bubbly “born again” roommate, the chapel experience, and a funny but discredited Christian comedian, here is an earlier essay: