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on day four, i sat here and wrote that i am looking for signs in everything.

i now find this activity to be completely obnoxious.

let me say something about religion because i’ve taken a lot of crap for it lately and would to know that my thoughts on the matter are available to any who care.

my faith is this. i assume that if there is a higher power, it is some sort of embodiment of love (and i say ‘love’ instead of ‘goodness’ because i think that’s less open to interpretation). i believe that love in the general sense does not discriminate and love in the focused sense is not based on commodity, and thus i feel a god must be this way as well.

information is as much a commodity as money or social status, so i can’t believe in a god who will reward you for having been exposed to one particular dogma over another. to me, a god who favors people in one faith community is no more acceptable than a god who loves only chinese people or a god who loves only the rich. this is the source of my disdain for evangelism—i can’t believe you can save a soul by spreading information; i only believe you can save a person with love.

consequently, i believe that religion is only as useful as it is on earth. it is not going to make any difference in the unpromised afterlife if you are buddhist or baptist or deist or nothing. if you find comfort in religion, that’s a gift. maybe this will change one day, but currently i do not and no pep talk is going to change that.

somehow my annoyance by all these reported “signs” results in my being subjected to a lot of spiritual cross-examination. but back to my original gripe.

it appears difficult for others to understand that this talk of signs generally makes me feel less hopeful about things, that though i hope all grieving people find peace however they can, i personally find it very alienating when people explain totally everyday events as my dad at work. my dad wasn’t a sunset. he wasn’t a rainbow. he wasn’t rain or the absence of it. he wasn’t something that happened every day. what’s the chance of this card being a spade? it’s 25 percent, or 0 percent or 100 percent, depending on whether on not you’ve already drawn and looked at the card. the more ridiculous we get about sign spotting, the less i believe i can be a reasonable person and still hope for one. i mean, you want to talk about odds? the odds of unlikely things never happening are terrible.

i was venting to Lizzie about this last night, and we got to talking about how often these “signs” are songs, and how it’s a little silly when the song happens to be some top-40 thing you hear most days you listen to the radio. i wondered for a moment if i could ever see any song as a sign, but it only took a moment to determine that there is only one that might do it, and even that was iffy.

in eighth grade, i went on a confirmation retreat with my catholic education class. on the last night, we all sat on the floor in a candlelit room and were handed letters from our parents filled with words of love and affirmation. despite instructions not to look at each other, we all peeked to see how everyone else was handling this very emotional moment. we’d all known each other since first grade, but never like this, crying happy tears in an age where a kid’s mission in life is to be above anything sentimental. i will never forget this moment.

the song playing as this happened was ‘as i lay me down’ by sophie b. hawkins, and i’m pretty sure i’ve only heard it about five times in my life (in fact, i only know the name/artist thanks to google). on each occasion, it brought me peace during a really crappy time in my life. i no longer go on church retreats, nor do i listen to christian radio, so i expected not to hear it anytime soon. if i heard that song now, i thought, it would be pretty strange. if any song could be a sign, that’s the one i’d have to stop and think about.

i was at the bar not an hour later when it came on, nestled among songs that were actually bar-appropriate, as though it weren’t the fucking weirest thing to ever happen.

i am too emotionally suppressed lately to extrapolate, but i thought i’d share.