Faith and Blue Eyes

“Faith is a knowledge within the heart,
beyond the reach of proof.”
~Kahil Gibran

I have friends and family members who are deeply religious. I am not. I'm not even a tiny bit religious. I do not believe in God. At least, I don't believe in God in the way the vast majority of the world conceives a Supreme Being. I lack faith. I always have.

What I believe is that faith is something you either have or you don't. You can't wish for faith and suddenly have it. If that were the case, I would have already been canonized. To my mind, having faith in God is exactly like having blue eyes: some people do, some people don't. I am a brown-eyed atheist.

One would think that as I grew older (and hopefully wiser) I might have discovered at least a kernel of faith lurking somewhere inside me. I haven't.

Living here, watching Daddy die, has convinced me even more thoroughly that God does not, CAN NOT exist. How can there be a God who causes/allows anyone to die this way? How can anyone believe in a Supreme Being that permits a human being as good, loving, and wonderful as my father to be stripped of every shred of dignity, dispossessed of coherent thought, and deprived of the ability to communicate? How can there be a benevolent Father in Heaven that watches blindly as my father becomes incontinent? That refuses to intercede with a tiny bit of peace when Daddy is frightened and confused? How could a God turn a deaf ear on my father's bewilderment with the basic minutiae of daily life? How could a Divine Being watch idly as Daddy gets lost going from the kitchen to the den?

How can an All-Knowing, All-Powerful, Absolute Being allow any human being to suffer this way?

I wish I had faith. Maybe I would then be able to understand this devastating disease that is destroying my father inch by inch, day after day. I am still just a brown-eyed atheist with more rage and pain than I can cope with. Thanks, God.