The Old Man's Epiphany

There was an old man who believed he had suffered enough. He had prayed for release for years. He was certain God would grant it, simply because he had prayed too hard for the prayer to be ignored.

It was ignored. He suffered for more years, and then he died of the suffering.

Just before the end, he had what I can only call a blasphemous epiphany. All great truths begin as blasphemies, Shaw wrote. It was too late for the old man. The beginning had arrived at his ending.

I have been thinking about him for some time, and about the truth he found, and about whether to say it out loud.

Here it is. God is not as involved in our affairs as we have been told. He goes away sometimes, for centuries. The last time He was clearly here, the Second World War was ending, and even that ended only after millions of murders. Maybe it was not God arriving at all. Maybe it was just the humans, finally tired of blood.

After thousands of years, we still cannot keep a good relationship with Him. We are at war. It is the war of pawns against a king. The pawns are punished. The king remains the king. The game continues.

So how do we live, then.

Like this. Live your life. Enjoy it without hurting anyone. Fight your own battles. Focus on what you can actually do. Stop praying for things you are not also willing to walk toward. Work hard and hope for the best.

I know how this goes. Sometimes you turn over in bed and weep for your own fate. Those tears are crocodile tears. You are your own misery, often enough. You did nothing. You let people walk over you and then mourned the footprints.

And on the flip side, none of it really matters. Success, failure, blessing, misery. Everything is comparative. Everything is absurd. Meaningless, like life itself.

You are a human being. Sin defines you as much as virtue does. You are not an angel or a spirit or a robot or God. You are a miscalculated algorithm of neurons, and you will sin. There is no version of you that does not. Do the thing, and ask forgiveness afterward. Religions work that way too.

And how could you have a relationship with God if you have never had one with a person. With parents. With friends. With the one you wanted to touch and were told it was a sin. The one you wanted to kiss. The one you wanted to drink with between the sheets for a slow hungover morning. All of it, as beautiful as the original sin of leaving the heavens in the first place.

Pray if you must. But understand that prayers alone do nothing. Some men kill children and bomb hospitals, and nothing changes while two billion of us pray.

You see my point.

— Hassan