A/N yeah, I know, it's Christmas, I'm a good few months away from what should be a Lent fic, but oh well. I thought it was a very House like train of thought, and I can see John House being one of those men who would drag his son to church without actually listening to any of the words the preacher says. Well, that, and I made the appointment to get the quote tattooed in aramaic this morning.
He cried out "Eli, Eli, lema svaqthani" which is translated "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Matthew 25:47
*
He didn't believe in God. It was a simple fact of life. Some people decided to put trust into some figure in the sky as though it would be an answer to all of their problems. He knew that it wouldn't. He thought it foolish that people put hope in, believed in, prayed to something that couldn't be definitively proved. He was a man of science, not a man of God. If it couldn't be touched, wasn't tangible, wasn't something that he could see with his own eyes, there was no reason to believe in it. Putting stock in something that was invented to describe what, in times before technology, was indescribable was just outdated.
He wouldn't say it was because he'd lost faith long ago.
His father had been a religious man, if only out of a twisted sense of tradition. He'd been brought up dragged to church against his will every Sunday morning. Out to the chapels on base, out to the local parish churches when they were living somewhere that wasn't controlled by the US Government. He'd been to Sunday School, and had been forced to say his prayers every night before he went to bed, after he brushed his teeth, but before his mother came in to wish him goodnight.
And he'd prayed, once.
He had been taught that if he prayed hard enough, that God would save him. That prayer could fix everything that was broken with his family and with himself. And no matter how hard he tried to be a good little boy, to follow all the rules, and do his best, he still found himself left outside in the cold, alone. He still found himself left alone in the unused doghouse-his father had long ago shot the dog that had lived in it-unable to come inside, for some reason that only his father grasped.
If prayer could move mountains, why couldn't it help him?
As time had moved on, he'd grown more and more cynical towards the idea of a God. If God did exist-and he still believed in God then, it had been ingrained in him from youth, and he believed blindly what his elders told him-it wasn't the kind and loving God that so many made him out to be. No, this was the God of Sodom and Gomorrah, this was the God who turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, and sent his loyal servants to go butcher their sons. This was the God who sent the ten plagues down, and made his chosen ones wander the desert for forty years.
God had a strong hand and an outstretched arm-not unlike his own father.
By the time he had reached high school, he'd long since lost his faith. He went through the motions, because to do otherwise would to be to incite a wrath not unlike the one promised in Revelations. He himself was a part of a system that used death to it's advantage. He was part of a well-oiled machine that broke the first Commandment in the name of peace. Fighting for peace, not unlike fucking for virginity. It seemed so hypocritical to him, and it still did. That his father, a man trained to kill people first, and ask questions later, could possibly walk into a church and act as though he was forgiven.
He knew that if there was a hell, he was going to it, and he didn't care.
After the infarction, one of the local priests had been doing rounds, and had stopped in his room. He knew the man, if only because they had both belonged to Jasna Polana, and there weren't many who were members of TPC-level country clubs. And the priest had told him that this was merely something that God had put in his way to make him a stronger man, something to test his will to live as a human being. That this was supposed to make him a better man for it.
He'd laughed in the reverend's face.
It was then that the last few shreds of faith that had been hanging raggedly to him had finally lost their hold. The faint few thoughts of "what ifs"in the night had finally disappeared, and he knew that he was alone in the world. There was no supreme being to make things right in an afterlife. A supreme being would have never allowed the world to suffer-even if they did decide to break all the rules set forth for them. Genocide, torture, horrible incurable diseases that were inflicted upon newborn infants through no fault of theirs.
Punished for the sins of the fathers.
No, it was far more comforting to believe that he was alone in the world. That if there was a God, he had long since abandoned the world, and left it to it's own devices, to disgusted with what His children had done to themselves to dare try to intervene anymore. God, if he existed, were the parents of the hopeless, homeless drug addict, who had tried to help their child, first kindly and then by force, before simply giving up and acting as though they never existed.
He had forsaken his only son, and the rest of the world with them.
It was more comforting to not believe in a God, because it made everything that much more finite. There was nothing to worry about atoning for before he died. If he were to die tomorrow, he would be fine. He didn't have to worry about heaven or hell. He didn't have to worry about meeting St. Peter outside the pearly gates and saying why he had lost his faith. No, he would simply die, and it would be over with. He didn't have to worry about if it was the pills that killed him or not, because suicide didn't matter-what did he care about sins?
Remember that you are from dust, and to dust you shall return.
But on long lonely December nights, when his neighbors are blaring Christmas music that talks about hope and the idea of being absolved of all one's sins, that one last shred that refuses to let go nags at him, and no matter how hard he tries to remove it, it refuses to be removed. It's there, reminding him that once upon a time, he had believed in God. But he reminds himself that it was not he that stopped believing in God, it was God who had stopped believing in him. It made things much easier that way-to shift the blame onto someone else than it was to blame himself. And on those long nights it's not the Christmas mass he thinks of, but the Good Friday one, and Jesus' last words on the cross, thinking that they are the most fitting description of what every man, woman and child who believed in God should thing.
Eli, Eli, lema svaqthani. My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?