What DO you believe?

We atheists get that question a lot. Most people are incredulous that someone could not believe in God. Atheists are a tiny minority in the world, clutching reason as closely to our breasts as the faithful do God. I think maybe there is a gene that codes for faith or the need to worship, and some few of us are just born without it, like albinos, lacking the deity that allows us to walk in the crowd accepted and comforted.

What do I believe? I believe the unembellished, unambiguous truth is that we float through cold space, unique in the universe, short lived, in various states of denial of the irreducible fact that each of us, in our deaths, is alone.

While belief is as variable as individual human beings, human need is not, and staring at the flint-hard truth I just wrote, I know that what I need is pretty close to what all people, everywhere, have always needed: to feel that I am not alone, that I matter greatly to someone, that my life is not a flicker of candle light in a galaxy of suns.

I need stories that give me hope. A story that ends on a hopeless note is anathema to me, and to all but the most sneering and cynical critics. Hope cannot save anyone. But without it, why would we hang on long enough to see if someone might save us? Or that we can save ourselves.

And I need a warm hand to hold, a hand to squeeze mine when the winds of fate howl outside our door, a brush of lips on my ear and a whispered “everything will be all right.” A soft and lovely lie full of all the kindness and empathy of which we are capable in our best moments. And I will believe.

Real Love

I rarely put up another writers words in my blog posts, but this is perhaps the greatest love poem I have ever read. While we all hope never to be afforded the chance to demonstrate love in such a fashion, even the non-believers of us pray to find love so deep and sacrifice so unconditional.

Quarantine
by Eavan Boland

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking-they were both walking-north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and a woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.