WHY I BELIEVE IN GOD
Grace LaFave
This post is about the reasons for my belief in God, but that doesn’t mean that I am confident I can impress you with my reasons. I am not a master logician or reasoner, but I thought that if I want to write about God, you should hear something about my belief.
I believe in God the way a baby believes in its mother. That is, I have never questioned that God exists, because it is so obvious to me that He does. How could I question a creator when things are, or a divine Giver when good things come to me which I don’t seek? As a Catholic, I believe two things about God: that He is existence itself, and that He is Love. What follows from those two statements is that the substance of Existence itself is Love, and I find that to be true from my own experience. We find in our day-to-day living that Love brings life and joy and children (builds up existence, so to speak) and that all negative things destroy life, whether physical or mental/spiritual (they are negative- they negate).
I don’t at all claim that I came to a spontaneous belief in God. I was taught about God when I was little, and as I grew older I saw from my observations of life and my understanding of reality that He certainly exists. I see that the nature of existence is love, and that is exactly what I was taught about God when I was small, in so many words. What is God but the Absolute, the Unchanging, What IS, the principle of “to be” itself? “I AM WHO AM,” said God to Moses, and that makes sense. We look around, we touch, feel, smell, and taste, and we experience that things are. Do you ever wonder why? You will see that really, nothing has to be here, but things are anyway. You are here anyway. Your hands and eyes are here anyway. That beautiful tree outside your window is here anyway. Someone wanted that to be the case, and made it happen, and it wasn’t you.
I believe that Someone is God. I believe that self-giving Love is God. When I experienced that creative Someone, and experienced that unchanging Love, then a belief in God naturally followed. A religious instinct wrapped onto an experiential reality. I have seen and felt, and so I know.
For a Catholic, that knowledge of God does not remain in the mind. Rather, Catholics believe that the entirely-outside-of-us God incarnated Himself. In-carn-ated. Made Himself into a physical human being, took on human flesh. This post is not about why I am Catholic, only about why I believe in God, so I won’t go into this incarnation of God very much, but the point is that for a person who finds believing in an immaterial Deity difficult, believing in God-made-Man gives that belief a physical reality, and in a way makes the believing a lot easier. I believe in a God who is truly visible to my naked human eyes. He is not far away, and that makes belief easier. Natural even, as believing should be. God does not demand a belief that has no substance, but rather a belief that simply acknowledges the bare, visible, that’s-there reality of things. God is the principle of “to be” itself. Things are, so God is.
Belief in God does require faith. The faith is in the act of saying, okay, reality presents itself in a certain way. I experience real things, and my existence is more than the flighty feelings running through my head all the time. I do not make my own reality, I only accept it. This means that I give up my efforts to make the world in my head the place that I spend most of my time, make it perfect, make myself a god. (You see, there is always a god.) Personally, I find the world in my head to be an anxious and somewhat desperate place. I am not a very good god of even the world in my head. Much better to be a creature in the hands of the real God of the universe than a phony creator of an unreal world. Okay, reality presents itself a certain way, for a reason. I accept that. Yes. The “yes” to reality is faith.
So, I believe in God. I am a created person, maybe even a creative person, but not a Creator-person. God makes the Universe, not me. Things are, and I didn’t put them there, and Someone did, so that Someone is God. I experience Love even when (especially when) it doesn’t come from me and I don’t deserve it. God is that unchanging Love, and I find nothing better or more natural than to believe in Him.
