God as Sanctuary: A Reflection on Recent Life Events

My mother often criticizes my interpretation of the Bible, but she’s been doing it an awful amount this week. She doesn’t like that I feel that it’s important for me to voice my opinion. I’m a child, she says. I’m her child, so while I’m technically an adult, my opinions are still suppressed. The excuse is always that I’m breaking one of the commandments by sharing a negative opinion of her parenting technique or on anything relating to her or my (absent) father, really.

This leads her to fear-monger. I’ve heard so many times this week that I’m going to end up alone in this world, but I already knew that. All of us know that already. I suppose some people want their family with them at their deathbed. Some people want to feel like they had a hearty amount of friendships during their last breath. Some people want the assumed security of children that will take care of them in their old age. But doesn’t this all stem from the fear that...we might not have that? And we don’t. We could, but it’s uncertain. It’s odd to me that someone would assume the opposite.

But my apparent acceptance of this is also an issue. I often retort that I’m never really alone. That I always have God, because throughout my whole life. I have had him. I have had someone to look up to, talk to, feel comfort in, feel safety in.

I never really cared if all my atheist friends and mentors looked down on this. I never really cared when my Catholic family looked down on the idea that I would use God to, for lack of better phrasing, my advantage.

The idea that I’d even consider God as my company, when responding to the idea that I’ll die lonely and unfulfilled, is always admonished. It astounds me, but I understand it makes people uncomfortable. To have someone so secure in the belief of something. To be so solid in their views, or rather, to be so solid in feeling comfortable enough to share these views. My views change so often on my religious practices, my politics, my choices, but what I don’t falter on is being unapologetic and that includes my connection to faith.

I’m not practicing incorrectly, I’m practicing in a way that doesn’t fit my mother’s outlook for who I should be and how I should feel. I shouldn’t be content with God as my only company if that should happen to be the case in the future, and as it seems, it likely will be. I shouldn’t be as calm of a person as I am if I were practicing correctly, and I’m not sure how this was an argument, but I can only write it off as anger speaking rather than logic. I should be more grateful about the life I have, even though I am quite grateful, just not for the things she’d like me to be grateful about. And I can’t do anything, and this seeming apathy just boils the blood more.

This week and really I guess my life experience that all built up to these heated arguments made me decide that I am going to cut off the toxicity in my life, and that unfortunately includes my mother, so maybe she was right, maybe I’ll look back and think that I was practicing incorrectly, but for now, this feels right, and I know in my heart that God is here with me. I don’t know how He feels, but he’s there, and she can’t change that.