No Country of Return
I believed because I was told
the world required a center.
A throne.
A voice.
A hand that arranged suffering
into design.
I accepted the grammar.
Subject: God.
Verb: wills.
Object: history.
It was a clean sentence.
It steadied me.
I lived inside it
as one lives inside a climate.
Then small fractures.
A question here.
An inconsistency there.
Not dramatic.
Only cumulative.
I followed them.
There is a moment
when the structure does not collapse
but clarifies.
You see the joins.
You see the human carpentry.
And once seen,
it cannot be unseen.
I did not rage.
Rage would have implied betrayal.
This was quieter.
A cooling.
The miracles thinned.
The doctrines thickened.
The explanations began to sound
like rehearsals.
I kept returning,
as one returns to a well
long after it has dried,
lowering the bucket
out of habit.
The rope came back light.
I told myself:
faith is doubt endured.
But doubt endured indefinitely
is simply doubt.
I wanted to believe
the way I once believed in gravity.
Unchosen.
Inescapable.
Instead I found I was choosing
again and again
to suspend what I knew.
The body resisted.
There is a particular fatigue
that comes from pretending
certainty.
I mistook that fatigue
for spiritual warfare.
It was cognitive dissonance.
Now I pass the language of creed
as one passes a language once fluent.
I recognize the words.
They no longer bind.
This is the grief.
Not loss of heaven.
Loss of coherence.
The world has no narrator now.
Only events.
And yet, the strange thing:
The hunger remains.
Not for doctrine.
For depth.
For that interior widening
the mystics spoke of
when they stripped God
of attributes
and called it darkness.
I do not despise them.
I despise the demand
that I declare
what I cannot affirm.
If there is a holiness left for me,
it will be this:
refusing to say
I know.
Refusing to kneel
before what collapses
under scrutiny.
This is not triumph.
It is austerity.
I cannot go home
because the home
was made of claims.
And the claims
did not hold.
So I remain here,
without anthem,
without adversary,
without promise.
Only this bare fact:
I would rather stand
in unadorned uncertainty
than rest
in a certainty
I must defend
against my own mind.
