GOD DIES

"No one ever came to me and said, " your a fool. There isn't such thing as god. Somebody's been stuffing you. It wasn't murder, I think god just died of old age.And when I realize he wasn't anymore. It didn't shock me. It seemed natural and right.

Maybe it's because I was never impressed by a religion. I went to sunday school. And I like the stories of christ and the christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn't believe them. The sunday school teacher talked too much in the way of my grade school teacher used too when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.

Religion was too vague. God was different, he was something real. Something I could feel. But there was only certain times I could feel it. I used to lie between cool, clean sheets. After I'd have my bath. After I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles, and fingernails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face toward the window with the trees in it, and talk to god. " I am clean now, I've never been as clean, I'll never be cleaner. " And somehow it was God. I wasn't sure it was. Just something cool and dark and clean.

That wasn't religon, though. There was too much of the physical about it. I couldn't get that same feeling during the day. With my hands in dirty dish water. And the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the rooftops. And after, a time in at night, the feeling of God didn't last. I began to wonder what the minister meant, when he said, God, the father, sees even the smallest farrow fall. He watches over all his children. That jumbled it all up for me.

But I was sure of one thing, If god were a father with children. that cleaniness I had been feeling wasn't God. So at night, when I went to bed, I am clean, I am sleepy. And then I went to sleep. It didn't keep me from enjoying the cleaness any less. I just knew that god wasn't there. He was a man on a throne in heaven. So he was easy to forget.

Sometimes I found him useful to remember, especially when I lost things that was important. After slamming through the house, panicky and breathless from searching,I could stop in the middle of a room and shut my eyes."Please god, let me find my red hat with blue trimmings." It usually worked. God became a superfather that couldn't spank me. But if I wanted a thing bad enough, he arranged it.

That satisfied me until I began to figure that if god had loved all his children equally, why did he bother with my red hat and let other people lose their mothers and fathers for always? I began to see that he didn't have much to do about hats or people dying or anything. They happened whether he wanted them to or not, and he stayed in heaven and pretended not to notice. I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing, it seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was nothingness.

I felt rather proud that I had found the truth myself, without help from anyone. It puzzled me that other people hadn't found out too. God was gone, we were younger..We had reached past him. Why couldn't they see it? it still puzzles me.