The Face of God
Testimony of a Bleeding Nose
I was baptized the summer I was sixteen. I brought an extra set of clothes to change into afterwards so my atheist parents wouldn’t know how far my new convictions went. I suppose I already had one foot out of the baptism pool because I wanted to keep it a secret. Of course, I think my mom knew anyway– she always seemed to know everything, somehow. Recently, when I told her I was nervous that she’d react negatively to a choice I was making, she said, “There is very little I could ever judge you for.” But I have always been like that, wishing to have secret corners of my life. No matter how little the world cares to look at me, I glare back at it as if it’s scowling.
The baptism happened outside, in a large kiddie pool filled with hose water. A person stood on either side of me, and I kneeled on soft plastic, the water up to my chest. They held my arms and pushed me under, my black t-shirt flying up against the movement. When they pulled me out of the water, my nose started bleeding. It was an omen, I remember thinking, the way my blood fell into sacred water.
A year before I chose to be baptized, I kissed the face of God on a Sunday. The pastor gave a sermon about the purpose of humans and God. He had a diagram of the world, and high up in the clouds of a tall mountain was the light of God that we were all supposedly striving towards. He said that humans were like killer whales who weren’t doing any killing until we had God. What was the point of a killer whale that didn’t kill?
His point came across: humans are miserable without purpose, and by extension without God. I suddenly understood that my life would be forever incomplete if I didn’t embrace this theology. Now, I think his analogy may have been flawed. Why did God want me to be a killer?
But it didn’t matter, because I was fifteen and the theology that the pastor was sharing didn’t need to make sense to mean something. I started crying after the final worship song and he came and sat with me. That’s when he said it. “Margot, you have kissed the face of God. Don’t ever forget it.”
I felt a deep physical sense of bliss and despair and overwhelm that the pastor told me was the presence of God. I knew in that moment what it felt like to believe, and I knew that I could now choose to believe in God. I could no longer say I simply didn’t understand, or that the choice wasn’t available to me, having been raised without spiritual knowledge. I decided I would take that feeling, that emotional spirituality I had unlocked, and use it to create a new religious identity for myself.
I threw myself into an identity of belief and the community of my church and I sought out that feeling of peace again and again. I felt it in worship on Sundays, and when I held my youth pastor’s babies. I felt it when I sunk into a warm bath and knew that I was armored and safe. I spoke to God when I was so depressed that I could hardly see a way forward, and it lifted me out of the darkness.
Now when I joke about my religious phase to friends, I say that I’m always on the verge of falling back in love with Jesus. It’s true that if I got depressed enough, if I lost track of myself completely, I might find myself going to a church. The purpose that saved me once would save me again.
You are supposed to believe that being a Christian is the only path to heaven, or to being saved, but I always had a sense that this wasn’t true. In my mind, anything that makes life more bearable– be it religious practices or the comforts of family and the hobbies we indulge in– will serve the same purpose as Christianity. Jesus saves through the ritual of belief, the community of the church, and the belief that you have touched something greater than yourself.
These days, church spaces still introduce a tinge of that old blissful feeling. My love for churches is probably fueled by my desire to feel anything at all, but something shifts in my body in those spaces. This past summer in Canterbury Cathedral, I asked a friend of mine who grew up Mormon how it felt for her to be in a place like that. “It doesn’t really affect me,” she told me, “our churches weren’t like this.”
Neither were mine, I wanted to tell her. So why did I feel something there? Why does a part of me still insist upon sensing God in these stained glass windows and pews?
I think I still believe in God, even as an atheist. I remember how it felt to believe and that’s not something you forget. What you don’t realize when you have never been religious is that most believers are fighting their doubt, swallowing it down like bile in their throat. Part of the magic of religion is that you are so sure that it’s impossible, yet you have a feeling of certainty, a personal collection of evidence that builds upon itself. Some days I think believing is weak because it’s easier than facing the fact that our lives are meaningless, but sometimes I think it’s really brave. I learned what a “leap of faith” was when I started taking them every Sunday.
I am sick of conversations about whether or not God exists. I don’t think they give us anything. God is real if any one person actively believes he is. God changes and moves the world because there are believers who are acting in his name, so that the concept of God becomes undeniably more powerful than the question of whether the omniscient being exists at all. There are people to do his bidding, and this is what makes him real. God’s values are real because there is a material and emotional impact on our world and individuals, caused by religious people who think they are acting on God’s values. God is in the people, in the societies that interpret the Bible and use its perceived meanings for merciful love or for genocide, and everything in between.
A part of me still yearns for religiosity. I want the world to be sacred and meaningful, even if I’m aware I’m putting that spin on things. The reality is that I can’t force myself to feel God, even in Canterbury Cathedral. Instead, I feel something akin to spiritual peace in strange moments, like on the bus ride home from the cathedral. There I was, trying to decipher the French of the girls sitting next to me when my chest swelled with that same peculiar joy. It is a playful fact of my life that sometimes a bus ride and a good song are better than a hymn in a centuries-old cathedral.
Originally published in Cutler Publication’s “Cipher Magazine,” the Sacred Issue, in March 2024.