“Someone said praying isn’t really talking to God.
It’s acknowledging the despair.
To throw yourself on the ground because that’s all you can do.
Not unlike lying with your heart broken, thinking…
“Please, call me.”
“Please, forgive me.”
“Please, take me back.”
And…
I had fucked up.
And I was alone, and crying.
And then, for the first time, I sat down on the floor… and prayed.
I don’t know who I said it to, but I said it out loud,
“Help me, I can’t do this anymore.
I can’t do it alone.
I want a home.
I want a home.”
That is from Sentimental Value. Despair, loneliness and bleakness are at the centre of this film. And most of the time, these kinds of films love to gut-punch you with hope.
Hope is a dangerous thing.
Another line that I am sure wiggles its way into many stories even though it is best said in the classic, c’mon you don’t need me to name it. Because it really is, isn’t it?
What I find more dangerous, though, is the hope that can’t ever be made into an action. Hope that stems from despair. When all your despair can do is hope that there is someone listening.
Maybe that is why I have always found myself a little distant from religion, because I have always considered it to be something that people turn to when they need someone to turn to without actually doing something. But that’s probably just my need for control; when I have hope, I almost desperately want to do something about it.
I hope for an interview with my celebrity crush, then I just spam their DMs, or keep having chance encounters with them across a metropolitan city.
And also because I can’t have more things to be disappointed about.
If my hope were tied to a religion, then I would know another entity that doesn’t really listen. Another reminder that all the joys and sorrows are mine to handle and that nothing really means anything. Then I would have to trust someone else’s plan, and it wouldn’t be my actions that determined the consequence, but someone else’s. I need to know that it was because of something that I am experiencing this. There has to be a reason.
If I had just done this one thing differently, then maybe the timelines that we live in would give me the reality that was the most peaceful of them all. (Best way to understand timelines: Community S3 Ep4).
But when my hope is something also as intangible as god then what do my actions translate to? What could I have done differently if it had never been in my hand at all?
When I feel everything is going wrong, then I want someone to tell me what would be right. Which brings me to-
“I want someone to tell me what to wear in the morning. No, I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like. What to hate. What to rage about. What to listen to. What band to like. What to buy tickets for. What to joke about. What not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in. Who to vote for and who to love and how to…tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong. And I know that’s why people want someone like you in their lives, because you just tell them how to do it. You just tell them what to do and what they’ll get out of the end of it, even though I don’t believe your bullshit and I know that scientifically nothing that I do makes any difference in the end, anyway, I’m still scared. Why am I still scared? So just tell me what to do. Just fucking tell me what to do, Father.”
Like every other basic-ass agnostic, I connect to Fleabag almost as if I am scared to have a personality of my own because if Fleabag can have a small rendezvous with Hot Priest and have a soul-altering connection, then she must be doing something right, right?
And as her therapist said, “Do you want to fuck God?”
Maybe then I can have a greater being in my hand. (just laugh, you know you want to.)
I am an agnostic who is so jealous of those who are able to believe without a need to know if there is even something justifying their belief. Unconditionality, the ability to let go, the consistent hope that doesn’t seem to turn to despair. Religion needs people to let go. Religion becomes a reason when there is nothing reasonable about something.
Everything is beautiful and then suddenly it is not. There is no explanation for the sudden and yet for those who have hope and faith, there will always be a reason, a path they are meant to follow. I’ll cradle my hope and then see myself let it go because there was never any reason to have it in the first place.
After doing everything that could be done, the only realisation is that there is no control. My agnostic brain has to let it go and fall on the floor with loss and then wonder, if there was someone listening, then at least the control could have just gone to them? They could carry this burden.
How can I not be jealous when Hope itself feels like something that I am not privileged to have? I don’t have the mechanism to see that in the path lying ahead, there is something that will make all this heaviness have a purpose.
I also can't stop wondering if that's exactly what faith requires—the ability to let go of what's in front of you for the promise of something you can't see. Hope that the burden of carrying loss is shared by the one looking from above and determining if this is right or wrong.
Liz Bucar wrote about Trevor Noah and Zohran Mamdani’s discussion in Noah’s podcast, where he said-
“One of the things that faith requires of you is the ability to believe that this current state that you are in is not the end. There is a possibility that something can be greater. And even though you cannot see it, you believe that it can happen. It requires literally everything that you just said.”
Liz writes-
“Faith gives you the capacity to believe that this current state isn’t the end” without needing a peer-reviewed study proving the future will be better. It’s not irrationality. It’s a different kind of rationality altogether, one that can juggle complexity and ambiguity and hope all at once without dropping any of them.
Think about that for a second. We’re not talking about blind optimism or toxic positivity here. We’re talking about a cognitive and emotional framework that lets you stare directly at how bad things are while still organising toward how things could be.”
The framework of faith makes the bad things have a future to evolve into something better. It becomes greater than time.
Another film example. The Look of Silence by Joshua Oppenheimer is a documentary about the genocide in Indonesia.
A brutal massacre where the perpetrators continue to rule the land. There are so many families who continue to exist living under the rule of those who mercilessly tortured and killed their loved ones. Sometimes, they know members who were part of these deaths. But they can’t do anything. They are forced to be helpless. They are forced to sit with this pain. They are forced to continue living on. Even if they act on their anger and pain, this turmoil will exist and so they sit with the hope and strongly believe that when those with innocent blood in their hands will face the god then all this pain and suffering will not be in vain.
But for that, they need to believe there is a God. Only then can they let it go and accept that the change and justice they want will happen.
When I first watched this film, I wondered how the mother of the martyred son had so calmly yet emotively explained that she had to believe that God would rectify it. How, after seeing all this destruction, did the people have the strength to believe and look forward?
How did they have the faith to believe that this current state is not the end? Hope is such a dangerous thing.
For them, I want to believe. Because if there is nothing, then that hope was cruel.
She had to give up control and to just give it up was so unbearable that she hoped, believed and screamed it forward to something, although intangible, that was still a reason convincing enough to let it go. She believed it was not in her hands and had to accept what the reality was.
Marx said-
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
For very understandable reasons, this is a much debated sentence. What does this man mean?
The opium was not something simply handed out to the masses, as de Sade had maintained, but something which was self-generated in order to deal with the pain of existing conditions.
The other side speaks of how it is the only way to feel virtuous when there is nothing but desolation.
If there is some life order that can be maintained which is not made by known evil incarnates (like law, capitalism, societal norms etc), then following the rules made by an unknown entity is far more compelling to follow because it can be presumed it comes from better and purer intentions.
When the world is literally on fire and it is well known who all flicked the last matchstick to blow up the world and yet there is a helplessness that is not born out of inaction but just by the design of the world, then how can I not be jealous of people who still hold the belief that there is something better than this?
My hope has a finish line in its despair where it convinces itself that this bleakness is just in my cards and this is how it will be. Religion, however nefarious, made by extremists, continues to shine some light for those who find individual solace there.
Their pain has the hope that this world and this “current state” is not the finish line.
Now, I must state that nothing about any of these paths is easy. I really enjoy the dohas of Kabir and thus-
चिंता ऐसी डाकिनी, काट कलेजा खाए |
वैद बेचारा क्या करे, कहा तक दवा लगाए ||
Which means, “Worry is such a thief that it eats one’s heart. What can a doctor do? How far will his medicine reach?”
None of these paths, ideologies, and beliefs is easy because, at the end of it all, we made these thoughts just to use as a crutch when shit goes downhill. My need for control stems from the believing that all my actions will have consequences so maybe if i do things right then I will finally get it right. Religion makes one believe that if even in the hardest of times, one listens to the word of their God then all the sacrifices will soon be worth it. None of that makes sense to me, my absolute desperation for things to work out or the belief that in sometime god will handle it.
But I can say one thing after researching, reading, talking and writing about this topic for so long that I do think being an agnostic and arguing that just because something can’t be proven, it can’t exist is rather a surface-level argument for something that is so important and necessary for so many.
The Unknown God: Agnostic Essays-
“When is “uncertainty of argument and evidence” about a given matter a decisive reason to be agnostic on that matter? I do not think this is always obvious. In some cases, I suggest that some ethical and prudential principles can guide us in questions of uncertainty. For example, in the case of witnessing what appears to be cruelty to animals, if one does have philosophical uncertainty about the apparent cruelty (perhaps under the influence of Descartes or Wittgenstein) I suggest that one should nonetheless act on the supposition that what appears to be the case, is truly what is occurring.”
Regardless of whether my brain can determine it, my mind has started to hope that, in the burning world, there is someone out there listening. We all want a home. Please.
And as my basic-bitch agnoticism continues to persevere, here is another fabulous quote from Fleabag but from the other side of the argument-
“Love is awful. It’s awful. It’s painful. It’s frightening. It makes you doubt yourself, judge yourself, distance yourself from the other people in your life. It makes you selfish. It makes you creepy, makes you obsessed with your hair, makes you cruel, makes you say and do things you never thought you would do. It’s all any of us want, and it’s hell when we get there. So no wonder it’s something we don’t want to do on our own. I was taught if we’re born with love then life is about choosing the right place to put it. People talk about that a lot, feeling right, when it feels right it’s easy. But I’m not sure that’s true. It takes strength to know what’s right. And love isn’t something that weak people do. Being a romantic takes a hell of a lot of hope. I think what they mean is, when you find somebody that you love, it feels like hope.”
He was talking about God.