You sip your coffee and your hair is the
colour of tiger, falling straight and clean from beneath a beanie with a big
woolie pom-pom on top.
“So it goes: By definition God is all
Perfect. Its is more Perfect to exist than not to exist. Therefore God
exists..”
“That is totally stupid.”
“Its not my great theory! I agree. But it’s
called the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God.”
“Well its retarded. Particularly the bit
about it being more perfect to exist than not to exists.’
“Take it up with Adrian Heathcoate!”
“I don’t have time to give some pompus
Epistemology teacher a blow job and a lecture.”
I laugh. It is chilly. You are my atheist
friend. Sometimes I wonder if you are secretly agnostic. Your behaviour
suggests that there is only one life and it must be lived to the fullest. Your
heart suggest that there are many shades of humanity and each of them deserves
love. Your eyes look at the fractured beauty of the world and your pragmatism
makes me feel safe.
You tell me that you are an athiest but I don't believe you.
I know that I believe in a God. I know that God kept my heart beating that
Christmas day, whispered something to Rowan about going home early to find her
on the kitchen floor, pills splayed around a fan of ebony hair.
I know that God woke me up from my mermaid slumber.
I know that God made the summer afternoon
just the right temperature, had the neighbours play Leaving on a Jet Plane the day before I left for Bangladesh. My
mum put her arm around me and suddenly understood why, remembered the day before she left all those years ago.
I know that God made the doctor in Burma
look me in the eye with her creased and wizened face and make a decision, make
some calls.
I know that God appeared in the form of a
big black dude who walked me home one night in Ottawa when Ryan left me drunk
in a bar and some Arab boys wanted to take me to ‘a party’. He didn’t say
anything, my dark angel, except when he watched me open the
front door. “Please take care of yourself. I had a sister once.”
I know that God wanted me to travel and see
the world, made it so easy for me, gave me so many gifts.
I know always makes jokes and makes me laugh at dappled irony of His ways.
I know God is real because of the beautiful
people who have come into my life, including you Miss Non-Believer, the one who
first said out loud over a coffee in the courtyard of the Holme Building at
University of Sydney that the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God is
cr*p.
Yes it is. And when I hear you say it I
know that you are real and you are all the colours of the rainbow and somewhere
inside it paradoxically reminds me that God exists.
