for meta: how about steinbeck's religious beliefs and how they've changed (or haven't)?
@abyssaliis / meta prompts / accepting
he’s raised baptist. sundays are for church and family meals before anything else (but work around the farm can follow in the cooler evenings). he reads the bible front to back by age eleven, and at age twelve he’s baptized by his own decision. he knows the stories, the scriptures, the psalms.
god, to him, is grace and beauty and balance. he sees him in each sun rise and sun set. he sees him in the dew that clings to crops, and the wind that rustles leaves. every delicate or lasting beauty is painstakingly crafted by the hands of god, he knows. even bad things, when they happen, happen so we grow and learn. after all, water’s more refreshing when you’re parched after exhausting work in the fields. you have to know a taste of the bad to appreciate the good.
and things are good. nothing’s ever bad enough for him to question god’s love or grace or warmth.
but then, suddenly, things are.
he’s gifted, but it feels more like a burden—a weight of violence to himself and those around him. it stains his hands red and continues to do so for years, but he wants so badly to hold onto that dream of hope and grace just as tightly as he holds onto the bible kept in the glove compartment of his truck.
and he meets people, too—people who challenge these ideas without ever really trying. there’s fitzgerald, who rises and takes and commands without fear of god or man. there’s lucy, whose life has been nothing but suffering despite her kind, good heart. and then there’s lovecraft, who isn’t human. he’s a being that’s something big and incomprehensible, really, and so separate from the world god created.
and the suffering continues. it continues for him, with more violence and death, and it continues with those around him—allies, strangers, it doesn’t matter.
god exists, he decides, after years of holding tight to that little book. he decides it after nights remembering the way the rolling farmland looks at dawn, and thinking about how another hand feels in his own, and when listening to the sound of nature at night, and when looking up at the stars so far out from a city.
god exists, he has to, but there’s no grace. there’s no hope. there’s no love.
god exists. he created everything. and he left. he doesn’t love; he doesn’t hate. he doesn’t bless; he doesn’t condemn. he just is, without a true care for the creation he’s abandoned upon this earth, and maybe that’s scarier than hating them.
