Published 2025-10-08
Tags: #life-reflection
I’m an ex-Christian, and I’m starting to pray again. This is the story of why.
The other day, I was listening to God Help The Outcasts from Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, and was surprised when I started crying. These lyrics, in particular, struck a chord:
I don’t know if You can hear me
Or if You’re even there
I don’t know if you would listen
To a gypsy’s prayer
Yes, I know I’m just an outcast
I shouldn’t speak to You
…
I thought we all were the children of God.
God help the outcasts.
Children of God.
But did I still have the right to pray?
Was it intellectually honest to keep activating a mental Rube Goldberg machine that was built for a faith I no longer held?
Was there a way to redefine prayer that didn’t feel like I was simply fooling myself?
It turns out I could. The key wasn’t to change the act of praying, but to change who I was praying to.
First, a little context: I was raised Christian, but I no longer believe in the specifics of the faith. The argument that ultimately led me away was the “Problem of Particularity” — the idea that a truly universal God would be unlikely to show preference for one tribe, in one corner of the world, for millennia. To me, it feels more plausible that the gods of specific religions are man-made constructs, localized to the authors’ particular eras. Thinking of God as something truly universal feels [1] right to me. It points toward a sacred source that belongs to everyone, everywhere, across all of time.
What then is “God” to me at the end of this journey? God, to me, is the universal gratitude sink — a boundless space I can pour gratitude into, without expecting anything to echo back.
With this universal sink to pour my gratitude to, prayer became an act of pure gratitude, and the things I could be grateful for became boundless. This God isn’t bound by rules from a specific time or place. You can be grateful for anything without judging the feeling as right or wrong. Here is a piece of prayer from my walk today that prompted me to write this.
I am grateful that I can pour my gratitude into something boundless — untainted by cultural judgment, untethered from any single time or place.
I am grateful for the ability to love and be attracted to the same sex — and to live in a time and place where I can do so freely.
I am grateful for friends and family on opposing ends of the religious and political spectrum. Each shows me a different way to live a moral life, and I am grateful for the growth that comes from trying to empathize with them all.
I am grateful that prayer, even now, still leaves me with a sense of beauty and awe.
As a Christian, a prayer like this would have felt forbidden. Now, it just feels like peace.
Is the Universal God listening to the prayer of an outcast of Christianity? I don’t know.
But maybe being listened to isn’t the point. Maybe what matters is the quiet gratitude that rises when I gather my wonder and love for the universe, and gently exhale it into spoken words.
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