✨ I Believe in the Stars More Than I Believe in God
“I believe in the stars more than I believe in God. If anything, the stars are God, and they write the universe.”
Written by Rebecca M. Bell
Catholic Roots, Crooked Questions
I grew up Catholic, the kind of childhood where prayers were memorized like multiplication tables, and faith wasn’t so much questioned as recited. God was supposed to live in the wafer, the incense, the hands folded properly on the pew. I was told the heavens declared His glory, but when I looked up at night, all I saw were a few scattered dots, drowned out by city lights. The rituals were tidy. The sky was not.
The Whitman Effect
Then came college, and with it the kind of double exposure that can shatter and rebuild your worldview. I was sitting in American Literature to 1860 with Walt Whitman on my desk and Introduction to Philosophy in my backpack. Whitman sang the body electric, Emerson dared to call nature itself divine, and suddenly the rigid God of my childhood looked suspiciously small.
Whitman once wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Pantheism gave me permission to contain multitudes too— questions, doubts, wonder— and to call all of them holy.
