Image credit: Photo by xamad on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

One summer night many years ago, I was standing on my parents' back porch talking to an old friend -- old love -- on the phone. The air was warm and moist in a way that wrapped around me like a blanket, and I could smell the ocean somewhere off out of sight. There were fireflies flickering among the trees, hovering lazily like so many winking earthbound stars. We were talking about God, or rather our mutual lack of belief in God. But as I listened to his voice and looked out into the soft, warm darkness, I thought, "But I am looking into the face of God right now." And those two thoughts -- that I didn't believe in the God I knew from church, and that I was touching something Divine at that moment -- didn't seem contradictory.

When I was in college and would get depressed, I'd go to one of two places. During the daytime, I go to the Geology department, and I'd stare at the rocks and the fossils and the skulls. At night, when the Geology building was locked up and the stars were out, I'd walk to the middle of an abandoned athletic field and look up at the sky. I'd think about how old the Earth was and how short my lifetime was and how very small I was (and by extension, how small my problems were). I'd think about how long the starlight had traveled to get to me or who that person whose skull sat on a shelf in the Geology building used to be. And that would comfort me somehow.

My father-in-law was a jazz musician and one day he and my husband were talking about how certain music could move them to someplace outside themselves, somewhere closer (though they were both atheists) to what they imagined God might be. My father-in-law asked me what music moved me, and I told him none. Music doesn't move me. And I could see he was alarmed and appalled that my life lacked that connection to the Divine, so I assured him that while music didn't take me there, words do. When I read something beautiful, when I write something that I know works, I feel the way I did on that summer night or on days staring at skulls or nights looking at the stars: connected to something larger than myself.

When I first discovered my husband's addiction, I was in the deepest despair I've ever felt in my life. I knew I needed support, and that this was one of those times in life that I was supposed to start going back to church to find God, but I didn't want or need God in my life. After all, I said I still didn't believe in God: not the God I grew up with anyway.

Yet five years later, my focus for the year is God. And when people ask me where they can find recovery -- from addiction or grief or angst -- without God, I feel the panic I imagine my father-in-law must have felt when I said music didn't move me. For me, the secret to overcoming that despair and fear wasn't in looking up divorce law or learning about addiction or finding a job or anything else, but in the connection of fireflies and bones and ancient starlight and dogeared pages and the sound of a friend's voice refuting the existence of God. I may not yet have needed religion or the God of my childhood, but I can't imagine having found support or peace or healing without that feeling of being transported and connected: without my God.