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Sarah Gunning doesn’t believe in God. Except for when she does.
Everything happens for a reason, her mother tells her when she comes home from college for her father’s funeral. And the thing is, Sarah agrees with her. Her father is dead. The reason is a heart attack, caused by a blockage in his arteries. Everything has a reason. It’s not always fair, and it’s not always a reason within anyone’s control. But it is logical.
Her mother has a different reason for it, of course. God’s time. She says it like it explains everything, and maybe for her it does. But for Sarah, it doesn’t. Why was it God’s time, what was the reason? Why did Jesus have to die for sins to be forgiven? If God created Adam and Eve, who only birthed Cain and Abel, then where did the rest of the people come from?
How can they claim that God is unconditional love, when there are so many conditions?
No, there’s no logic to it. Therefore, it must not be true.
Except.
Except after the funeral, when they’re alone in the church, her mother… breaks down. She collapses in the front pew, covers her face, and sobs harder than Sarah has ever seen her sob. And she’s helpless against it, there’s nothing she can say, because as much as she understands the why’s of her father’s death, it doesn’t change the fact that he’s dead .
But then Monsignor Pruitt arrives. For a long moment he just stares at them, his dark eyes grave and his face solemn. And Sarah worries, a bit, that he’s going to say something well-meaning but utterly worthless, like you’ll see him again in God’s kingdom, or the Lord works in mysterious ways. As if any of that means anything to them right now.
The priest Sarah has known since she was a little girl kneels in front of them. He takes her mother’s hands in both of his. “God is with you, Millie,” he says. “God loves you. And I—I’m here for you. The whole congregation is. We’re all praying for you.”
And against all odds, against all logic, it seems to help. Her mother, anyway.
Sarah goes back to the mainland. She graduates college and applies to med school. She starts a skincare routine and tracks her spending fastidiously. She visits her mother on Crockett Island and makes a point to leave before Sunday. She kisses women and dates some of them. When she breaks up with her longest-term girlfriend to date, she gives herself three days of moping—one for every year they were together—and reads articles. Apparently, extreme sadness can paralyze the left ventricle of the heart. That’s why they call it heartache.
She becomes less interested in the question that plagued her at her father’s funeral. Is God real? That’s a question without a neat answer. Why do people believe in God? Would it be helpful for me to believe in him? That’s a question that feels more helpful, more meaningful. More logical.
People believe in God for all sorts of reasons, all of them with their own internal logic. For her mother, God is comfort and community. For her father, he was mentor and guideline. For people like Bev Keene, he’s the ultimate justification, a ticket of superiority. Sarah doesn’t think she needs any of these things from God, isn’t sure if she can get them with the way she is. So she finds other things to believe in. It should be that simple.
Except.
Except sometimes when she’s with a patient, and things are looking dire, the thought comes unbidden. God, help them. And sometimes, when she’s worked too much overtime and she feels like she’s about to fall over, it comes again. God, help me. And sometimes, when she’s looking over a table at a woman with pretty eyes and a prettier smile, it stings. God, forgive me.
She knows gay people who are able to condemn religion—who are able to hate it with their whole body and soul. And she knows gay people who are able to find comfort in it, in spite of the people who tell them that it isn’t for them, who are truly able to believe in their souls that God loves them for who they are.
Sarah… isn’t sure where she stands on that, for a long time. She is angry, for a long time. The anger is logical. There’s a special kind of trauma, in being told that you’re deserving of an eternity of suffering before you even realize it applies to you. She’s going to have to carry that with her forever, not believing in it the way that she believes in science and coffee and late night conversations with friends, but a belief nonetheless. It’s simply rooted too deep, taught to her too young. She’s not sure she’ll ever be able to forgive that.
But she’s never quite able to make the jump, from anger to hatred. Because when she does… she thinks of her mother in that church. Or her father, praying through a sleepless night. Or her best friend in college, singing hymns as she cleaned. God and religion might not be for her, but it is for the people she loves. She can’t begrudge it entirely, and over time, she’s able to make her peace with that. Emotions have a logical reason, but that doesn’t make them logical. Her own sacred mystery.
Then her mom starts forgetting things. Small things at first, but then bigger things, like where Sarah’s living now or once, horrifyingly, her father’s name. Dementia is caused by nerve damage in the brain, which is caused by aging, which is caused by the passage of time, which is caused, caused, caused —Sarah knows this, knows all of this, knows that there’s no one to blame for it, not really.
Except.
Except her first night back on Crockett Island, after her mother is asleep, she finds herself going to St. Patrick’s. The lights are on, but she doesn’t walk inside. She doesn’t know what she’d do. Burn it all down? She thought she made her peace with anger at God, but this is different. This is her mother.
It’s logical, she tells herself, to feel angry. To feel cheated. To feel afraid. All of these emotions are natural reactions to the situation she finds herself in. It’s logical, too, that she wants to find someone to pin the blame on. She’s losing her mother—the only family she has—and it’s unfair, and cruel, and awful. She’s allowed to have emotions about it.
She wipes tears out of the corners of her eyes. Sniffles. She gets a sense, all at once, that she’s being watched, and she thinks it’s an echo of that old Catholic Guilt—the idea that God can see her, sense her thoughts. But then she looks, really looks, and sees Monsignor Pruitt at the window of his old home, staring at her.
Sarah stares back. It’s too far away to make out his facial expression, but… she can’t imagine it’s a very kind one. She’s the one who left the island, after all. Left the church. And Sarah’s too old to believe that he can see right through her, too logical to believe that he can read her and judge her and hate her for everything that she is.
Except…
Sarah settles into her mother’s house. She becomes the island’s doctor. She takes care of her mother. She goes on first dates that rarely lead to second ones. She takes care of her mother. She reads up on dementia, so she knows what to expect. She takes care of her mother. The days blur together, broken up only by the truly remarkable—that horrible business with Leeza, Erin returning to the island pregnant, Monsignor Pruitt leaving, a younger priest taking his place. And that’s when things really start to change.
There’s logic to everything. Leeza’s recovery, she can understand that. Mistaken diagnoses are rare, but they happen. The fervor that sweeps the island, that makes sense, too. Logical, to discuss miracles when a girl who they said would never walk again takes her first steps toward communion. It’s even logical that others might feel similar relief—the mind is an amazing thing. She chalks her mother’s momentary clarity up to the same thing.
It’s a bit worrisome when talk of miracles gives way to talk of God’s army. She doesn’t like the fervor in the new priest’s voice, the way that he says that people will just know who deserves judgment. Sarah has first-hand experience with that not being true, after all. But even this makes sense, is a script that’s been followed for years and years.
The blood samples bursting into flame, that’s… that’s harder to explain. She stays up until 3 a.m. researching erythropoietic protoporphyria, and tells herself that every disease is a mystery until it isn’t, but her brain still feels like a rubber band stretched to the brink. Especially when her mother doesn’t just start acting younger, but looking younger as well.
Sarah is sincerely considering the possibility that she might be having a psychotic break of some kind when Erin arrives at her home, shell-shocked and horrified. After that, everything happens too quickly for her to process—the massacre at the church, houses going up in flames. She comes to understand, that clinging to the hope of living to see the sunrise isn’t… isn’t logical. She makes her peace with that, and she chooses to believe that the kids made it, at least. Her own version of faith.
And then she’s in the church, and that priest is there, and he’s telling her that he’s proud of her and he’s been so proud of her and he wishes they’d gotten to know each other. The revelation changes so much, and she wants to sit with it, wants to digest it, wants to let it recontextualize so many little moments of her life, wants to fit it in with everything she knows of the world.
But she doesn’t have time. And there’s a reason for that, too. The reason is a gun, wielded by a man who thinks he’s doing the right thing, following an internal logic of his own.
Dying doesn’t hurt as badly as she feared. Adrenaline, Sarah assumes—she hasn’t done too much research on it, and she supposes she won’t have time, now. She spits out the priest’s “gift,” because that flies in the face of everything logical, everything that should be. As she fades, she makes her peace with the life she led. She doesn’t pray for anything to come after, and she doesn’t fear judgment, either.
Except.
Except.
Exc…