I believe in God. I think I fear God, though maybe not enough. I love God, but maybe not more than I am angry at him. As I contemplate the medical bills piling up, the ever increasing number of medications I am put on after every visit to the doctor, and the simple fact that – at only 36 and owing solely to heredity and biology and not through any action or inaction of my own – some of my internal organs have taken it upon themselves to pack it in. I can’t work like I used to. Even if I could afford it, I can’t go out like I used to – I get too tired and basically need to be home by 9 pm or else my exhaustion and crankiness makes me unbearable.

We are all dying, from the moment we are born we begin to die. My own troubles might (with a transplant or some other procedure and some luck) be reversed. But the fact remains that, for now, we are all dying, but I am dying faster than most.

It has brought my closer to God, but it has not made us more intimate. I has made me crankier towards him.

During noon mass, the sermon focused on Saint John of the Cross (Juan de la Cruz), who wrote admirably about the darkness. I was, no doubt, appropriate for my mood, but did not uplift me.

All I can say is, that I am trying. I am reading J.K. Huysman’s later novels about his life after his conversion (though I miss the delicious evil, the sex, and the femme fatales, and the black masses of his earlier works). Tomorrow, I will go to a penitent service and make my confession. I haven’t been in a while, so am going to a church near my work rather than my home parish – I am ashamed to reveal how slack I have been to Father Bill.

My companion is angry, too. She is contemplating a life without me. Or a life with a me who is dehabilitated by illness. Or by the poverty of mounting medical costs and a declining ability to earn the money to pay them off. It is not what she signed up for. And I am sometimes angry with her for feeling that way. No one likes to be weak, to be dependent. To be less than you were just a short time ago.

She also doesn’t like the church. She thought she was attaching herself to a young, atheist intellectual. Not a prematurely weak Catholic. Nominally Buddhist, effectively irreligious, she has not truck with the church’s western version of mysticism. The rituals and requirements seem like mere idolatry to her. And it is not in my nature to prosthelytize, so I find myself unable to properly defend my decision – not in the least because I cannot fully understand it myself. If, as I just stated earlier, I am angry at God, what is the function of keeping to these abstruse and difficult decrees? I feel I can’t explain my anger, but neither can I say that I love without equivocation. So I am silent and weak.