When I told God to just fuck off

AI-assisted translation from the Greek. Greek original

Take off your shoes before entering the mosque. Wash your hands. Bathe on Saturday before going to church on Sunday. Put on your best clothes. Fast for three days before taking communion. Confess first. Stand with your hands joined. Cross yourself before kissing the icon, and again after lighting the candle. Do not speak inside. Do not turn your back on the sanctuary. Pray before eating. Give thanks. Forgive first if you wish to be forgiven. Cleanse your heart. Humble your thoughts. And further afield, in other corners of the world and other centuries, at incomparably greater cost: become worthy, become faithful, become pure, and then the door of paradise will open to you.

None of these commands says what God is. They all say what you must be in order to approach. They are not doctrines; they are antechambers. And their weight does not lie in their strictness—most are actually easy: a bath, a fast, the sign of the cross. It lies in the fact that they install within you a task that never stops: checking. Before bringing anything, you check whether what you carry is acceptable, whether the wording holds up, whether it is allowed. And the checking continues even within prayer, even within silence, because checking has become the very form of approach.

I said it today, not because of anything in particular but because the difficulties do not stop. It was not a prayer, and it was not a moment of reflection. I said it the way you say something when you have reached the end: just fuck off already.

I grew quiet—that was what I had not expected. I could say I regretted it, but that would be a lie: I said it wholeheartedly, all of it. It hurt me to say it, and precisely because it hurt, I know I did not say it into a void. No one is hurt by swearing at something that means nothing to them.

Something happened, and nothing had foretold it. I had resigned myself to everything coming down on me, and nothing came down. Yet something did fall, and what fell was not God. What fell was the condition of entry. Whatever guards the entrance is not guarding God; it is guarding the procedure, and a procedure laid down by religions consists of conditions imposed later by human beings, not by God.

One need only remember whom Christ approached—the very person in whose name all these things were instituted. He sat with tax collectors, people who worked for the occupier and earned more the harder they squeezed their own people. He let a prostitute wash his feet in front of others. He touched a leper, which made him ritually unclean himself. He spoke to a Samaritan woman—that is, someone from a people the Jews considered heretical and contaminating—and drank water from her vessel. Nowhere did he say, cleanse yourself first; whatever was asked was asked after the encounter, never as a condition for it to happen. The conditions are not his. The priesthoods added them later, and added them in his name.

And there is a phrase heard once a year, on the evening of Holy Thursday, at the service of the Twelve Gospels, when the accounts of the Passion are read: why have you forsaken me? It is heard in packed churches, before everyone, and passes without meeting any resistance—because no one present is the one saying it. It is a reading. But let us read it as it stands. It does not ask whether it happened; it states that it happened and demands the reason. It does not say perhaps; it does not say I fear you may have. It says: you have forsaken me. It is an accusation, and an accusation against the one to whom it is addressed.

If any other human being says it, under the terms of every religion, it has a name: blasphemy. For every system makes its first premise that the divine does not abandon; so whoever says that it has abandoned them is not complaining—they are contradicting the very foundation. They are accusing.

And the weightiest thing is not that it was said, but who said it. It was not said by someone who did not know. It was said by the one who had taught what love is and who his father is. This was not a man asking without knowing. It was the one who possessed the facts. So the phrase does not ask for information. It demands an account.

And how were his words interpreted? In two ways, both doing the same thing. The first says that he was not expressing something of his own, but invoking a familiar psalm that begins with those very words and ends in praise; by speaking its opening verse, they say, he was bringing the entire psalm to his listeners' minds, including its happy ending—so he was really expressing trust, not abandonment. The second says that he was speaking as a human being and not as God: it assigns the cry to the part of him permitted to suffer and leaves the other untouched. Neither interpretation says he did not say it. They say he did not mean it that way. They remove the scandal, keep the word—and pass over the obvious: no one chooses verses while dying.

Thus we arrive at the paradox that no catechism names. The same act is blasphemy when performed by a human being and sacred scripture when performed by him. And if someone answers that he had the right, then love has conditions of access—in other words, it becomes precisely what it denies being.

I am not comparing what I said with what he said. I am only saying that they have the same form, and the form is the issue. Both phrases address someone in the second person; neither says “you do not exist,” both say “you.” Both emerge unprocessed: permitted prayer requires you to work on what you have before bringing it, to turn anger into complaint, complaint into petition, and petition into humility—none of that happened here. Both are spoken at the end, not at the beginning; “already” and “why” do the same work: they declare that all permitted forms have been exhausted. Both hurt the one who says them. Both accuse, not the world or other people, but the one they address. And that is precisely where they fit nowhere, because an institution exists by guaranteeing something—here, that God does not abandon—and every one of its functions rests on that guarantee. Whoever brings a complaint about how things are asks something of the institution: consolation, explanation, mediation; and the institution works. But whoever brings an accusation against the guarantee itself asks nothing of it; they challenge the foundation on which it stands. And then the institution has nothing it can do: it cannot vindicate the accusation, because it would collapse; it cannot condemn it, because the same accusation, that exact “you have forsaken me,” is heard within the texts it itself reads as sacred; it cannot even refer it elsewhere, because there is no elsewhere. So this is not a matter of prohibition but of inertia, and inertia always comes out as silence or awkwardness. The only difference between the two phrases is their outward shape: one looks like a question, the other like rejection—but the question expects no answer, and the rejection does not leave.

Some time after saying it, I wondered: if I were in God's place and a being came to me and said just fuck off already, would it bother me? The answer was no. Not out of indifference, not in the sense of “I couldn't care less.” Only someone who expects something in return can take offence—someone who has invested their image or position in the relationship and believes they are owed respect. Someone who expects nothing has nothing that can be withheld from them. Raw speech does not come against you. It comes from someone who has not yet given up; because someone who has given up does not swear, but falls silent.

And then I understood that all the time I had hesitated, I had hesitated out of shame. Not about the word. About coming without first having become something else. And that shame is not mine; it belongs to those who stand at the entrance not to welcome but to weigh and approve, not only the being but its passage too.

I am not suggesting that anyone should swear, and this is neither a method nor a stance. What keeps someone outside is never God; it is the idea that you must become something else in order to approach. And the nakedness I am speaking of is not the nakedness of language. It is nakedness stripped of conditions.