The Christian God is Not Dead

By Sarah Woods

I found a black bear skeleton earlier this summer on the shore and shallows of the Garcia River. The first bone I saw was the skull and I picked it up immediately. Once I had taken in the find, I looked back on the ground and saw a jaw bone and a piece of spine. As I widened by gaze, I saw rib bones, a femur, and a rib cage littering a space about the size of a fairy ring. I was out walking with my dog at the mouth of the river just inland from Manchester Beach, under the bluffs surrounding Point Arena Lighthouse. It is a breathtakingly beautiful spot where I can be for hours on end and not see another person but watch flocks of starlings, cormorants, pelicans, and gulls soar and glide over crashing waves, sea grasses wave in the winds, deer bounce in the dunes, and seals play in the surf.

Unlike younger me, I did not react with discomfort at the sight of bones. As a young woman touring catacombs in Peru and Paris, I had felt alarm and suspicion about the psyches of religious collectives that painstakingly decorate their basement with human brain shells. I still do.

At one point in my ministerial training, Rev. Stanley, the congregational minister who ordained me said, “Sarah, you have not yet made peace with death.” It was not an entirely fair critique. I had told him I did not want to be cremated. The thought of my body being engulfed in flames terrified me. Even if I were no longer in my body, I might still be attached to it after leaving and I suspected then, as I do now, that I will not want to watch the…