I have tried many ways of reaching God. Prayer, silence, meditation, study, surrender. None of them answered. Over time, belief did not collapse into rejection. It thinned into something quieter. Familiar.
God, as I experience it, is neither absence nor presence in the usual sense. It feels more like a witness. A gaze without intention. Not judging, not comforting, not intervening. Simply there.
That gaze does not feel external.
At times, it feels as though God is looking through me. Through my eyes. Not at me. There is no separation, no sense of being evaluated. Just awareness observing itself, without emotion attached. I have grown used to this feeling. It is here even now, as I write this.
It does not ask anything of me.
It does not offer anything either.
I still ask why, almost every evening. Not because I expect an answer, but because the act of asking remains. A form of address without expectation. A habit that survived belief. In all my years, nothing has replied.
The closest I have come to feeling God mirrored in me has been through loneliness. Not as punishment, and not as meaning. More like recognition. As if the loneliness is not unheard, only unmoved. As if what I feel is not foreign to whatever is watching, but not enough to prompt response.
There has been no intervention. No correction when things broke. No reassurance when effort was not met by outcome, or love by reciprocity. If there is something divine, it has never guided me toward safety or stability. It has never stepped in.
What it has done, if anything, is remain.
Sometimes I wonder if this is what God is when stripped of all human projections. Not love, not justice, not mercy. Just awareness without preference. The endurance of being seen without being met.
That is not comforting.
But it is honest.
And it is the only relationship with God I can truthfully describe.