What We Made of Heavens

by Carmen Grad

We have never felt safe in the silence. Not the silence of a still room, nor the deeper, more deafening silence of the universe. So we filled it—with words, with rituals, with imagined voices that sounded like mercy but often spoke like judgment. Faced with the vast, unanswerable mystery of existence, we reached not for one another, but upward, inventing gods to shield us from the terror of our own freedom.

Gods did not create us. We created them—born of our longing and fear.

Religion, in its earliest form, was not a revelation, but a retreat. A refuge for minds unready to carry the weight of choice and the loneliness of consciousness. It was not wisdom that gave rise to sacred texts, but confusion—confusion mistaken for divine clarity by men too tormented by their own minds to admit they were afraid. They called their delusions “the voice of God,” their visions “truth.” And we believed them.

To escape the burden of personal responsibility, we invented fate.
To escape the fear of being alone, we conjured a father figure in the sky. We called it God. Allah. Yahweh.
And like children trying to please a distant parent, we began to shape our lives in service of someone who might never love us back.

But what kind of love must be earned through obedience, punishment, and sacrifice?
What kind of god needs constant reassurance that we are worthy?

The god we created became like us—jealous, vengeful, conditional.
Not because the divine is cruel, but because our own hearts are.
What we worship is not pure love. It’s the reflection of our earliest wounds.

Look closely. No major religion teaches unconditional acceptance. They teach endurance, sacrifice, fear, comparison.
They teach that you are born flawed, and must earn redemption.
They divide, rather than unite. History bears witness: how many wars, genocides, and unspeakable crimes have been committed—and are still being committed—in the name of “God”? And if this god thrives on blood and division, should we not ask: are we still worshipping good? Or have we been serving cruelty all along—dressed in the language of holiness?

Evil wears a human face.
It always has.
And sometimes, it’s your own.

You will see it, if you dare look in the mirror. Not in horror—but with honesty. Behind your eyes, there is envy. There is indifference. There is cruelty, tucked behind politeness. There is the urge to dominate, to judge, to withhold love. It is not a demon. It is you. And if you cannot face it, you cannot rise above it.

We were not born in heaven.
We were born in flesh, in blood, in the pain and warmth of our mothers.
We are not made of light. We are made of cells.
We are not the imagination of the gods—we are the reality of one another.

So why, then, do we give our care to what is unseen while turning away from those who stand before us?

Why do we recite prayers for salvation and ignore the suffering in the room next to ours?

We are the only certainty in this world.
We are the only miracle we can touch.

Yet we recoil from one another. We love in fear, serve in expectation, and offer kindness only in exchange for something in return. We are still terrified children, clinging to ancient myths because we do not trust ourselves to love without instruction.

And what of the commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself”?
How could we, when we’ve been taught to loathe our own reflection?

Self-love is scarce. What we call love is often possession, often fear disguised as care. We hold others tightly not because we see them, but because we’re afraid to be left alone. And so we continue the cycle—offering affection conditionally, rationing compassion, believing love must always be earned.

We don’t know where we came from. We may never know.
Our minds are not built to hold that answer.
But still, we fill the unknown with stories—some tender, some cruel—and cling to them as if they were truth.

But this much we do know:
We are here.
We are real.
All we have is each other.

And for as long as we are alive on this Earth, perhaps the most sacred act is not prayer, but compassion.