Finding God in Gomorrah: The Books That Led Me Toward Faith
Finding God in Gomorrah: The Books That Led Me Toward Faith
By a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures
Dear Henry,
I’ve mentioned the nun who first nudged me toward Catholicism, but I never really told you why I went looking for God in the first place. It’s a long story, longer than I realized until I sat down to write it.
My parents—Team BK—lived lives that were, to put it mildly, outside the boundaries of morality, decency, or any semblance of the religious norms of the community around us. Because of that, I grew up without a framework for goodness, purpose, or even basic rules. I spent my teens and early adulthood stumbling through life without a map.
People say the Big G never gives you a life without also giving you the tools to get through it. It took me a long time to see it, but I did have gifts. I’ve always had a strong sense of direction, I can “see” light in a way that helps with photography, and, more than anything, I love to read. I found my way, quite literally, through books.
Side note: I owe my love of reading, road trips, photography, and maps to my dad, not my biological father, but my mother’s second husband. He taught me to read using road signs and car insignias and gave me the quiet, sturdy gifts of curiosity and exploration.
And so, these are the books that guided me.
Meg Murray felt like a soul-twin to me. Smart, but unable to fit in. Capable, but unable to see her own worth. Her journey to fight the darkness echoed my own early struggles.
This quote about life being a sonnet became the first of my guiding philosophies. It reminded me of something my stepdad used to say: “If you obey the little rules, you can do whatever you want.”
The trouble was, Team BK’s “rules” weren’t real-world rules. I had to learn those the hard way. And so began my lifelong mission to understand the actual rules that govern life.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith
"Suffering is also good; it makes a person rich in character."
From Francie Nolan, I learned that class isn’t just about money. It’s about dignity, education, and the ability to rise above hardship. I also learned that reading uplifting works, Shakespeare, Scripture, and meaningful stories can shape a life.
I didn’t pick up the Bible then. My early experiences with religion were harsh, and Genesis and Exodus felt like a string of condemnations from a God I didn’t need in my life.
Still, I believed in “something," just not the smiting figure of my youth. After The Mists of Avalon, I became convinced God might actually be a woman.
A Road Less Traveled - M. Scott Peck
"Evil then, for the moment, is the force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness."
I picked this up because I romanticized Frost’s poem. Instead, I found a book that held up a mirror to everything in my life that wasn’t working.
This was the first book that told me the truth: volition matters more than intention.
It was where I learned what evil is, and that laziness, not malice, is often its root.
This book was a turning point.
And then came "the accident," a jolt that changed everything. There is nothing like coming back from the dead to rearrange your priorities. The event stripped away the negative, selfish people in our lives, and what remained was small, but real.
Fortunately, small tribes have room for reading.
"Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy -- a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind's fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer."
Say what you will about Rand, her books are long and her philosophy often contentious, but buried in Atlas Shrugged was something I desperately needed: a definition of happiness rooted in purpose, honesty, and the integrity of one’s own mind.
Dagny Taggart, in all her stubborn glory, taught me the beauty of creation, competence, and owning one’s worth.
As A Man Thinketh - James Allen
"Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results; bad thoughts and actions can never produce good results...We understand this law in the natural world, and work with it; but few understand it in the mental and moral world - although its operation there is just as simple and undeviating-and they, therefore do not cooperate with it."
This tiny little booklet is a treasure. From it, I learned two things:
You must cultivate good thoughts.
You must surround yourself with good people.
What the book didn’t mention was how lonely that process is when you have to walk away from everything you’ve ever known. Fish and I separated ourselves from nearly everyone—family included.
It was isolating and necessary.
Slouching Toward Bethlehem - Joan Didion
"Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life - is the source from which self-respect springs."
Didion taught me the true meaning of self-respect, something I wish I’d learned decades earlier. Her essays forced me to reconsider everything I’d been taught about love, forgiveness, feelings, and worth.
Once you begin respecting the cost to yourself, your definition of “worth it” changes drastically.
"Death overshadows you. While you're alive and able, be good."
If Didion taught me self-respect, Marcus Aurelius taught me values, honor, and how to guard the sanctity of my soul. After confronting death, “memento mori” becomes less philosophical and more… familiar.
A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
"The usual approach of science, of constructing a mathematical model, cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?"
During Christmas, there is an M&M commercial where Santa Claus and two M&M men meet by the Christmas tree, and after exclamations of "He does exist!" "They do exist!" Santa and one of the M&M men faint with shock.
This book was my M&M moment.
I’d always believed in “something," I just didn’t know what. Hawking made me see that God was the why behind the universe.
Suddenly, the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology became God’s laws, too. Sin wasn’t an arbitrary punishment but a cause and effect. Even Sodom and Gomorrah stopped looking like wrath and started looking like geology.
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Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
"I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been."
Fish and I had lost most of the people in our lives. Our tribe was just us and our boys. After multiple miracles (see “the accident” and “the pregnancy”), I had no one to share the stories with.
Charlie Gordon’s fear struck home. It told me we needed people, our people.
"No man should be asked to think highly of a master who has robbed him of his liberty."
This book introduced me to a Jesus I had never encountered before. Suddenly, Christianity wasn’t the strange, harsh faith of my childhood—it was something close to Judaism, something gentle, something that connected.
Maybe.
God Is Not Great - Christopher Hitchens
"And it seems possible, moving to the psychological arena, that people can be better off believing in something than in nothing, however untrue that something may be."
This part of the story always makes me laugh.
I had learned discipline, recognized the need for a tribe, realized God was real, and understood that I needed Jesus.
I still didn’t want to go to church.
Church people, in my experience, were weird and judgmental, and I wanted nothing to do with that crowd.
Hitchens, of all people, changed my mind.
His critique of religious people behaving badly mirrored everything I’d seen, but tucked between the snark was an undeniable truth: people thrive when they belong to something bigger than themselves.
Damaged people fall apart without structure and ideology.
And so I decided it didn’t matter if the “blue pill” wasn’t the real world. It was a world I wanted to live in, a world that would finally bring me peace.
After a disastrous call with my mother, I took the leap on Ash Wednesday.
And that’s where the story truly began.
xoxo a.d. elliott
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a.d. elliott is a wanderer, writer, and photographer currently living in Salem, Virginia.
In addition to the travel writings at www.takethebackroads.com, you can also read her book reviews at www.riteoffancy.com and US military biographies at www.everydaypatriot.com
Her online photography gallery can be found at shop.takethebackroads.com
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