Sometimes the most profound truths emerge not from finding answers, but from discovering that our questions were born from the wrong assumptions entirely.
I spent the first eighteen years of my life on my knees, begging a silent heaven for signs that I mattered. Small prayers, mostly—the desperate whispers of a child trying to survive in a world that felt designed to break them. Please make them stop hurting me. Please let someone see. Please just let me know you’re there.
The silence was so complete it felt like mockery.
In the Kingdom Hall where I grew up, we were taught that Jehovah heard every prayer, that he cared about every sparrow that fell. But I wasn’t a sparrow—I was a child drowning in plain sight, and the sky remained empty of rescue. Night after night, I would lie awake wondering what was wrong with me that even God couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge my existence.
Was I too broken? Too sinful? Too small to matter to the infinite?
The questions ate at me like acid, dissolving whatever faith I’d been taught to build my life upon. If God was real and chose not to help, he was cruel. If he was real and couldn’t help, he was powerless. If he wasn’t real at all, then everything I’d been taught was a lie designed to keep me compliant while those in power did whatever they pleased with my childhood.
By the time I escaped that organization, I had settled on the third option. God was a fairy tale invented by adults to make children behave and trauma survivors grateful for their suffering. Prayer was performance, faith was delusion, and silence was exactly what you’d expect from a universe that contained no one listening.
I thought I had figured it all out. I thought my pain had taught me the ultimate truth: we are alone.
But even after losing my faith, even after deconstructing every belief I’d ever held sacred, some stubborn part of me kept reaching toward something beyond the visible world. Maybe it was wishful thinking. Maybe it was conditioning too deep to root out. Or maybe—and this thought both terrified and comforted me—maybe the questions I’d been asking were wrong from the beginning.
The White Crows We Ignore
Years later, while researching life after death and the supernatural in our world, I encountered Jeffrey Mishlove’s work on postmortem survival of consciousness. In his research, he references William James’s famous observation:
“You only need to produce one white crow to prove that not all crows are black.”
Just one. A single piece of evidence that contradicts the absolute claim.
Mishlove documents what he calls humanity’s “white crows”—the extensive evidence for consciousness surviving physical death that mainstream science largely ignores. Near-death experiences with verifiable details. Mediums providing information they couldn’t possibly know. Reincarnation cases with documented historical accuracy. Communication from the deceased that transforms entire families.
One white crow is all it takes to prove that our materialist assumptions might be incomplete.
But here’s what struck me about his research: most people, when confronted with white crows, look away. Even when presented with compelling evidence that consciousness might persist beyond death, that there might be more to existence than the narrow band of reality we can measure, we often choose comfortable skepticism over uncomfortable possibility.
Why? Because if there’s more—if consciousness survives, if there are realms beyond this one, if something vast and aware might actually exist—then we have to grapple with the original question that haunted our childhoods: Why doesn’t it intervene? Why doesn’t it answer? Why does it let us suffer?
The skeptic’s universe is cruel but simple: we suffer because suffering is random, meaningless, inevitable. There’s no one to blame, no one to rage at, no hope for intervention. It’s devastating but clean.
A universe that contains consciousness beyond death, potentially vast intelligences aware of our pain, forces that could intervene but choose not to—that’s far more difficult to accept. It brings back all the childhood questions about divine indifference and abandonment, but with the added weight of potential reality.
When Fiction Becomes Philosophy
I was deep into writing “Blood of the Wild Gods: The Lost Histories” when the idea struck me like lightning. I had been crafting the character of Tanneus G’Raja, a scholar obsessed with unearthing the truths of the gods that went silent. His story was supposed to explore how knowledge and truth can be dangerous—how some discoveries destroy the seeker rather than enlighten them. But as I wrote his final testament, something shifted.
What if the gods’ silence wasn’t abandonment? What if it wasn’t indifference? What if it was the greatest act of love they were capable of?
From Tanneus’s final writings:
“The gods are not absent. They are not deaf. They are not indifferent to our suffering. They are right here—closer than our own breath, nearer than our heartbeat—holding themselves back with a restraint so absolute it looks like abandonment. Every moment of every day, they love us enough to remain silent. To stand at the very edge of intervention and choose, again and again and again, not to speak.”
As I wrote those words, I felt something fundamental shift in my understanding. Not my belief—I’m still not sure what I believe about divine existence. But my framework for approaching the question changed entirely.
“Because they learned—through apocalypse, through the unmaking of stars, through watching reality itself crack beneath the weight of their good intentions—that divine words reshape existence. That every blessing becomes a curse in time. That every gift, no matter how lovingly given, becomes a weapon in mortal hands. That love expressed directly from the infinite to the finite doesn’t elevate; it incinerates.”
Suddenly, the silence that had tortured me as a child took on a different quality. What if unanswered prayers weren’t evidence of divine cruelty, but divine restraint? What if the very thing I had begged for—direct divine intervention—was exactly what would have destroyed me?
The Catastrophe of Answered Prayers
Consider what happens when prayers are answered in the stories we tell. When gods intervene directly, when divine will reshapes mortal reality, when infinite power touches finite lives. In mythology, folklore, even modern fiction, the pattern repeats: divine gifts become curses, blessed individuals become isolated from ordinary humanity, direct contact with the infinite tends to annihilate rather than elevate.
Think of King Midas, whose granted wish became his torment. Of the mortals who glimpsed gods in their true forms and were destroyed by the sight. Of every fairy tale where getting exactly what you asked for turns out to be the worst possible outcome.
What if these stories aren’t just cautionary tales about being careful what you wish for? What if they’re cultural memories of a time when the divine was more present, more responsive—and when that responsiveness nearly destroyed everything?
In my fantasy world, I imagined the Wild Gods as beings who loved mortals so completely they couldn’t bear to see them suffer. They didn’t prevent every tragedy, but they tried. They intervened where they could, answered prayers when possible, reached out with fierce protective love. And in doing so, they broke the fundamental structures that allow mortality to exist at all. Their love became a cosmic catastrophe that required other gods to choose between letting love destroy creation or stopping love to preserve it.
“The Wild Gods were everything I believed divinity should be. Compassionate. Present. Active in mortal affairs. They walked among us, loved us, protected us with fierce devotion. They gave us everything I spent my life insisting we deserved. And they destroyed the world with their kindness.”
Writing this fictional cosmology recontextualized every unanswered prayer of my childhood. What if the silence hadn’t been cruelty? What if it had been the most profound mercy possible—the mercy of restraint from beings whose very attention could unmake the delicate structures that allow mortal consciousness to exist?
Writing Blood of the Wild Gods: The Lost Histories
I didn’t set out to write a book about divine silence when I began crafting Blood of the Wild Gods: The Lost Histories. I thought I was creating an anthology of interconnected mythologies—six stories that could stand alone while weaving together a larger picture of meaning. But as I dug deeper into these fictional histories, I realized I was excavating something much more personal: my own questions about love, power, and the terrible price of caring too much.
The first story, “Seven Days of Sun,” explores love that transcends death itself—but asks what happens when eternal devotion becomes eternal suffering. Elodias and Senia’s curse forces us to confront whether some loves are too powerful to survive, whether the very intensity that makes love beautiful also makes it destructive.
“The Weaver of Sorrows” delves into the psychology of obsession disguised as devotion. Malritha’s jealousy reveals how easily love can transform into possession, how the need to be chosen can corrupt even divine hearts. It’s every stalker’s justification written in cosmic terms—the terrifying moment when “I love you” becomes “you belong to me.”
In “The God Who Wept,” Thainos searches for one human untouched by cruelty and discovers something devastating: perhaps innocence was never the point. Perhaps the capacity for both good and evil is what makes consciousness meaningful. Perhaps we were always meant to be complicated, contradictory, beautifully flawed.
“The Sin of Mercy” examines impossible choices through Azrael’s story—a god cast from heaven for choosing compassion over divine law. When being good requires actions that damn you, when mercy becomes a sin, how do you navigate a universe where every choice has unbearable consequences?
“The Song of Blood and Stone” exposes how wealth can literally rewrite history. Princess Jade’s murder of two lovers becomes heroic myth through strategic bribes and commissioned murals. It’s every cover-up, every powerful person who bought their way out of accountability, every truth buried beneath enough gold to make lies seem noble.
And finally, “The Divine War” reveals why the gods fell silent—not from indifference, but from love so profound they learned that speaking might destroy everything they sought to protect.
I didn’t realize it while writing, but I was becoming Tanneus—the fictional historian whose research gradually unmade his faith in easy answers. The deeper I dug into these philosophical questions, the more my own comfortable certainties began to unravel. Each story forced me to confront truths most people are too scared to examine: that love can be destruction, that good intentions can damn, that power corrupts even the divine, that history belongs to whoever has the gold to buy it.
Like Tanneus, I found myself undone by the weight of understanding. The more I explored the darker implications of consciousness, love, and power, the more I realized that fantasy wasn’t escape from reality—it was the only safe space to examine truths too dangerous for direct confrontation. In mythology, we can ask the questions that would shatter us in daylight: What if free will is a curse? What if love is the enemy of peace? What if the price of consciousness is eternal suffering?
Blood of the Wild Gods became my way of processing the philosophical devastation of growing up—of recognizing that the universe is neither kind nor cruel, but vast and strange and utterly indifferent to our need for meaning. Yet somehow, in that indifference, there’s a terrible freedom. If the universe doesn’t care about our choices, then every act of love, every moment of compassion, every decision to choose kindness over cruelty becomes an act of cosmic rebellion.
We create meaning in a meaningless void. We love in spite of loss. We hope despite evidence. And maybe—just maybe—that’s miracle enough.
If you’re curious to explore these dark mythologies yourself, you can read more about Blood of the Wild Gods: The Lost Histories and dive into the individual tales that forced me to confront the most uncomfortable questions about love, power, innocence, and the price of divine caring.
Living with Sacred Questions
The silence that once felt like abandonment now feels like space—room to grow, to question, to develop my own relationship with mystery. The unanswered prayers of my childhood weren’t failures of cosmic communication; they were invitations to develop the strength to face uncertainty with dignity.
Perhaps the most radical act of faith isn’t demanding that the universe answer our prayers, but trusting that our questions themselves have value. That the searching matters more than the finding. That consciousness capable of wonder is already more miraculous than any intervention could be.
In that silence, I’ve found something I never expected: a love so vast it knows when to stay hidden, so wise it appears absent, so profound it chooses distance over destruction. Not the omnipotent God of my childhood religion, but something infinitely more mysterious—the possibility that we are held by forces beyond our understanding, loved by a cosmos that cares enough to let us become who we’re meant to be without interference.
As Tanneus writes in his final testament:
“The gods’ silence is their greatest gift. Pray they never love us enough to speak again.”
The white crows are everywhere once you learn to see them. In every moment of unexplained beauty, every surge of unearned love, every choice to be kind when cruelty would be easier. They don’t prove any particular theology, but they suggest that reality might be stranger and more wonderful than either fundamentalism or materialism allows.
Maybe that’s enough. Maybe the mystery itself is the message. Maybe silence is how the infinite speaks to the finite without overwhelming us with more truth than we’re ready to carry.
I no longer kneel beside my bed begging for answers. Instead, I sit with the questions, grateful for a universe mysterious enough to keep surprising me, vast enough to hold all my doubts, and loving enough to let me find my own way through the dark.
Sometimes the greatest gift is the one that comes wrapped in what looks like absence.
Sometimes love speaks loudest when it chooses not to speak at all.
If you’re interested in exploring the research on consciousness survival that inspired these thoughts, I highly recommend Jeffrey Mishlove’s “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death.” His documentation of the “white crow” phenomenon offers compelling evidence that our understanding of consciousness and mortality might be far more limited than we assume.
And if these ideas resonate with your own spiritual journey—whether you’re recovering from religious trauma, exploring new frameworks for meaning, or simply trying to make sense of the silence in your own life—know that you’re not alone in the questioning. Sometimes the most profound faith emerges not from having answers, but from learning to live beautifully with mysteries that matter.