Sun Bleached Flies

God loves you, but not enough to save you.

It was June 2024 and my North London flat held heat unevenly, toasty in the corners, cool by the staircase, stale in the middle where I worked. My desk was wedged awkwardly at the intersection between the living room and the staircase and it tilted slightly to the left, just enough that any pen placed thoughtlessly rolled off the edge and pissed me off. It didn’t take a lot to piss me off and it still doesn’t.

I was working on pricing up an influencer’s costs for an Instagram reel (£10,000, by the way) and drinking a cold, stale black coffee with too much honey. It was one of those jobs where time felt like it didn’t move forward. It was also one of those jobs where coworkers existed in extremes, some of the nicest people, and others who felt mythologically and almost comically cruel.

I had music on while I worked, obviously. I always had music on and if not music, then a podcast. If not a podcast, then a TV show. If not a TV show, then an audiobook. You get the picture, I didn’t like silence and I still don’t.

Sun Bleached Flies by Ethel Cain. Released May 12th, my birthday.

“God loves you, but not enough to save you.”

I didn’t register it immediately, it was just a song mixed in the shuffle that I hadn’t heard before and then it stopped me in my tracks. I had been in a really strange place then. I would have described it as a slight psychological storm mixed in with a bit of religious psychosis. Actually that’s overly dramatic. It wasn’t psychosis but I was desperate for something to pull me out of that storm, so why not God?

“God loves you, but not enough to save you.”

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The song got me thinking about my relationship with religion. Or my lack thereof.

I grew up in a place where Christianity was in the atmosphere, the architecture, the language and the assumptions people made without realising they were making them, but it wasn’t in my home. My parents weren’t religious, God was something external, something other people spoke about.

And yet, I moved through the motions of what was the done thing where I’m from. Baptism then communion then confirmation and the occasional church visit and a pearly white rosary hung on my bed frame.

I’ve always believed in something. A sense that there is more than this, that something exists beyond what we can see or measure but I’ve never been able to define it and I probably never will. It shifts depending on where I am in my life, sometimes distant, sometimes intimate, sometimes entirely absent until I need it again.

Because that’s the truth of it. I only really speak to God when I’m desperate.

When something is falling apart, or when something good feels just out of reach and I want it so badly, that’s when I reach out. I talk to him like an old friend I’ve neglected. I apologise, I plead, I bargain, I promise things I won’t keep and then, when the feeling passes, I forget again.

It’s a cyclical relationship. Tidal. I come in, I go out. Nothing steady. Nothing sustained.

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Just before my dad died, which was almost four years ago now, he told me he didn’t believe in heaven or hell, or God in the way that most religions define him but he believed in spirits and energy and in something beyond us, but not something that judges or saves or condemns and I think about that a lot.

I don’t know what I believe. But, I know what I don’t believe.

I don’t believe in structures that position women as subordinate, that suggest obedience is virtue, that frame suffering as something to be endured rather than questioned. I don’t believe in doctrines that promise men rewards in the form of women, as if we are something to be allocated. I don’t believe in the exclusion, the control, the violence that can be justified under the language of faith, the homophobia and honestly just so much of what most religions I know of preach.

There is beauty in religion, the same way there is beauty in anything humans have poured themselves into. There is comfort in ritual, in shared belief, in the soft architecture of faith that holds people up when nothing else can. There is community, there is meaning, there is something undeniably human about reaching for a higher power and finding language for things that would otherwise remain unspeakable. I can see that. I do see that. But there is also harm and fractures running through it and contradictions that feel too loud to ignore.

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I started writing this because I wanted to talk about Ethel Cain, about her music and the other songs of hers that have stayed with me and carried me through some of the hardest parts of the last few years. But it turns out I wanted to talk about religion. About my relationship with God, or my lack of one. Sometimes I believe in a higher power, sometimes it’s the universe, sometimes it’s Mother Nature, sometimes it’s God in the way Christianity frames him. Sometimes I believe in nothing at all, and other times I just don’t let myself think about it because I can feel my mind starting to spiral if I go too far.

So yes, this was meant to be about a song, about an artist, about a moment. But it ended up being about belief, and doubt, and all the space in between where I seem to spend most of my time.

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