(ESSAY) All her life, Nutsa Javakhadze has felt like she doesn’t belong.

I met Nutsa during my stay in Prague last summer. We interviewed each other on our religious backgrounds for an assignment intended to help us understand other faiths and perspectives. I gave her part of my testimony, and she told me the story of how she became an atheist.

Nutsa was born with cerebral palsy in Kutaisi, Georgia. When she was eight years old, her atheist father drove her five hours to another city to see a Georgian Orthodox priest. The interior of the stone church was pitch black, illuminated only by isolated candles. The walls were covered in icons. There was no bathroom; the church had rejected the government’s plan to install one, since it would defile the place. There were no pews either, so Nutsa had to stand for three hours.

The priest showed Nutsa the coffin holding the body of a revered Orthodox saint named Father Gabriel,  whose remains were continuously sent around to various churches to provide miraculous healings. Georgians reported being healed of diseases ranging from burns to birth defects to cerebral palsy to brain cancer upon touching it. The local priest told Nusta she would be healed if she kissed Father Gabriel’s coffin.

Nothing came of the ritual. Nutsa became an atheist a year later.

“I can live with the disability,” Nutsa said. “I can’t live with the false hope.”

Before this, she had been the only religious person in her household. Her family members are atheists, but Nutsa’s grandmother considers herself Orthodox because she was baptized into the faith. Like most Georgians, the religion is part of her cultural and national identity. She gets defensive whenever atheism comes up, telling her family not to oppose religion.

Prior to that day in the church, Nutsa had prayed every night and tried to avoid sin.

“I lived this way because I was heavily influenced by my elementary school teacher. She was very religious and so she taught us these things,” Nutsa said. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I stopped being religious after I finished elementary. I had no contact with her anymore so there was no one to ‘convince me’ to be religious.”

Nutsa’s family goes through the outward motions of the Eastern Orthodox faith. They celebrate saints’ days, including Mary and the disciples. They pray for dead family members on Easter, and Nutsa’s father will occasionally say toasts to Christ on Christmas Day. During the Christmas church service, Nutsa enjoys eating the bread served in communion. Called sebiskveri, it is a thin wafer made with dough.

“I think they put heroin in it,” Nutsa joked. “Why [else] would I love it so much?”

But no one in her family believes in God or in miracles.

They maintain this cognitive dissonance because the vast majority of Georgian Orthodox Christians believe their faith is a tradition and way of life rather than a theological understanding or relationship with God. According to a Pew Research survey, 83% of Georgians in 2019 professed Christianity, but only half consider religion very important in their lives, Nutsa called it “bastardized religion,” and explained that many Georgians don’t understand basic theology.

“They sacrifice a sheep and think it’s the body of Christ,” she said.

This occurs during the festival of Lomisoba, seven weeks after Easter. Her friends are atheists, cafés and bars are usually accessible, and there’s no social pressure to attend church.

But she’s still not happy.

Nutsa thinks this is because of the constant struggle she has with cerebral palsy. Her college in Lithuania has elevators and ramps, and she has access to the local shopping centers. In Georgia, however, she can never leave the house without someone to help her walk. The local pharmacy is supposedly accessible, but its entrance lacks a ramp for wheelchairs.

“It’s like carpooling, but I’m the only other person,” she said.

Her mental health, and that training herself to cope is impossible. For this reason, Nutsa is darkly pessimistic about her ability to overcome her disability unless she lives in a country where it is not a hindrance. She is certain she will never come to terms with the continual trauma of being stuck in her house.

“I told myself for years that I could [cope], but every two weeks I had a breakdown,” she said.

Traveling away from Georgia is highly therapeutic for Nutsa. When she studied in the French city of Lille, near Belgium, Nutsa almost never thought about being disabled. It gave her a new desire for life.

During her mother’s funeral this October, Nutsa’s grandfather, who remained an atheist after the fall of the Soviet Union, held a candle and prayed for Nutsa’s mother’s soul.

“Habits are stronger than faith,” Nutsa said.

Perhaps this is why her father took her to Nutsa in Brussels to Lithuania. … I was a cockroach in Georgia, and now I’m a human being,” she said, referencing Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.”

Although Nutsa told me she has a flair for the overly dramatic, she may not have been exaggerating. If inner psychology is central to existence, then her life did begin when she left Georgia. Besides, the first thing Gregor Samsa’s family did after his death was to go on a vacation.

“Every time I go abroad, I rediscover myself,” she said.

In Georgia, you act like you have faith whether you do or not. Nutsa doesn’t remember her father’s reason.

“I think he did it for me,” she said.

Nutsa’s isolation from her society was made obvious daily, but especially on major saints’ days. People would walk up to her and say “Happy Saint so-and- so’s Day,” and Nutsa would be confused because she “had no idea” that such a saint existed. Some Georgians would post pictures of saints on social media, which Nutsa thinks is irreverent and theologically inconsistent.

Nutsa was relieved to leave Georgia for college in Lithuania, where she is a junior In Prague, Nutsa considered quitting the program due to the multiple city blocks she had to walk each day. The spiral staircase leading up to the classroom was even worse. A program administrator named Fjolla would carry her wheelchair Bob up the two flights of stairs for her.

Even in Lithuania, it was socially awkward for her to bring Bob to bars with her.

Nutsa related a Georgian proverb roughly translated, “Life determines consciousness.” The proverb basically means that the quality of your life determines your perception of it. Nutsa believes her living conditions determine.

But Nutsa has little prospect of enjoying life outside of traveling to accessible places. Having rejected Eastern Orthodoxy, she no longer has access to one of the religion’s most potent ideas: the redemptive possibility inherent in suffering. Nutsa is convinced there is nothing good about her disability. She can ignore it sometimes, and she can even persevere through it if she has to, but she doesn’t see it as anything more than a debilitating disease.

For Nutsa, the only path to happiness lies in minimizing her suffering. In discarding a largely hollow Christianity, she also lost the ability to find goodness in her daily struggle.

This piece was originally published in The Herald, the student publication at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia. It is republished here with permission.

Lincoln Patience is a student at Patrick Henry College. He took part in last summer’s European Journalism Institute held in Prague, a program co-sponsored by The Media Project.