wish I believed in God.

I wish that when I looked up to the sky, every nerve in my body would tingle with the electric presence of Heaven. Every tiny hair would light aflame from the hot blanket of the Lord’s embrace. Praise be to the Garden of Eden that makes the church bells ring out and the choir sing, “Glory, glory for our Father!”

I wish that Father would call out to me.

I wish I were passionate enough about my home team to wail and squeal and punch walls when they won or lost. I wish I could stand in a stadium drunk on the energy of my fellow devotees, my face lost in a crowd of my own countrymen.

I wish I loved my country enough to take to the streets waving the star-spangled banner high — proudly propagating the gospel of my forefathers. I wish my pledge of allegiance would join the cacophony of thousands. “From sea to shining sea,” preach folk singers and nationalists alike. I wish I belonged to one tribe or the other.

Sure, I defend America when it is criticized by the likes of a Brit. But I still have the soul of a self-hating, traitorous, soft-hearted, Brooklyn liberal. I still can’t truthfully say I am proud of my country, that I belong to “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

It seems easiest to form a more perfect union when you have a common enemy, whether that be sin, or immigrants, or the Eagles. Maybe my issue is that I don’t hate enough. Or maybe if I weren’t so conceited, I could find it within me to join my comrades in their sycophancy.

It is a problem of my own design, one I could easily solve. Nothing worth writing about, this faithlessness.

And yet it seems to me that faithlessness is plaguing us all. Something is rotten in the state. Something is seeping into the body of the nation and corrupting its very core. In many ways I relate to Tony Soprano when he says, “I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”

Though I would never argue that we should return to the America of seventy years ago. I do not believe that a former era is when our young nation was great, even as it certainly is not great now.

It feels as if I am — as if we all are — coming up at the tail end of one world order and just beyond the reach of something major. Something tectonic-shakingly, order-shiftingly, earth-shatteringly major. And I wish I were excited.

I want to have faith in something incredible. I want to belong to a generation of artists and thinkers, politicians and writers, scientists and entrepreneurs that are ushering in a new epoch of human excellence. As a budding filmmaker, I want my art to have a role in shaping this epoch. I want to revel in a dynamic world of our joint creation.

I look to the great experiments of the past — the creation of empire, the dawn of Enlightenment, the foundation of America, the moon landing, the computer revolution — and I feverishly grasp at the wisps of elation that they left behind. I am nostalgic for eras I never experienced.

My parents are nearly brought to tears when they watch playbacks of Barack Obama’s first inauguration. Like them, I want to look back at a moment in my life, in my country’s life, and feel like I belong to something “unique, cosmopolitan, mighty, and unparalleled” (as E.B. White describes 1940s New York City).

But I look to the heavens and see nothing.

I admire those that can undertake the same action and have full faith in something beyond themselves. That one day, when all else fails, they will always have the divine, the warm embrace of heaven. In this faith, they are connected to believers across the world, all hoping to bring about a great awakening. One world under God.

But I only have this world, this country. And I have yet to be inspired, yet to belong to a global project, a global community. What do I have to look forward to? What will be the defining moments of my bildungsroman? More war? Less liberty? Artificial intelligence, ready to prove my education obsolete and poison my hopes of becoming a writer and artist?

In my lifetime, I want man to walk on Mars. I want a new political order. A new cultural renaissance. For art and literature to pollinate the world and their seeds to be forever revered. I want my generation to come of age as the world accelerates upwards.

And I long for my own success. My own greatness. To be part of this world in constant motion, constant progress. I want my films to be historically informed and politically persuasive, to penetrate the American zeitgeist and touch the minds of millions. Yet is this possible in an age of apathy?

We are all suspended in the air with no God to bring us up and no gust of progress to propel us forward. So we cling to our families, our schools, our neighborhoods — the final anchors to the ground.

But I need more from this world. And I want this world to need more from me.

— Magazine writer Astrid S. H. Aggour can be reached at [email protected].