I.
There is a labyrinth in a church courtyard around the corner from our house – a maze set in bricks on the ground. My daughter, Rosie, and I would often visit when she was young. I would slowly wind my way through the maze, trying to get her to follow behind me, but her impulse was always to cross over all the boundaries and go straight to the middle. She was simply not that interested in my adult explanation that the journey is why people walk the labyrinth—that following the path gives one a chance to be quiet with their own thoughts and dreams.
One of the last times we visited the labyrinth together, I was in the middle of my usual monologue about following the path when she suddenly interjected, “Mama, what do the people think about in the lab-rint?”
I paused for a second, “Well, maybe about their lives, or about the people that they love, or maybe about God.”
She was quiet, a puzzled look appearing on her face, before asking, “Mama…What’s God?”
Suddenly I felt so much like a parent — I was about to impart upon my daughter her first impression of God, at least since she has become a creature who can remember things. True, as a just-barely preschooler, her memory is still in formation and not always reliable, but it still felt important. I experienced a stab of fear. Can I really answer this question? Am I ready for this responsibility?
Thinking back to my childhood, I am not able to remember my parents ever talking to me about God. They must have done so at some point in my upbringing, but religion was such a non-issue in our family that it didn’t happen often enough to sink-in in any meaningful way. My father is Jewish, my mother grew up Episcopalian, but neither one has any ties to their religious background.
However, when my sister and I were young my parents decided that it was time for us to have a religious education, and they began to send us to the local Unitarian church each Sunday morning. While we “went to church” my father shopped for hardware at Hechingers. He almost always waited in the car for us at the end of the church driveway, and we would stop to get Big Macs on the way home. Sometimes he would actually attend the “grown up” service, but whatever happened in that part of the building was a complete mystery to me.
At the Unitarian Church I remember holding hands in a circle each week as we sang, “Here we are, all together as we sing our song, joyfully…” and not much else. We had a few youth group sleepovers, and may have even staged a play for the adults. I basically liked my time there, but felt unsatisfied, as the thing that I really wanted to learn about – God – was not particularly high on the agenda.
For as long as I can remember, the concept of God has been something that has felt clear and true in my heart, but not always in my mind. Like my daughter now, as a child I was searching for the details: what, how, and why? It became evident early on that my family wasn’t going to provide much enlightenment on the God issue, or about religion in general, so I realized that I was going to have to figure it out on my own. And in my search, I made a few mistakes.
II.
My clearest memory of committing a God-faux-pas happened when I was about eight years old, during a visit to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. I had never seen any place so beautiful, and felt like I could hardly breathe from excitement when my parents, sister, and I walked through the front entrance. Here, I thought, is where God lives, and I was eagerly awaiting some kind of sign or signal that he/she/it was in there waiting for me.
Rows of wooden pews dominated the center of the building, and around the perimeter were shrines for various American saints. We began to walk, stopping to look in each shrine. The banks of candles in front of each saint’s statue fascinated me, and the people who lit them seemed like they must know God well. I quickly decided that I could not leave the cathedral without lighting one of those candles myself. I felt sure that by doing so I would understand God, and the anticipation was almost too much for me to bear.
The procedure seemed simple enough. Take an already lit candle and use it to light another candle, and then say your prayers. I waited until my parents had moved several saints ahead and made my move. Slowly, so that I would be sure to remember each moment, I picked up the front candle and moved to light one of the others. As the hushed sounds of the cathedral flowed around me, I closed my eyes and held my breath, waiting for what I imagined would be some kind of signal from above.
“WHAT are you doing?!” My mother’s annoyed whisper pierced my reverie.
Apparently, I was not aware that you were supposed to give a donation if you wanted to light a candle, and my parents were not happy. They quickly pulled me outside to the front steps of the cathedral and tried to explain what I had done wrong. I don’t remember their words, just my own shame. As I watched the traffic and pedestrians flowing past on Fifth Avenue I felt sure that all those anonymous people knew that I was a God-faker. I remember my body shaking and my tears flowing, not so much because I got in trouble, but because I felt like I had been so close to understanding when I was inside that church, and God now seemed very, very far away.
When I was thirteen years old, I took communion. Nobody called me on it this time, but it was later reported to me that this was another big God-related error, since I’d never been baptized nor had a first communion. It was Christmas Eve, midnight mass, in The Netherlands, where I was visiting family friends. When it came time for communion, I got up and followed everyone else into the line, and my presence was neither noticed nor questioned. As we moved slowly closer to the priest, I carefully watched each person’s actions as they received their own communion. Like at Saint Patrick’s, it seemed like a simple enough process: close your eyes, open your mouth to get that small white thing, then move your hands in a crosswise fashion on your chest. Making the hand motions looked like it would be the hardest part, and I tried to memorize exactly what everyone else did.
As the priest placed the tasteless wafer on my tongue, I didn’t get a chance to feel filled up with God because I panicked about crossing myself correctly. Up-down-over-left-right- what was the order again? Did I do it wrong? Was the priest glaring at me? Had I been found out? My face burning, I hurried back to my seat in the pew and slouched down, upset with myself for messing up and sad that I had again missed what I thought was my big chance to understand God.
At that point, I started to really question whether this thing called God existed at all – after all, if he/she/it were real, then why couldn’t I experience what others seemed to be able to feel? And why did my own life seem so lonely and lousy? However, I was not ready to give up hope yet, even after repeated disappointment when it came to trying to understand God. So, I continued my search by sticking with the route of organized religion, as this seemed to be the most likely place to find what I was looking for.
As a teenager, I left the Unitarians behind, and decided to try out the Methodists. I began going to church with my friend Jenny and her mother each week. My parents were a bit taken aback by this move, but they decided to humor me in my religious quest. The Methodists, however, didn’t last long, as I was never able to feel at home in the stiff, emotion-less services that characterized Jenny’s particular congregation. I ditched them after about four months and decided that I was Jewish.
After all, as far as I knew, I was Jewish. True, we hardly ever celebrated Hanukkah, or the High Holy days, but we did have a Passover seder, at least during the time that my grandfather was still alive. I loved the ritual and tradition that went into the seder, even our family’s get-through-it-as-quickly-as-possible-so-we-can-eat version. I felt confident calling myself Jewish, and hoped that claiming my religion would help me figure out God a bit more easily.
What I didn’t know is that Judaism is a matrilineal religion, and my Jewish side of the family is my father’s. It didn’t matter that I was Jewish enough to have been murdered in the Holocaust. I was not Jewish enough to be married by most rabbis, and not Jewish enough for my Jewish grandmother to really consider me a Jew. When I found this all out, I felt saddened and cheated out of an identity, a religion that I felt was mine, and out of finally having some kind of legitimacy to figure out God.
So, in the first few years of college I gave up on organized religion, and put God on the back burner of my life. I wore black, sometimes claimed to be an atheist (though not with much conviction), and read Nietzsche. But, alone in bed at night, I still did something akin to praying – though I didn’t admit to myself that I was praying. I had conversations with the God that I hadn’t yet figured out, but hoped was around somewhere, listening to what I had to say.
III.
During my junior year in college there was an anti-apartheid political action on campus. The Students Against Apartheid organization had constructed a shanty in the middle of the Cut, our college’s version of the university quad, and protestors camped out there day and night for several months in an effort to force university divestment from companies doing business with South Africa. While I knew of the anti-apartheid movement, I had not been particularly politically aware or involved before that time. One night, however, a friend asked me to go to the shanty. A former South African political prisoner, poet, and professor, Dennis Brutus, would be speaking.
My memories of that evening are somewhat like remembering a dream: certain images clear and vivid, and others murkier, denser, unsure. I don’t remember which of my friends I went with, but nonetheless can vividly recall sights and sounds, as well as how I was changed by the experience.
It was dark, and about thirty of us gathered around the simple wooden shanty in the middle of the green lawn, candles flickering, students walking past on the nearby paths on their way to their dorms, the library, or computer labs. The night was clear and brisk. Dennis Brutus sat in the middle of the circle of students and talked about South Africa, about the divestment movement, and read his poetry:
O let me soar on steadfast wing
that those who know me for a pitiable thing
may see me inerasably clear:
grant that their faith that I might hood
some potent thrust to freedom, humanhood
under drab fluff may still be justified.
Protect me from the slightest deviant swoop
to pretty bush or hedgerow lest I droop
ruffled or trifled, snared or power misspent.
Uphold – frustrate me if need be
so that I mould my energy
for that one swift inenarrable soar
hurling myself swordbeaked to lunge
for lodgement in my life’s sun-targe –
a land and people just and free.
It was in that space around the shanty, with the soft-spoken poet-activist-professor, that God finally became something tangible for me: something that I could feel all around, guiding our small group of students to reach out to other human beings, to expand our knowledge and understanding of the world, to work towards justice, and to build our own capacities of empathy and love.
It wasn’t as I expected it would be – there was no great voice booming down from above saying, “Here I am!” Rather, the experience was like revisiting that feeling that I’d had in my heart since childhood, but with a sense of assuredness, understanding, and peace that I had not yet been able to feel. God is here, I thought to myself, of course God is here. In that circle of people I was finally able to release myself from the rational pull of my brain, and trust what I had sensed all along.
Now, nearly twenty years later, those God-faker feelings from my childhood still haunt me sometimes. When Rosie asked me to tell her about God, my first reaction was that I was not qualified to reply – after all, I still don’t belong to any organized religion and would be hard-pressed to cite more than a few lines of scripture. No one has ever actually taught me about God, so how can I have any kind of legitimacy to explain God to her?
While I considered what to say to Rosie, I thought back to the night with Dennis Brutus and about how I’ve tried to live my life since then – in a manner that, while not always consciously evoking God’s name, has been guided by the same spirit that was present that evening. If some people consider me a God-faker due to the fact that my only understanding of God comes through my ever-stumbling and sometimes-succeeding attempts to build love, empathy, and justice in the world, then so be it.
As we left the labyrinth and began to walk back home through the foggy afternoon, I quieted my doubts and explained to Rosie what I know to be true.
The Dennis Brutus poem, Prayer, can be found in Against Forgetting: Twentieth-century Poetry of Witness. Norton, 1993.
This piece was originally written and published in 2008.
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