Looking for God

Don’t snicker, but I used to believe God made the whole world just for me.

Here’s how I mapped it out in my mind. Before I was born, God assembled all the players and assigned parts to lucky individuals: who would be my parent, who’d play the part of enemy or friend, which dog would be my beloved pet, which tree would I first see when I got up in the morning. Naturally, everyone wanted a starring role I was only five, so maybe my ego-centrism can be forgiven.

My next glimmering happened when I was in a swimming pool. I was doing one of my favorite pool activities: bobbing along in the water, knees to my chest and my arms clasped around my knees, holding my breath as long as a ten-year-old could, pretending to be drift wood in some vast impersonal ocean.

It was a weirdly pleasant sensation. I knew I was a person, but there in the water, under the water, maybe…I wasn’t? Maybe I was really just a log or a cast-off pirate treasure. A thing, an entity.  It was puzzling. Only two minutes before, I’d been standing on the cement edge of the pool, two legs firmly grounded, hoping I had a quarter to buy an ice cream sandwich, and quick as a blink, with a hop into the pool, my entire reality had changed.

Photo by Raj Rana on Unsplash

As I bobbled in the water, my brain exploded with possibilities. What if there were many worlds and realities beyond this one, and all I had to do was jump or do some simple act to enter it? Maybe my present life was just a crude scraping of the surface of the real thing, whatever that real thing happened to be.

Maybe my present life was just a crude scraping of the surface of the real thing, whatever that real thing happened to be.

I’m not sure how I leaped from that idea to the idea of God, but suddenly He seemed close and real to me. As real and maybe realer than the water that surrounded and floated me. But not realer than the strawberry cheesecake ice cream sandwich I was bent on buying, and by the time I left the pool, found a quarter, and went over to the machine, I’d forgotten about Him.

In the ensuing years, God got relegated to background noise. It was hard to compete against the world. There was Donny Osmond, David Cassidy, Sonny & Cher, cream of mushroom soup, and Huckapoo shirts.

And because I stopped paying attention, I thought God wasn’t there. But He had a way of deviously sneaking up on me, reminding me He was there.

Like when my eighth-grade Hungarian science teacher introduced the concept of electrons, protons, and neutrons. I was dumbstruck. No, outraged and furious is more like it, especially when I considered all the future homework the topic of atoms would generate, not to mention increased torture time spent studying for tests.

Although normally a quiet obedient kid, I now muttered angrily to my classmates, “It’s a lie!” I smacked my hand against my desk. “Did you see any atoms jump out? No! That’s cos they don’t exist!”

We were all being suckered, I knew. Obviously, this atom business was a device to keep us budding teenagers busy and out of trouble. I would reject their existence. If I paid them no mind, they couldn’t be real, right?

My indignation must’ve been contagious because some classmates nodded their heads, and said, “Yeah!”

But those silly electrons and protons kept showing up in 10th and 11th-grade textbooks, SATS, and even under microscopes, no matter how much I insisted they were a dirty trick, a figment of a diabolical teacher’s imagination.

Just because I couldn’t perceive something through my own senses, didn’t mean that ‘something’ didn’t exist. It just meant my human machinery was a tad limited. Finally, one day, I thought: What am I doing. Holding up a spoon to stop a tidal wave? My belief or disbelief didn’t affect reality one bit. Atoms would be atoms whether I approved of them or not.

I learned something from my atom tantrum (how else to describe it?).

Just because I couldn’t perceive something through my own senses, didn’t mean that ‘something’ didn’t exist. It just meant my human machinery was a tad limited. And that maybe my biases deeply influenced what I chose to believe or disbelieve.

This led to another glimmering of God.

I looked up at the moon one night, and don’t laugh, but till then I actually thought the moon got physically bigger and smaller in the sky. But that night I realized all I was seeing was the earth’s shadow. The moon didn’t go from a tiny fingernail slice to a full-blown mama of a moon each month.  The moon didn’t really disappear. It was there all along. It’s just those shadows that confused me.

Photo by Valery Sysoev on Unsplash

These days I’m a grandmother.  And I'm still looking for God.  Sometimes I feel God when I’m slowly and deliberately eating a bowl of ice cream, deeply conscious of each sweet cold spoonful of pleasure.  I can tell you the days where I don't sense God because I've blocked Him out, because of all the things that I have to, must do that are so very important, and nothing, no person or Being dare get in my way.

These days I’m trying to prove my existence to Him, make it worth His while, so to speak, to have brought me and countless creatures here to this world.

And then there are the days when I let go of all my urgencies.  Once, I had a sensation of God like a humming on my heart, or just a warm, kind hand on my back.  I felt it while I washed dishes, tied a child’s shoelace, or looked at the trees.  It was the most wonderful feeling, as if invisible strings tied our hearts together, and wherever He moved, I naturally followed.

When I look back on my younger self, I thought God made the whole world for me.  As I entered my teens, I kept trying to figure Him out, make sense of Him, almost as if He had to prove His existence to me.

These days I’m trying to prove my existence to Him, make it worth His while, so to speak, to have brought me and countless creatures here to this world.

I still take a page from my younger self, though, the part of me that was open to the Godly unexpected.  Like the Kotzker Rebbe once wrote, Where is God?  Wherever you let Him in…even in a swimming pool.

Featured Image, Yoann Boyer, Unsplash.com