12 Ways of Looking at God

In the Episcopalian church of my youth, I used to lie on the padded green kneelers and watch the square of dark floor turn riotous with rainbow colored light, which had traveled 93 million miles to our small California city at the edge of the Central Valley where people cultivated almonds, gnats, roadkill, and intellectual torpor. The sun had angled itself perfectly in the late morning so as to swim through the stained glass, making a bar of light on the floor where I watched it, thinking it was a messenger from God, from distant heaven, some sign of the beauty of the world to come.Of course, that world never came; the ballast of life weighs us all down. Our petty human dramas. My petty human dramas—a job disappointment, a friend gone quiet, the arguments of my children, the curled edges of a dead hydrangea, the rote nature of days—which feel some afternoons solid as rocks one might carry into the Thames.But I am still left with that memory from childhood, which haunts me, which comforts me, my head against the soft kneeler, my mother, white-cheeked and red-haired, soft above me, and the light pouring down. Beyond me, the priest droned on about the Gospel, about sin and redemption, cock's crowing, pieces of silver, betrayal, demons and stones being rolled way, the way Jesus walked on water. And my body, filled with light, taking in all those words until they wove a person of me, a person filled with the hope of the world to come, a person full of shame.When I was three, my mother moved us away from my father and his new wife. On our family's first day in the church, I'd wandered away from my mother at coffee hour and into the small field of star thistle, reeds, and dried grass that rose above my head. I was pursuing something. Who knows what now, through the slough of years. A bird? An insect? An escape from the voices of adults, which were as distant as light in a jagged canyon. Childhood, a canyon. The air rich with gnats, with mud, with longing. The fields of youth, which only a child can see.My mother says I wouldn't listen to anyone as I played in the dark waters of the sluice. She said no one wanted to walk across the muddy ground to retrieve me from that trickle where sometimes ducks alighted. Or maybe she says that I cried and wouldn't come to her. I do not remember. But I do know that I've never been brave. So, I was probably crying, terrified of what I'd wrought.The priest, my mother says, lifted his regal vestments and walked into the mud, passed over the waters and gathered me into his arms and brought me back to the safety of my mother. That was the day she decided we'd found a church.Do I remember that day or just my mother's story about that day? I swear sometimes I can still feel the heat on the back of my neck, the embarrassment. I swear I can still feel myself wandering among the star thistle and pencil-thin reeds in my mind, searching for something in the fields of childhood.Decades glide past as a soda can bobbing on the streams of youth. Forties now. And the architecture of life has been built and destroyed. As a child, when I took the wafer-thin host from the priest, he stared into my eyes and said: This is the body of Christ: Take. Eat. In remembrance of Him.What an indignity to belong to a body. Why couldn't I have been made from something more durable, less prone to slippage, to breakage, to the wearing away, as sand on the shores of time, waves as years.This is the year I take pills for my heart, for my cholesterol, for my hair. This is the year that I drink laxatives and spend days on the toilet, emptying my insides, time after time, which is what I've always tried to accomplish with my writing, an emptying.At the office, the nurse asks if I have a will. When I say I don't, she tells me not to worry. She says very few people have a will. The curtains are pulled around my bed, and it feels like prep for dying. I wait on the anesthesiologist; I think about death; I think about what percentage of my savings should go to my children. I imagine the Bible had some advice on this I must have missed in Sunday school. When I awake, the doctor tells me its fortunate I came in when I did. He says he's taken some large polyps from my colon.This is the year when I begin to set timers on my phone, trying to extend the life on my bladder, which has become unreliable of late, prone to urgent and frequent evacuations. This is the year I start wearing a brace to straighten my shoulders, a piece of tape across the bridge of my nose to improve my breathing. This is the year of trying to fix the accumulation of defaults built up across the long stretch of days as though I am a statue brought up from the depths of the Aegean.I wonder what it's like to be God, wholly sufficient to oneself. I imagine it must be boring to have never changed, to have never needed repair. To have never slipped into a midlife malaise, to have never yearned for a body.All summer, I read books and try to keep my bladder at bay. I watch the timer, desperately waiting for release. Some days, I give up and sit down to pee and feel the rush of relief as God felt on that seventh day, after he'd made the rivers, the plume of mist rising off them, the loons and white geese that fall like snow across the waters.In the years after college, I lost sight of God, somewhere between the reeds and the sluice, the sin and the redemption. The only thing that drew me back to religion was the Orthodox Church, where beauty was wedded to prayer. I used to walk into the sanctuary, thick with incense, golden icons illuminated by soft candlelight. During church, we sang the liturgy, voices lifted in a kind of transcendent harmony.Mornings, I'd recite the prayers of the saints in my small room, prayers of the desert fathers, men who had left everything behind in search of the divine. Then I'd try to remember those prayers, those lives of devotion, as I drove along the highway toward work. The 101 snaking between the imposing Santa Ynez Mountains and the blue-green slick of the Pacific. Sun-glitter and prayer. Tendril of road, tendril of faith.Back then, I thought the prayers of the saints might save me, might thread together the fragments of my heart. But now, years later, all their words are lost to me, washed clean by time as silt down a river. I cannot find those saints, those prayers, that person searching for God. It's all lost to the mud of the years.What I remember most acutely is whispering the prayers as I drove on a dusty side road toward my job, cactuses and long stretches of grass leading up to magisterial houses in the distance. The earth is 26,000 light years from the center of the universe, so perhaps it made sense that I felt so distant from God.As I said the prayer on that late summer morning, clean thoughts, clean heart, clean mind, I started thinking of Nadine, a woman 15 years my senior who worked in the office, and the prayer suddenly disappeared as fog in sunlight. My prayer was then to her. My thoughts, unclean.In the Bible, dreams are used as signs of things to come. They're portentous, meaningful. Freud would have had a heyday. In the morning, when my wife tells me her dreams, I scroll on my phone, vaguely listening because I don't believe our dreams tell us anything we don't already know. For years, I've dreamt of bears in river valleys. I have dreamt of their humped backs searching me in the wilderness.When God dreams, I wonder if He dreams of other galaxies, other universes. I wonder if He dreams of me as I have never dreamt of Him.In the famous parable of Zhuangzi, he awakes from dreaming of a butterfly, not sure if he's a man dreaming he's a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he's a man.Once, just before the end of my first marriage, I dreamt that we lost our son at an event, an overly large theater where we'd gone to hear chamber music. After he was gone, we wandered the hallways, lifting up velvet ropes, screaming his name. Julian! Julian! The dream voice echoed through the hallways and permeated the thin membrane between sleep and wakefulness; my heart rate rose.Then, as is often the case in dreams, things radically shifted, and I found myself in an apartment, tall windows overlooking a city, lights a small honeycomb below. It had been days in the logic of the dream, and he was still gone. We stood in that darkness, knowing he'd be missing forever. All we'd do is be filled with longing for what had been lost, rust-colored curls, his pinkish cheeks. We hugged each other at the window.Then I awoke from the dream and back into my life where I'd lose him half the days of his childhood in the divorce and separation to follow.When God dreams, He can't remember if He invented blue whales or whether someone, perhaps the devil, whispered it in His ear eons ago. He sees those monsters in His dream, and He wants to speak to them, but He cannot remember if He gave them language or if He just filled them with the architecture of sadness.He broods. And a meteor soars through a vast track of sky. In the time He thinks about the whales, the inland seas dry up, and He finds himself staring at the arms of a saguaro cactus, holding up brilliant red flowers as a waiter might drinks. He knows He'd never have invented something so exquisite, and after this, and the matter of the whales, He knows this universe He's awoken in was created by some other God, stranger than He'd ever been.Children are made in the image of God, which is why I try to write about them less as they age. They are 13 and 11, so no longer quite children. I am starting to see the way they belong to themselves, wholly sufficient as God might have been before the ruckus of humanity sent His sense of self topsy-turvy.My children are perhaps the closest I'll get to playing God. I see myself in the expressive eyes of my daughter. I catch my son carelessly tossing a granola bar wrapper on the floor, and I yell that he needs to pick it up. Where did such carelessness come from, I wonder, before finding the nearest mirror.Does God look down with disappointment at those creatures He spun out in His image? Is that why He's been silent all these years?I find disappointments in my children often too, but they are mostly petty. An unkindness. An ingratitude. Mostly, the children are a kind of strange ineluctable joy. Their presence has an intensity so deep I can sometimes barely form thoughts. In absence, I yearn for them. Children are a paradox.Last night, we watched a movie about a giant dinosaur swimming from the depths of the ocean to destroy Japan. My son, 11, is scared he won't be able to fall asleep in the fathoms of darkness in his room. Not certain what dreams will bring.I lie in bed next to him, rubbing his back as he'd rubbed mine earlier in the day. We keep tenderness between our bodies, my son and I, which is something my father never taught me. Something his father, whom I never met, probably never taught him. Until you go down the long list of fathers back to God, who loved His son so much that He sent him to die and called it a tenderness.For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son. I will not be giving my son for love of this world. Nor my daughter. There is nothing in this world I love enough to part with them. And I know. I know. I hear them reproach me, my children. They say, we stood in the hallways of childhood knocking at your door and you did not answer. They say that they asked me to play basketball, to play Clue, to play anything, and I said I was busy or doing yoga, busy grading, too tired, making dinner, napping. They knocked on the door and said, Dad, dad, dad, dad, dad, into infinity. I said I'd be with them in a minute, which is what I've been saying all my life.Today, my son said he was confused by life. He said he didn't know what to make of the fact that we are but a 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 percent of the known world. He said, What are you supposed to do with life? Does it mean anything?You make the meaning, I said.God never answered my knocking either. It's left up to us. All He gave us is an inscrutable book.My says she has been my She tells me she knows I didn't like the she used to tell me as a I tell her I everything some days, and not sure if I mean the writing, the or the carelessness of her read the which was not to her but to be a of I should have made the story more to I should have said, my is like the in the like the of the across the said, must long for God in to be set by but if the cannot feel the then it must long for the longing. To long for the longing is from have for other other other for most of my life. I have on the of in and for the fog to to not the across the to me keep my that the on forever. I have for across a bar for for for a to take me out into the for a to into the I have from the of a in that the and the we were through might forever. I have for to me out of the I felt for I have for the in for the red suddenly illuminated by of light, a a I have to escape my body, escape my mind, escape my life. I have to have as anyone to see but one small the field of my the of the the children church when they with me. me if I still in God. I'd look at them in the these of and trying to My a would me. not I'd look out the of my blue green a of I don't believe in be in you Some are too to be like the of the universe, which is always like the from my is the universe is that I read a that the universe is more to heat than a an so vast that the heat will be so that nothing can of distant They say it will in million years. I to say I'll wait for my children at the other side of the universe, years away, but I don't quite believe I don't know what I the flowers the I'd from and Not quite nothing into something but a and the a a in the rose by our I and head or first into the The on the and stretch toward the toward a friend asks about my I say that everything down to an that have an answer. Why should be something of much of a the I That which is in a that and will come into Something from I say that my religion is a from my new of I before to go on that I has I tell my children that their has into us after we I am the my trying me, each of mine as a trying to find a I tell her she me. I say this of of doing that which I have me to the I hear a in the the voice of my father, whom I for of my childhood, his his with me, the way he used to always say I was being I think of God who was always at His for golden for into the on the long up of road, I about our for I say that I won't the in the of when we get much in the city It's not a my says, think of ever to my do not think Jesus ever about into His The were one from the if the of the is to be But I can't make sense of at myself in the and the back is not the one from on the I the of I the of the I see nothing in the I see time in the my the of hair. I see my father some afternoons staring back at me, with children and I together in the years after my life had lost its In I taught a on where we read says, is this And the they In the of our I the children to know that the is our that the are our thoughts. I the to know that the of language is what the God, like a first like the years between and heat we the and often one the to be what to She with the timer, did or her thoughts. my children the thing I did as a A child is a A child has a way of A child into the in search of something. A child not to be they are into the waves of the just off the shores of they play in the to They with they They in the They to me, and I swim out to them. My God dream of other other on the of an dusty on the the of In this city, God a He haunts the dreams of He on the of He into the He haunts His dreams and brought him to the He himself He awakes in a city of and knows this time get everything wife is on the it with and from about the lives we had in between divorce and She says that these of whom she thought were her out for a of She tells me she said as she I always what my life would have been like if I'd gone out that tell her I had a story about a in a in a in I that I dreaming of the life that was not my But on the of it, I away, walked through the away from the at the more to tell the story than to To by way of a memory that and like the universe, like a golden field of through a in life To imagine what the might have been the with and the sometimes set on an It to the of my thoughts. I think of God, who created the of days to make the of the in the of the But the was He only needed days, and the seventh was for He is all as I at my The very fact that He just that of think of time, which us in its all our against it along the toward some distant which the says all at but we are it, only to the next and the are we to do with the of life? What is an to do with the of which is a in that of A of light into the universe of says that language is a on which we out for bears to all the time we long to the to wife and I watched In the for the by about and who begin to spend time together after their are on them, trying to find in their time together what it might have felt like for their to to the of In the of they fall for but they have not to the of their All we waiting for a a a sign that they would always be Their love is never said love to all had that God made man in His image out of God I wonder if God in or if He that into the universe and it a after the has is on an to He by himself through the of that from the As the from the finds a in the He something into a and then it off with mud, a to him earlier in the a way of a forever. He his love for her in the of is to fall in our our dreams, our about our What left with is the which is sometimes of a child, a walk on a at the of a with you love in always and the in the is a for longing. But the was always to fall to in an why the universe is full of so much why it and for something to its the the is his of After his love into the of the his small form against the of the which above him. The of which We language into those of an event, a a an that through the God feels about the of which still in the of His I feel about everything I and everything read in this is but a small toward something something I can't like the sight of a along the in a before it in a small of dark where a child away from voices and into fields