Finding My Religion

I wrote this essay more than twenty-five years ago, but I still recognize my voice and my thoughts in here. In any case, it seemed a suitable post to share for Easter Sunday, which is today.

Once I heard an angel sing. Its voice was the most beautiful I had ever heard; it was silvery, like a river washing over me for a fleeting moment.  Although I heard only a fragment, I understood that the song it sang was about a rose.  I did not question this.  I simply knew that I was not alone in my room.

I lived in a world in which spirits walked freely and doubt did not exist.  There were angels on Coney Island Avenue and ghosts in Prospect Park. Borders blurred between dreams and waking, past and present. When I closed my eyes, I saw the starry flecks of a galaxy behind my eyelids. I heard the universe hum in the din of traffic and the rush of wind through treetops. There were oily rainbows in the gutters.  God was wildly imaginative, even at times weird, but He took a personal interest in me.     

Every night I prayed.  My standard prayer was a lengthy, earnest litany which sometimes put me to sleep, but I never doubted that God heard, never doubted that He indulgently forgave me for dropping off in mid-sentence.  My prayer was mostly about taking care of people, for there were many about whom I worried: my father worked too hard, two of my siblings had kidney disease, my brother was always sad. I also blessed a lot of dead people, everyone from Grandma Assunta to Abraham Lincoln, and I was sure I would meet them all in heaven someday. I couldn’t wait to ask Amelia Earhart where she’d been.

God got me to school before the bell, and like most kids at P.S. 179, I also prayed during class: “Please, God, don’t let her call on me.” He helped me through important tests, got me past the streets where nasty boys threw hard-packed snowballs, brought my paralyzed legs back to life one morning when a man pulled me into an alley and shoved me against a wall and I froze in fear until God’s hand gave a protective push and I ran free and fast into the morose security of the schoolyard.

 I was a lapsed Catholic but did not know it.  One day a woman named Ruby came to our house to draw us back into the flock at Holy Innocents. She was appalled that my belief system had grown so expansive and liberal. She told me that I must kneel beside my bed when I pray, that God did not hear such lazy, sleepy prayers as mine. She said that God expected to see me in mass on Sunday. My negligent parents were hell-bound already, but for me there was hope if I followed the rules.

My mother, a Jew who married an Italian, was disdainful. “Those Catholics are too strict,” was her assessment, she who had been disowned by her family for marrying a Gentile.  But her tribe had a long history of exile. I saw it in the sad eyes of the old women who huddled together in the park speaking Yiddish; I saw it in the blue tattooed numbers on the arm of the tailor and his wife.

My mother’s form of Judaism was a lonely and mystical one. She lit candles in glasses and taught me to kiss the mezuzah that was mounted on our wall like a magic charm, but these artifacts were oddities to me, like things in a museum. Her God had turned away in anger, leaving her to fend for herself. I wasn’t sure what he would make of me, a child of an ill-fated union that everyone had spoken against.

One day, my best friend Carol Bessey invited me to accompany her to St. Mark’s Methodist Church. It was a congenial place, and I soon felt like an adopted daughter there, signing up for Sunday school, choir, and a religious instruction group that met every Wednesday afternoon and qualified us for early release from school. The God at this address was an affable one, a firm handshake kind of God, a constructive social activist, fond of potlucks, rummage sales, and summer camp for city kids. In His beautiful sanctuary, well-dressed citizens gathered together singing hymns that became dear and familiar to me. There were lilies on the altar and rose-toned sunlight slanting through the stained glass windows. Ladies wore magnificent hats to Sunday services, hats that sprouted birds and flowers, and there was a grown-up smell of wool coats and perfume in the air.

The agonized Christ that the Catholics were fixed upon was absent from St. Mark’s. Instead, there was Jesus, who seemed loving and humble, a gentle teacher. At his head, there was always a yellow circle of light, but I felt the humanity of this Jesus, cried at his suffering, rejoiced at the happy outcome of Easter, and fervently hoped it was all true.

But Jesus was the ultimate role model, and I knew I had to try to be good. Even a child, after all, makes himself known by his acts. This high-minded quest was to be forever accompanied by feelings of guilt and inadequacy, for I discovered I could be pretty grabby when it came to earthly goods, and occasionally I was inexplicably bad, like when I stole a pair of doll shoes from the Woolworth’s on Flatbush Avenue or turned off the light and locked Mary Ellen into the bathroom just to give her a scare. And although I deliberately did kind things, too, I had inherited a terrible temper and was not big on forgiveness prior to revenge. In the end, I only hoped the good in me would outweigh the bad.

I still felt the constant presence of my original God, still knew He did not dwell exclusively in one particular house. And though billions of other souls had claim on him, I never doubted that He looked out for me in some special way. I added the Lord’s Prayer to my silent monologues and felt forgiven every night for all of my trespasses. I was distracted now, and growing up, but a ring of ritual encircled me. I had known a few storms, survived them, and felt reasonably safe. I suppose I didn’t think about it so much.

But years passed. My own invulnerable father abruptly died one October night while I was far away. The kidney disease took its toll on my brother and my sister, people I loved dearly were struggling and sad, and the furies of the world raged on. There was not a shred of evidence that anything existed beyond the bleak present to make sense of all the suffering. The dead grew more dead each day, and my God had wandered off into another universe, or maybe He was preoccupied—or maybe He had simply never been.

I came upon a quote by Emile Durkheim: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” These words disturbed me more than anything I had ever read, for suddenly I suspected that indeed it had been necessary, and if God was not a human invention, I wanted a sign. But no sign was forthcoming. Not even my father could break through from wherever death had taken him.  If doubt was a sin, I prayed for forgiveness, for the only thing I believed with certainty was that nothing could be certain. Now I was the exile, banished from the infinite, relegated to the secular world of rocks and buildings. Everything had grown smaller.

A memory from long ago came to me one day, of my father pushing me high in a swing in Prospect Park at dusk. As I soared through the summer air, I saw the tiny lanterns of a hundred fireflies, felt the joy of the wind, trusted so completely that I would return safely back to my father’s hands that I didn’t even think about it.  I simply sailed with abandon, leaning back to see the sky, freed by my faith.

And thus had I started out life. When did flying become falling?

And why did I suddenly require tangible proof of the unimaginable? How ungrateful I was for the many years God had been within me and without me, both intimate and limitless. I began to see that I might in some small way reflect God like a mirror. If I found it in my heart to forgive myself, then perhaps I might be forgiven. If I led a life of love, perhaps I was not inventing a loving God, but emulating one. If I chose to believe there was more than I could see, there was more than I could see. It was not God who had turned away, but me.

“Learn slowly and ask questions,” advised a Muslim friend, “because all of the answers will point to the truth.”

I’m asking. I’m looking around, too. And I’m quite convinced that if God exists, He isn’t fond of churches based on arbitrary tree fort rules and doctrine enforced by terror. I’m pretty sure he’s not obsessed with dismantling health and welfare services, or redacting parts of history, and he certainly isn’t fretting about who we choose to love. ‘That is not what I meant,” I can picture Him saying, “That is not what I meant at all.”

My questions linger unresolved, but I’ve grown used to ambiguity. What I lack in conviction I more than make up for in hope, and I feel love as a powerful force. I’m very big on gratitude too—I am astonished daily by the wonders around me, and thankful for the privilege of bearing witness.

And sometimes, in a Buddhist kind of stillness, I have sensed the peace of no questions, just the pulsating heart of the organism that is earth and my own soul like water, clear and uncontained.

But once I heard an angel sing.