Conversations with God
As one of the Chosen People (™) I grew up having a special, personal relationship with God. Or something I called God.
That god was a childish cartoon version of the Jewish god. I talked to him—I guess it was a him. And he talked to me.
That was nice for me as a kid.
I tried to be good because I believed that God was watching me. And when bad things happened to me—as they did from time to time—I thought God was teaching me a lesson.
I didn’t feel God was punishing me because the God that I believed in was not a punishing God. He was a loving God. The God I imagined was drawn from what I understood as the Christian tradition more than what I understood as the Jewish.
When bad things happened, I asked, “What am I supposed to learn from this,” because God wanted me to learn. Sometimes, it would be repeated when I didn’t learn the lesson. Eventually, I’ve learned some hard lessons. Some are yet to come.
The father of one family I babysat for was a Sunday school teacher. Their bookshelf contained a set of books called “The Interpreter’s Bible.” Each book in the set analyzed a different book of the New Testament. I started with Matthew, read it all the way to—not very far. Maybe I finished it. Maybe I skipped around. Who knows? I was a kid. But I read it far enough to know that there was a lot of room for interpretation; there were a lot of questionable translations from Greek to English.
I admired Jesus—although I knew he could not have been the Messiah. For one thing, there was no peace on Earth; too many people had killed and tortured others in his name. This was a disqualifier.
For another, we Jews were still waiting for the Messiah to come. So he couldn't have been the one.
Finally, and most importantly, I wanted to be the Messiah. And I thought that God might choose me.
It was possible. I had the necessary qualifications. I was Jewish. I had a direct relationship with God. I was willing to suffer to save the world.
Well, maybe my willingness to sacrifice didn’t extend to a painful death, but I was willing to experience a fair amount of discomfort if that was what it took to end war starvation and suffering.
Then I discovered sex. Technically. I didn’t so much discover sex as I learned to jerk off. I did jerked off a lot. Would the Messiah jerk off as much as I did? I thought not. But that was a mistake. Instead, I should have asked God “What am I supposed to learn from jerking off?”
I later discovered other things about myself that made me doubt my divinity.
But before that, I rejected Judaism.
I’d been Bar-Mitzvah at thirteen. Our temple had a “Confirmation Class,” which we were told would confirm our belief in God. In my case, it ended with me becoming an atheist.
Our Rabbi, Rabbi Grishman, taught the class and tried to confirm God’s existence by appealing to science. The problem was that I knew a lot more about science than he did, and I was a wiseass.
Rabbi Grishman argued that even though the universe sometimes seemed to be disorderly, science had discovered the order behind what sometimes seemed to be chaos. That order came from something, and that something was God.
He explained that even though there were hurricanes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters, science had determined that they happened in an orderly way.
I asked him, “What would be an example of something disorderly—something which, if it happened, would prove that God did not exist?” He hesitated, and I offered him this: “What if all the air in this room suddenly jumped into one corner, and as a result, we all suffocated?” He thought for a moment and agreed that such an event would show that the world was not orderly.
That was just what I’d planned for him to say. I pulled out my copy of George Gamow’s book “One, Two, Three…Infinity,” in which Gamow explains that such a thing can happen (although the probability is vanishingly small.) A smart Rabbi would have said, “I was wrong in saying that that would show that the world was not orderly. You’ve just brought me something that shows that the world is orderly, even though improbable events can occur. And the probability can even be calculated.”
A dumb Rabbi would have thrown me out of the class.
Which is what Rabbi Grishman did—at least according to my memory.
But I was dumb, too. A smart me would have realized that something that seemed disorderly was actually orderly. A smart me would have said, “My Rabbi is not the authority on the conditions under which God does exist, so maybe God exists, even though I suckered my Rabbi into saying what he said.”
So dumb me decided that I’d just proved that God did not exist.
That was when I was about 15 years old. I don’t remember what happened next, but I have a clear memory of being in my car near Omaha, Nebraska, and being angry at a God that I didn’t believe existed. I don’t know why I got mad. Maybe he didn’t grant me some wish. Maybe he allowed the war in Vietnam to keep going.
Whatever it was, God and I were quits for a while.
As I look back on myself, I see me as angry and vindictive while still imagining I was as generous and forgiving as I imagined Jesus to be.
There followed a spiritual journey that led me from Judaism (Reform Judiasm aka Judaism Lite) to an interest in Christianity and Christian Science, and several flirtations with Buddhism, then ten or fifteen years of Scientology. Then the belief expressed in Richard Dawkins’ book “The Selfish Gene” that people were nothing more than a gene’s way of producing another genome. There was nothing but matter and meat (a kind of matter.)
But I never entirely lost faith that there was something beyond the obvious facts of material existence.
Eventually, I made my peace with myself, my parents, and ultimately with God. Or rather a version of God, the God I don’t believe in.
And now I’m talking to God again. And He or She or It is talking to me.
“I don’t believe in You,” I said to God one time, deferentially capitalizing the word “You.”
“Do you think I give a sh*t?” God responded. “As long you try to live a good life and try to make the world a better place, I don’t give a flying f**k what you believe.”
That’s the kind of God I talk with.
Might not be your idea of God, but it’s mine. At least right now.