The French writer Guy de Maupassant despised the Eiffel Tower. He found it hideous. Every day, though, he would dine at the tower’s restaurant. It was the only place in Paris, explained Maupassant, where he didn’t have to look at the Eiffel Tower. Maupassant never said whether he continued to loathe the tower after lunching in it for so many years. I suspect he did not. Familiarity does not, as we’re told, breed contempt but, thankfully, affection. From a distance, I found Judaism about as appealing as Maupassant’s Eiffel Tower. Up close, my perspective shifted. Or to put it another way: I could only see Judaism clearly once I could no longer see it.
Jews pride themselves on being not only the people of the book but the people of the question, and there is no bigger question than the one the nurse asked me in that cold and sterile hospital room: Have you found your God yet? Those six words propelled me around the world and way, way out of my comfort zone. Alas, I now realize it is the wrong question. God is not a set of missing car keys or an exit on the New Jersey Turnpike. He is not a destination. He’s as close as our jugular, as the Muslims say. In that sense, all spiritual searches are round-trip journeys. We travel in order to discover that there is nowhere to go. We turn, like a dervish, returning to the same spot where we started. The spot is the same but we are not. The point of turning—as well as praying, meditating, fasting, genuflecting, and every other spiritual technique out there—is to elicit a slight shift in our orientation. Rilke was right: God is a direction. We’re like satellite dishes, swiveling, scanning the heavens for a signal, swiveling a bit more, scanning again. A few degrees in this direction or that can mean the difference between a strong signal and dead silence. Usually, it’s the latter. We swivel and swivel, and nothing. The atheist says that’s because there is no signal to receive. The devout and confused keep swiveling, searching. In spite of.
There’s a great line from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita: “He who looks for God, finds Him where he wants.” If true, then I consider my search a success, for I have learned much. I learned about the importance of breathing and the primacy of the human heart and the beauty of slowness and the creative impulse that lies at the heart of all religions. I learned that I am fishier than I thought. I learned that shaving one’s legs is a task not to be undertaken lightly, and that it is much easier to liberate breasts than minds. I learned all these things, and more, not from a book but from “the voice of a stranger,” as Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, puts it. My strangers—Sandie and Jamie and Yedidah and Wayne and the rest—changed the way I think of God. He is not the Cosmic Male Parent, not that only. God is also loving and generous, and silly. Mostly, though, He is elusive. “Something like the wind, not much more,” as Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz puts it.
I learned (or, rather, confirmed) that there is a lot of bad religion out there. It’s about time, I think, that we distinguished between bad religion and good religion, just as we distinguish between bad science and good science, bad food and good food. Bad religion diminishes us. Good religion elevates us, makes us better people than we thought we were, than we thought possible. Good religion is a kind of applied philosophy, and with all philosophy, asking the right questions is at least half the game. What do you believe? That is a common question, but not a particularly helpful one. With all due respect, I don’t care what you believe. What do you experience? What do you do? That’s what William James wanted to know, and it’s what I want to know too.
Eight might seem like a lot of gods, but I barely scratched the surface. I could continue flirting with these deities for a lifetime—or lifetimes, as my Buddhist friends would say. Yet a still, small voice inside me, a voice with a distinctly nasal Staten Island timbre, warns against such spiritual promiscuity. Sporadic flirtation makes life interesting. Persistent flirtation suggests we’re afraid of something. Flirtation, it’s been said, is “the art of keeping intimacy at a safe distance.” That is not what I want. No, my flirting days are over.
At the start of my journey, in California, I met a Sufi named Wali Ali, who told me, “You can’t be any wiser than you are.” At the time, I thought it was just another New-Age-ism uttered by a deep-fried hippie with a funny name. I was wrong. What Wali Ali meant was that we start our journey in a certain place, and as much as we’d like that place to be, say, Paris or Bali, it’s usually Cleveland or Baltimore. We must recognize that, accept it. We never fully escape our past, nor need we. We sip from these wisdom traditions, imbibe of their truths, yet they will always remain the “other.” The best we can hope for is that bits and pieces of this wisdom seep into our marrow. This happens more often than I thought possible, and not despite our basic fuckedupness but because of it.
Indeed, that is the goal of all religion, all good religion: to transform the most repulsive parts of ourselves into something worthy not only of acceptance, but of love. “To make our darkness conscious,” as Jung puts it. Toward this aim, spiritual calisthenics like prayer and meditation help, but ultimately this transformation, this alchemy, remains a mysterious process, one that Christians call grace and Buddhists suchness, and Taoists don’t even bother to name. It is always a gift, never an entitlement, and it only appears once we stop looking. Madam H. was right. We don’t choose a religion. It chooses us. What is required of us is a kind of passive action. We need to do our part—pray, meditate, read—and then wait. As they say, the waiting is the hardest part.
I still have many doubts. Indeed, I am a tower of doubts, and that is okay for, as the renegade economist E. F. Schumacher says: “matters that are beyond doubt are, in a sense, dead; they constitute no challenge to the living.” Doubts are not an end but a means; they are desirable. William James once said that “the word ‘or’ names a genuine reality.” It took me awhile to wrap my mind around that one but now I think I know what he meant. We always live on the cusp, caught between two robust jet streams blowing in opposite directions, and that is okay. That is the way things are. The way things should be.
So, instead of looking for my God, I must invent Him. Not exactly invent. Construct. Assemble. His foundation is Jewish, but His support beams Buddhist. He has the heart of Sufism, the simplicity of Taoism, the generosity of the Franciscans, the hedonistic streak of the Raëlians. For a long time, I didn’t think such a composite God was possible. The New Agers I met in California had cobbled together a God, of sorts, except they forgot the glue. There’s nothing holding their God together, so they’re constantly chasing after the little bits and pieces. Yes, glue is important. Another difference: The New Agers never know, really know, the components that make up their composite God. So the entire enterprise is shaky.
Not that mine is so solid. I observe the start of the Sabbath, though not as often as I should. I meditate, though not very well or for very long. I say grace before meals, though sometimes I forget. I do some qi gong, more or less. Together, though, these parts add up to something. Is it true? Yes. No. Truth is what works. And this composite God works for me. I now look forward to the Jewish holidays at my brother’s house. When my daughter, now almost seven years old, speaks of God, I no longer wince. I am grounding her in her own faith, but will not despair should she choose another, or none at all.
As for my Tokyo story, there has yet to be a sequel. I’ve stopped expecting one, expectations being the great enemy of experience. Yet I continue to wait and, every now and then, swivel a few degrees this way or that.
In spite of.