Some Thoughts on God

I am always having glancing conversations about what I mean by "God". By "glancing," I mean that I say or imply something about my relationship with God, my beliefs about the mechanisms of the universe, or why I think Scott Walker has more than bad legislation on his CV, and I inevitably get it wrong. Either I say too little (i.e., "Jesus was definitely a Union guy...") or I say too much. Which I'm about to do.

The briefest possible way I can explain what I believe is to say that believing is an act, not a feeling. Feeling is an act, too.

When I was a teenage girl, alienated from my family because of years of strange and painful things that no one really wanted to talk about, I moved in with my boyfriend, because I could. My father, absent from my life for five years, and someone I was deeply angry with at the time, wrote me a letter. The front, an old toothless man, laughing a huge, gummy guffaw. The back, the following: Every moment of your life is a divergence from what the universe would have been without you.

I put it on my bathroom mirror, and when I moved out hurriedly, to better pursue my career in hardware and drug use, I took it with me. I found it hollowly inspirational- like a Hallmark card or a cliché involving animal behavior. Three years later, I was pregnant, and decidedly much more concerned about the universe. I wondered about it then. I postulated, in a feeble, pot-head Buddist way, that people were like oceans- if you stuck your little finger in one spot, the water would be equally displaced everywhere.

Everything you did, breathe, eat, sing- changed the universe in some, finger-in-the-ocean type way. Then my son was born. I needed to know the world was good enough for this child. I began to look for God.

I found him in Iceland, on the back of a physics book, in the italicized principles of thermodynamics (ironically, just as I was discussing the sad reality that he did not exist with my friend Kate, in Maine).

“Matter/Energy is neither created nor destroyed. Only changed.” I choked on the phone. Matter/Energy is not created or destroyed. Not created or destroyed? Only changed. Where did it come from?

Everything would have to be recycled, making Solomon's “nothing new” comment a little more empirical than prophetic. That meant that everything I was now was something else before it was me. That meant that everything I was would eventually be something else. And nothing was coming from anywhere. It was all here, just shuffled around. Changing from one to the other. So some organizing force, some God, in some form, had to exist. We were all eternal. Already, before I noticed. And after. There is no past, no future. It is and has always been now.

There is a line in Michael Ende's book, Momo, when Guisseppe asks Momo how old she is, and she replies, “As far as I know, I've always been around.” I think it's true. What would that mean to us? Is a human life what eternity means by “tomorrow?” Not "time" or "begin" or "end", but change? Can we remember? Can we learn? Can we learn right down to the most microscopic delineation of “we?”

How much of what happens to us is primarily ours alone, not yours, but mine, particularly? How much do we share? How are we changing the universe in every moment?

If our own consciousness does indeed dwell in our cells, then when our cells die, so does our consciousness, right? But within the cells are more tiny universes, and within those, more still. The cells are to consciousness what the body is to cells. Where does memory, learning, wisdom reside? We struggle to make a distinction between our minds and our bodies, eager to consign our bodies to the ether, our souls like ghosts that hover over our heads or lurk inside our flesh, waiting to be released like balloons from a net. But the mind is at the mercy of the brain- damage the brain, and the mind suffers.

Our thoughts are matter or energy. They are made of stuff. Our feelings are, too. We are organizing and sending our own patterns of stuff around the universe -of the universe - all the time. We are touching everything, in our regard of it, all the time. And everything, every new pattern of thought that corresponds with out own experience, our own soul or mind, was something else before, and will be something after. How much do we share? What of me is you, too, right now?

When I think of it, it breaks my heart with precisely the same crushing strength that it uses to open me wide, like a nascent star.

And brings up an interesting question, one I'll be wrestling with for the rest of my life (maybe longer, depending on how this whole God thing turns out): So, if my intentions, my feelings and thoughts are capable of moving and changing the literal fabric of the universe inside the confines of rules I can't and will never understand, what can I do to/with/for God? What am I? What can we do, really?

I don't know. I don't know why I am this and you are that, or why Rwanda happened to her and not to him. I don't know why cancer, why Powerball, why war, why quadruplets. I don't know where or what God is or understand the conversion of matter and energy with any wisdom but hindsight. What I know is that my beliefs are more plentiful, more powerful than my tiny hands, and the most powerful feeling I am capable of is love. My love is the most powerful transformative force I can wield. So, while I don't know how the whole thing works and likely never will, I know that my love is a creative act. It's a thing I can do. And I want to do good.

If it was always now, according to our stuff, another conformation of now doesn't have to include this hate machine or that constellation of shared sorrow, which are using the building materials that might otherwise be devoted to moons or oceans or God. We could recycle the machines of the tragedies and the injuries and the wars and wars and wars and add them to the air in pieces; sent out as benign components of a malignant structure, the whole of which is less than the sum of its parts. We could return them to God as love, so He can build impossible things from them.

We have such power over each other, and such importance to each other. Could I forgive your father? Could you stop my grandmother being abused? Could we stop Dahmer? Hitler? Could we create deities, demons, miracles, planets? Could I change all the horrors by focusing my love toward them? Could we heal your ailing body? How much of those memories, the responsibility for continually affirming the sadness and anger and wretchedness they evoke, do I share? If I can change the world by moving from one end of the room to the other, by bearing children, by eating more spinach - then I should be able to change, at a molecular level, the lessons we learn from the memories we share. And the events, the memories themselves, will actually, really change.

All you have to do is change your mind.

When I say "God," when I pray, I pray to this- the magnificent force of creation and entropy that is shuffling all this stuff around. I believe with my love and my hope and the best, most beautiful parts of me in the story that makes me best understand the meaning of my own life, and the relationship it has with everyone else, because my belief helps build it. I have faith in God because my faith is a creative force, and because it's something I can tangibly give back to the God that made me. It is the only power I have, but it's a pretty good power.