2 In Little Things

My thoughts flutter choatically.
They are sporatic, like lightning.
I say something and then retract it;
I add on to a thought before changing my mind completely.
I triple-check myself constantly,

just to make sure that I haven’t forgotten something,

or to understand where I went wrong,

or to make sure I couldn’t have chosen a better answer.

Ideas and suggestions flit to the surface, even if I don’t want them to. Sometimes I just wish I could dim the buzzing in my head, just stop thinking so much for a moment, accept what comes my way as truth, quit making so many mental riddles for myself to solve. Hindsight is 20/20. I know this is true, so why does my mind continue to actively participate in the cliche?

I second-guess a lot; maybe I second-guess everything.

I’ve hesitated about God, too. A lot, actually. I haven’t always been confident that He wasn’t a figment of our collective imagination, a better option compared to the bismal alternative of there just being nothing else. Sometimes I try to link all the facts together and understand where the athiests are coming from, but then the theories fall short in some way. If you can’t explain how exactly He’s done it, it’s pretty hard to try and explain Him away.

My grandma gave me a picture-Bible when I was really young. The Rhyme Bible Storybook, by L.J. Sattgast. All the words rhymed, and the pictures were vibrant and evocative. Evocative is definitely the best word for them. They were by no means beautiful, or perfect–the lines didn’t always match up, and sometimes the colours bled out from behind their borders–but each picture had a presence on the page, emotions shown even in the painted skies. The pictures had just as much of a message to share with the world as the words beside them.

It sat on the window-sill in my grandma’s spare bedroom, and every time I stayed at her house I would pour over the pages. I absolutely loved that Bible, it was one of my favourite books–it still is. I look through it sometimes, just because. I have a lot of great memories connected with those pages, but I also have a lot of questions. It’s not Sattgast’s fault; the questions have been there for as long as I can remember. Am I the only one?

As a kid, Sunday School lessons taught me that Jesus called us his brothers and sisters; I could never understand where, if that were the case, we drew the line. I didn’t understand how he was my sibling in most of the Bible, the only ‘Son of God’ in other sections. My questions frustrated people, especially those closest to me. Sometimes you just have to have a little faithis what I heard a lot growing up.

I spoke with every priest and parishoner I felt comfortable with about my concerns with the Trinity, with God and Jesus, and how everything all fit together. I talked to quite a few people about it, and every time I walked away disappointed; my confusion had been deflected, not resolved.

I took a psych course last year, in an attempt to understand the inner workings of my mind a little better, maybe figure out where faith fit in my head, but all it confirmed for me was that humanity has no idea what’s going on; a lot of guesses and theories, a lot of gray-areas, a lot of ‘blanks filled in’.

Except.

Maybe some of those filled-in spaces were never blank. We spent the semester talking about risks and rewards, punishments and benefits, fear and coping mechanisms. We talked about the different reasons a person might agree to do something, be it for themselves or others or perhaps even inadvertently. We talked about classical and operant conditioning, about our behaviors and the nerve-paths that spark throughout our bodies. We even talked about humanity’s collective fear of death, and the ‘coping’ techniques our mind has developed to deal with the concept of mortality–which is what God probably is, after all.

I learned in class that God is ‘unfalsifiable’, and then I learned that was a bad thing. Since He can’t be defined or tested through any physical means, God has been declared at best, a psuedo-science. A baby thrown out with the bathwater.

We’ve tried dissecting him, but the pieces wouldn’t fit back together again; we’ve tried blowing him up, but He always manages to get away at the very last second; we’ve tried to fit Him into our world, but He just won’t squish. After being proven wrong time and time again, the only conclusion our species could come up with was that the tests were broken, therefore the results inconclusive. And there you have it. I learned a lot, got a pretty good mark, yet walked away feeling like none of it was what I went in there wanting to find out.

I’ve asked the same questions to a hundred different people looking for a pattern. I’ve asked the same questions to the same people, over and over, to see if the answer stayed the same. I have questioned the very idea of God more than once, more than a thousand times, more than I can count. I have asked everyone who would stop and listen long enough about their opinion on God, and their answers were good; they all struck a chord–or discord, so to speak–in me.

I have tried to reason it out so many times that my thoughts on the topic are like well-worn pathways, the conclusions all ending up at about the same place. I have asked God to send down some valid proof on more than one occassion of His existence and what I was supposed to do with the information. I don’t ask those kinds of questions anymore; fortunately, they aren’t there for me to ask.

For me, God is right up there with calculus and quantum physics in terms of my ability to interpret and comprehend.

But, I’m starting to find the answers…

I think.

Some of them make me laugh, because I realize they were always there for me to find.

God’s right out in the open, He isn’t hiding anywhere. I see Him in the face of the woman who smiles at me as I walk past her, in the way the Detroit river changes colour every day; every day another shade of blue or grey or green. I see God in the ant pile I step over on my way to class, and in the ‘thank you’ an elderly man gives me, when I hold the door open for Him. I think the problem before was that I was overthinking God, trying to mash everything I thought I knew into something I could understand–into something I could have faith in.

The other answers I’ve stumbled upon make me laugh because I’m twenty-two years old and have only now found them. How can I have walked through life in such a small bubble, and for so long?

I didn’t know what an Imamwas until last year; I didn’t know that a man reciting prayer could make a whole building stop breathing simultaneously.Why did I have to move three hours away from home before I heard the word “Islam”?

I’d never even seen a copy of the Qur’an yet; I didn’t understand that the pages would become blurry when I read some parts, the words resonating in every limb, every sense and nerve. The first copy I ever owned was cream-coloured with a beige frame around skinny black letters. It was over six hundred pages, filled to the brim with footnotes explaining all sorts of things, most of which I was proud to say I already knew (thanks, Sattgast). There were no pictures, but each page had the arabic verses alonside the english translation. The letters wove together into hemistiches of information that I would dog-ear, saving for later.

When I finished the last surahI knew I had just finished reading something life-changing. It wasn’t something to put away on a shelf; it was something I had to embrace, something I had to share. That copy was the one that I gave to mom, when I was finally ready. She wasn’t.

I looked out at the Detroit river, just a shade darker than the air. The sky pressed down on the ripples of water, stilling their motion; the next second, steel-gray water churned itself free, breaking into the sky above. They fused together, if you stood there long enough.

Seconds collected into minutes and still, my knuckles clung hard to the pale green railing. I was looking at an answer; it was right here, on the other side of the rusting metal, yet I had no idea how to put it into words. I felt this way all the time–like my senses weren’t properly connected; my eyes saw something my tongue couldn’t translate, or I’d smell something I couldn’t visualize, for example.

A lump grew in my throat, refusing to go away no matter how many times I swallowed. I felt the cold, bumpy steel beneath my fingers.

Faith is something I have a really hard time wrapping my head around–probably because it’s not something that’s inside my head. It’s there when I see sun spattered sidewalks beneath marbling maples, and when I hear the whisp of waves stealing moss off the tops of those unsteady stones. It’s in the thick air I take on the last warm day of the year, the feeling of the icy breeze off the water, painting my cheeks, no doubt hinting at tomorrow.

I was looking for faith inside books and webpages, inside my family and friends, but you can’t gain it that way. You can’t be told to have faith, you need to understand it in your own way–and standing here looking out at the Detroit river, the clouds finally clamouring into my view, I was finally understanding what faith felt like.

I turned my attention to the pathway, to the people. I didn’t really care about where they might be going, or how they were dressed, or what they looked like. I was curious about what they were thinking. I wonder if they wonder about God, they way I do–as often as I do. Am I the only out here constantly asking myself these questions? I see headphones blinding noise and eyes trained on cellphone screens. 2018 doesn’t seem to want to look up, so what is it looking at? What’s got everyone’s attention–what’s moreimportant?

Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but God isn’t exactly an area where there’s much room for this type of post-meditation; by the time we have the answers we think we want, the concept of ‘hindsight’ no longer applies.

Except:

The answers are in everything, everyone, everywhere. They are right in front of us, the problem is decoding them, understanding them. I think the problem is a lot of us don’t ask the right questions. To be honest, I think most of us are okay with not asking any questions at all.

It’s there, though.

Stop.

Close your eyes, take a breath.

Don’t you feel it too?