My God Complex

No, Not That Kind

By the age of twelve, I was thinking about God all the time.

Growing up, I had very little religious education. I attended Sunday school for about one month before my mother stopped making me go. Maybe—although she was a believer—she just wasn’t sufficiently committed to her two daughters’ religious education to schlep off to church instead of staying home to make us a pancakes-and-bacon breakfast. I’m not sure.

Although she didn’t make me attend Sunday school, Mom did make me go to confirmation classes. The only reason she offered for that was that other girls in my grade were going. Apparently it was a social thing. Maybe she wanted me to make some new friends. The classes were on Saturday mornings, which sucked.

Confirmation classes took place in a small, cramped room upstairs in the church. Inside the room was a dust-covered piano and stacks of children’s religious books. Each class started with attendance. If you were present, but hadn’t been to Sunday school the previous week, you said “here.” If you were present and had been at Sunday school the previous week, you said “both.” I felt self-conscious admitting to having quit going to Sunday school, so I would arbitrarily lie by saying “both,” so that I wouldn’t look bad. But I felt guilty to be routinely lying, in church of all places! Still, what could I do? Why did my mother put me in this awkward position?

I found the stories in our kids’ version of the bible incredibly boring. Our minister, a kind, impish old guy with white hair, did his best to spice things up and keep us from falling asleep by dramatically acting out some of the more exciting bits of the stories. At the end of the course we got baptized, during a church service. I received a tiny electric shock as the minister held the mic with one hand and touched the top of my head with his wet other hand. I wonder if some of the girls experienced the shock as God’s divine spirit entering their bodies through their scalp.

As disinterested as I was in the bible stories, I was fascinated by God. I thought about Him all the time. About Him knowing everything about me…always seeing where I was and what I was doing. I didn’t like thinking that he could see me, say, picking my nose, or not dusting under the knick-knacks in my bedroom. And, as I was in the early stages of puberty, I’d developed a habit that felt simultaneously incredible and deeply shameful. Did God witness me, in my rose-print pajamas, doing this divine, terrible thing?

But perhaps God didn’t know all my secrets? I needed to learn more about Him, so I asked my mother.

“God is a being who watches over us at all times,” she said.
Yikes—that’s exactly what I was afraid of!
“What do you mean ‘a being’? Is He like a person?”
“No, not a person. He’s a spirit,” she replied.
“Oh, like a ghost?”
She was thinking.
“God is in the sun, and the stars, in rainbows and the clouds, the oceans, the breezes…”
I think Mom was feeling quite poetic.
“What do you mean He’s in them? How does that work? If He’s in the ocean, He must be under water, but is He up in the sky at the same time?”
“He’s not in them…He is the sky. And the clouds, the sun, the ocean...He is all those things.”
I was suspicious. “Why aren’t the sun, the clouds and all that just sun and clouds? It sounds like He’s nature. Why isn’t nature just…nature?”
I imagined she was starting to feel trapped. I know that I could be exasperating. But I wasn’t getting any kind of satisfying explanations. So not long after that, I asked my father the same question about God.

“Sorry, Kid,” he said. “I can’t answer that.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I don’t believe in any of that stuff.”
“Not even GOD?”
“Nope.”
Interesting. I ruminated over his reply for a long time.

This was starting to feel like the Santa Claus hoax that was pulled on children everywhere. I’d gotten wise to that one three years earlier, despite my parents’ best efforts to deceive me. It was a dirty trick; three-quarters of the magic was immediately sapped out of Christmas when I figured it out. But upon interviewing my friends on the subject, I learned that, even though they all had stopped believing in Santa ages ago, every one of them still believed in God. They never questioned His existence like they did Santa Claus. They just knew. It seemed everyone just knew, including my mother.

Everyone, that is, except Dad.

One morning, I was lying on my bed puzzling over God.My short legs were stretched out horizontally, the tips of my toes touching the pink wall. I gazed at the funny shadow that my legs and toes made against the wall. It was at that very moment that I announced to myself that I didn’t believe in him.

When I was very young, my mother used to say to me, “You’re as safe as if you were in God’s pocket.” I imagined myself inside the big square pocket of God’s enormous white robe, all snug and secure. I loved that feeling. But that magical, safe feeling came to an end on that morning as I stared at the shadow of my legs on the wall. At last I felt a sense of clarity, and I quit worrying about always being watched. However, in the bargain I’d also given up a lot of magic.

And so soon after having lost Santa Claus.

I can summon up a sense of magic when I’m witnessing beauty in nature; like when watching quietly-falling snow, or waves pounding against the wild Pacific coast, or a thunderstorm off in the distance in the New Mexican dessert, or tiny jewel-toned hummingbirds poking their beaks into honeysuckle. I guess Mom would call those aspects of God. I just call them part of nature. Still, whatever caused all this to exist in the first place is anybody’s guess.

Humans are plagued by this mystery. All we can have are guesses. Faith requires one to be certain of that which is unknowable and unprovable. I’m okay with not knowing, and with knowing that I can’t know, and knowing that I’ll never know. Not in this lifetime anyway.

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