Theology: a Guest Blog

This is from my friend J in Ohio about her five-year-old:

We were driving home from Young's (Their real motto: "The Dairy with Cows") after a meeting with Julie, Josh and the three kids, and were discussing Julie's dying father, which led to a discussion of God. After a brief back-and-forth, i.e., what is God? and Is god a person? Is god dead? Jen answered obliquely: some people think God is an idea, etc. There was also a tie-in with the spiritual, recently viewed on a 1930s Disney animation "Who built the ark? Noah, Noah" and that God told him to build an ark. Then Joseph considered the whole discussion, and finally said, "I know what god is: he is a tiny person that lives inside your heart and whispers to you; god is a whisper in your heart." Then, there was more discussion about whether God was on the ark with Noah, or whether he drowned in the flood. Finally, Joseph said, "I think God died a long time before Noah was born, and that he was a ghost who lived inside Noah, and that way he was on the Ark, but didn't take up any space because he was inside Noah." Later the next day, I asked Joseph whether he had ever discussed God at school or anywhere else. He said "No, I have that same whisper inside my heart."

Sins

I threw my sins into the lake yesterday. It's a Rosh Hashanah custom. Usually we throw bread crumbs as a stand-in, but there's talk that the crumbs could upset the ecosystem. So I threw a very few crumbs and some sand and some rocks. Seagulls found us and hovered and dove and one of them went after a rock I threw, thinking it was bread. I was glad the bird came up empty. It would be terrible to be responsible for killing a seagull while you were throwing off your last year's sins. The synagogue I went to is unaffiliated, meaning it's not Reform or Conservative or Orthodox or Traditional or Conservadox or Reconstructionist or Renewal. Though it seems like Renewal. Stuff about breathing and light in the photocopied prayer book, and God isn't called "he" unless there's a reference to "she" coming up soon. I've never understood what's so revolutionary about making God genderless or hermaphroditic. To me the issue is God in general. I don't believe in God, though I've mellowed over the last year or so (not related to cancer) and can accept God as a label for the ineffable liveliness of the atoms inside each of us and everything around us. I was telling L about this last night and he said then who are you praying to? I said it's general gratitude. He said why do you need that? I said it makes you more grateful for what you have. He accepted that. This veers into the teachings of the Harvard Happier guru (mentioned a few posts below) Tal Ben-Shahar who writes down every night what he's grateful for. There's nothing wrong with being grateful, though it's very 12-steppy--"attitude of gratitude." Like anything, it can become meaningless and rote and banal. I think it's the banality that bothers me more than anything else. I read "Pollyanna" for the first time when I went to summer camp and got the mumps. I read it in the infirmary while I petted a denatured skunk and waited for my parents to come get me. That was my best ever camp experience. Being inside, reading. What could be better? Pollyanna is, well, Pollyanna-ish, but not in a bland way. She learned the bright way of looking at things from her (poor, dead) father, and it was a way of having fun, not of avoiding reality. And as we learned in shul yesterday, Isaac's name means "laughter," because his mother, Sara, laughed when told she would give birth in old age. All this is in the Torah portion read on Rosh Hashanah. Isaac married Rebecca, the rabbi told us, and we are told they played together. Later he said that Rebecca was only 3 when they met, and they didn't consummate their union (thank goodness) for 20 years. This is the only instance where we are told a couple played together, the rabbi said.

And I write this as if I believe these were real people. As real as Pollyanna.

Bourgeois Pig (R)

Yesterday I was at the Bourgeois Pig(R) Cafe, where we were married, and I overheard two girls reading from Chicago guidebooks, on and on about Al Capone and other gangsters. The Pig is around the corner from the Biograph Theater, where John Dillinger was gunned down by the FBI in 1934. Then the girls started conversing, and so softly I couldn't tell if it was English. Then I was pretty sure it was Dutch, and I wanted to ask them but I didn't and then they left. I wanted to be a Friendly American in an Old Building in a New City. Next two graduating music majors sat at the table. One was studying German and had a slight accent I couldn't place. They were talking about the future: I'm going to wash windows at stoplights like gypsies do, she said. The guy said: If music doesn't work out I'm going to work in the airline industry. He loves to fly. It's been a long time since I've met (OK, we didn't exactly meet) someone who loves to fly. The girl said it was dangerous but he said it wasn't, and besides, he could get a job on the ground.

He asked the girl when she had come to the US and she said 12 years ago, when she was 13. I imagined she was from Bosnia, then. But I don't know.

The attraction of eavesdropping--what is private becomes public. The image of a person lying across the eaves to hear what's being said on the street below, or inside. Eavesdropping is the closest I get to reading minds. I'm one of those people who has the desire to be like Sherlock Holmes or Henry Higgins (both fictional characters, of course), to be able to discern so much about a person from voice and subtle characteristics that only you can pick up.

At another table a slight kid was talking to a more substantial and older man, probably a professor, about resurrection and such. I don't believe in hell, the kid said. I think souls go off into the other world and see each other and say hi.

It reminded me of why I liked teaching gifted high school students at WRU in the summer. I remember one Saturday night as we were standing in line to get into a dance sponsored by the program, a kid said to me, I don't know if I really believe in God.

At a certain age, everything is important, everything is open. And then after some years have passed--saying certain things make you sound naive.