In Competition with G-d?

An Author's Backstory

It was a hot, humid day in a suburb north of Chicago.  The lake was only three blocks away, but no breeze ruffled the white eyelet curtains of the bedroom window.  The room was on the second story, shaded by old oak trees.  Children’s voices drifted in the window along with the faint chirps of birds.

She lay with head at the foot, kicking her legs over the covers of the unmade bed, crying.   She had just turned sixteen, but her sobs were those of a petulant child.  She wanted it her way, and it wasn’t happening.  She was angry at G-d.

Tears brought no relief.  Her mind was racing.  It dashed from possibility to possibility, like a young chick trying to find an opening large enough to squeeze through a fence.  Or a child rattling doorknobs in hopes of finding one that opened.  She was looking for a strategy, a plan of action.  How could she get around all the precepts and laws?  She wanted it her way!

Her face was towards the wall.  She saw the aging wallpaper covered with flowers detailed in greyed hues of blue, green and brown, twining in a pattern that climbed and enfolded.  Her cheeks were damp with salty tears, but her sobs were dry, forced.  Tension filled her chest.  She became still, clenched.

“There must be a way!” she thought.  “There must be a way I can outsmart G-d!”

Suddenly she heard her thought.  “Outsmart G-d?  What am I thinking?”  Everything became clear.  She laughed, amazed at her silliness.  The tension subsided.  She felt copesetic.

Grandfather and granddaughter, heads titled towards the sky

Much later she learned a word for this kind of understanding.  It was ineffable, an understanding that can’t be put into words.  It can’t be put into words because it is the source of words.  It can’t be known because it is the source of knowing. 

She didn’t understand how this worked, but it explained things in a way that was meaningful to her.  It explained strange things that she felt to be the pillars of well-being, for herself and all that was around her.  Things that seemed to float in categories that were hard to define.  Things that she was able to think about without understanding.  Things like infinity and love and forgiveness.  These things seemed to work.

She liked things that worked.  She had spent her childhood paying attention to what worked and what didn’t.   Sometimes things worked in her family, and sometimes they didn’t.  Sometimes it was like heaven, and sometimes it was crazy and frightening with no relief in sight.  In the morning, it seemed that there was always forgiveness. 

She craved understanding how to keep it in the heaven-like flow all of the time.   She experimented to see what worked and what didn’t.  She got her ideas from bits she picked up from her parents and teachers, and from the books she read.

She didn’t understand many of the things, but they were repeated often enough that when she came to experience them, suddenly she would remember and come to an idea of how they worked and their significance.  Things like, “Honey attracts more flies than vinegar,” “To thine own self be true,” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” “Blowing out someone else’s candle doesn’t make yours shine any brighter,” “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again!” “A stitch in time saves nine,” “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” 

She read lots of books.  Her favorites were by authors like Frances Hedges Burnett, George MacDonald, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louise May Alcott, Elizabeth Coatsworth, Madeline L’Engle, Kate Serady, L. Frank Baum, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Brontë sisters, Emily and Charlotte.  These books traced stories whose characters behaved in ways that were guided by something hidden, something that remained even when seemingly completely absent. 

To follow this invisible guide seemed fantastic.  She wondered how it worked.  She experimented during the moments of chaos, the times emotions were high and violence was roiling.  She tried it when healing was needed. 

It was simple.  All she needed to do was to take another’s perspective, to consider what was driving them, and to feel sorry for their terrible angst.  She found it worked, so she kept up her experiments.  She didn’t know how it worked, but the results were enough.  They became data.

Long before, she had found a place in which she could deposit data.  It was where she kept open questions and vague, half-baked ideas.  The place was expansive.  She had come upon it the night she had discovered why she couldn’t understand infinity.  She was a five-year old then, standing on a dark beach in Southampton on Long Island.  Stepping out of the family circle of light, her father had come to check on her.  “Are you cold?” he had asked.

Together they marveled at the star-filled sky.  “It goes on forever,” her father had said.  “It stretches to infinity.”  This was a new word and a new idea.  How could it be?  She had peered deeper and deeper into the night sky, trying to imagine how infinity could have no end. 

Her father returned to the merry circle of family reunion chatter.  Puzzled, she had stood alone in the steady sea breeze, smelling the salt air, listening to the lapping of the waves, feeling her skin grow thick with goose bumps, gazing at the stars.

Eureka! Suddenly she understood why she couldn’t understand.  It made her laugh.  Her father came back to gather her into the warmth of the circle.  Excited, she told him.  “Daddy!  I understand why I can’t understand!  It’s because my head ends here,” she exclaimed, indicating its outline with her hands, “And infinity stretches on forever.  It’s too big to fit in!”

With that, she had discovered a method to understand things she didn’t understand.  Call it “successive approximation.”  It was a satisfaction with “good enough” that allowed her to use ideas whose contours and boundaries were not yet clear.  In using them, she could experiment, look for what worked and begin to discern small differences.

Over time she had continued to explore, assembling facts and feelings, bits of knowledge and an increasing number of open questions.  The aim was integration, to make sense of all of her experience together.  The method was something like the superposition state.  It was an indeterminant way.  She had neither to discard information she couldn’t comprehend, nor to stop in her tracks before continuing.  It was a way of living with “suspended disbelief.”  She could be strangely attracted to things like paradox without understanding why.  To her, the notion of G-d was of that ilk. 

No wonder she laughed when she realized that she had been trying to outsmart G-d! As the Prophet Isaiah asks, “Does the clay say to the one who fashions it, ‘What are you making?’ or ‘Your work has no handles’?”  She had grokked that no matter what image she was able to conceive, it would be her own creation.  Coincidently, that was also the definition of an idol.  She wasn’t interest in idols.  Nope, she was the thing in the process of creation.

Trails of dried salt crinkled her cheeks.  The desire to deal with the mess she had made stirred.  Tickled by her silly ploy, an event already transformed into a lesson of liminal goodness, she felt no waft of shadow.  Rather, the sense of light as present Presence.  A new and deeper understanding of something beyond all she could imagine.

There was no competition with G-d.  The challenge was not outside.  The challenge was within.