When God Disappears

Do you call them fireflies or lightning bugs? Every Fourth of July, we would stay out tracking down the little critters as they flew out of the woods and across our yard. They were beacons of wonder — daring any child to doubt their existence whenever they dimmed.

Little hands had to be careful and gentle as they scooped the lights out of the air. Then we’d run back to the house and drop them into a great, big jar where the light was bottled up, safe for keeping.

Except that fireflies don’t look that pretty up close. I mean, they’re beetles after all… And when you wrap up the night and take that jar inside you realize just exactly what you’ve done: put a bunch of panicked bugs in a jar and brought them in your own house.

Where did the magic go?

Rabbi Brent Spodek wrote of different kinds of wonder a few years back:

I can love the same woman my whole life, but just as I change, so does she. The letter I write to her when I am a teenager courting her is not the same letter I write when I am a young adventurer, which is not the same letter I will write when she bears our children, which is not the same letter I will write her when we retire, which is not the same letter I will write her when, God willing, we are old and at the end of days.

To hand her a xerox of the same letter year after year would make a mockery of what love is, and so it is with prayer. It is one woman who I love, but the letters change and change again.

Like the many letters to my one wife, which change as the years pass, the prayers I offer to God and the God I imagine receiving them change as time passes.

At the risk of comparing bugs, spouses, and God with each other, there’s a common thread of changing wonder. Changing expectations. Changing perspectives.

The God that I knew as a child had no place in my life as time wore on. That hurts. God is a “rock” and rocks don’t disappear. For me, God had become Martin Buber’s “frozen metaphor”. An image of God that “is not just a metaphor but a description of the true being of God,” as Rabbi Stephen Wylen writes. In other words, an idol.

I had a lot of religious idols as a kid. At church and at my Catholic school, it was sometimes hard to find a space where a saint’s eyes weren’t watching. As we reenacted the stations of the cross, we were reminded by the nuns: nothing hurts like the pain of the spikes going through Jesus’s hands. I spent hours staring at the porcelain figure’s overly rosy cheeks as it hung from the cross while we listened to scripture. “God” seemed easy. He was right over there.

Those who say they believe in God and those who say they don’t are generally talking about the same God — really tall, big beard, sits on a throne, sounds like Darth Vader. It’s the God that we imagine sitting and receiving or rejecting our prayers and managing the world the way a child manages stuffed animals in her room. It’s a god who tells us to do stuff or not do stuff and then rewards us or punishes us accordingly. Put simply, it’s Zeus.

That’s not the God I believe in. But that’s not the only understanding of God available to us. For sure, it’s one of the metaphors for God, but it’s not even the main metaphor of the Divine in the Jewish tradition.

Eventually, I left behind those frozen metaphors: “God as porcelain idol” and “God as Zeus”. They did not make sense in the world that I lived in. I left behind religion with them.

I started using words like “love”, “innate human dignity”, and even “the inherent responsibility of humans to make the world a better place” to take the place of the otherworldly commands that I had been given in school. Was there a word for that?

It’s hard to look into a child’s eyes — any child — and not see these truths, self-evident. There is wonder there. There is life. There is meaning. אל חי.

And even when fireflies dim, the light still exists by another name.

Even when the magic ends, the wonder is no less true.

Martin Buber wrote nearly one hundred years ago:

Man desires to possess God; he desires a continuity in space and time of possession of God. He is not content with the inexpressible confirmation of meaning, but wants to see this confirmation stretched out as something that can be continually taken up and handled, a continuum unbroken in space and time that insures his life at every point and every moment.

Many of us expect religion to be comforting. Many of us expect God to be a rock. We expect continuity. These expectations can lead us to believe that living a religious life should be easy and full of the certainty of faith. But life is hard and full of worry. Sometimes we have to work to find that meaning, especially as it changes over time. That doesn’t mean that “God as love”, “God as dignity”, “God as tikkun olam” does not exist.