I’m tempted to say that as a little boy I found God in the swirly patterns on my bedroom ceiling. Some of my earliest memories are of me, a lifelong asthmatic, huffing and puffing on my twin bed looking upwards trying to make heads or tails of the stucco moonscape that was my window into another world for more days than I care to remember. A psychologist I went to in college once summed up the origins of my, well, let’s say complicated character, in one simple yet brutal sentence. “You spent too much time alone as a child,” she said just before my session was up. That was a fun walk back to class.
Gazing at the uneven texture of the stucco above me helped me escape from the prison to which my little lungs had me condemned. Was that a tree? No maybe it was a hand. And the more I stared at this or that blob, the more it didn’t matter what it was or represented. It was like looking at a desert landscape at dusk, when all the dangerous, jagged edges of daytime melt together into a mysterious, fluid, and ultimately comforting silhouette on the horizon.
So it wasn’t God that I found in my second floor bedroom as much as it was an escape hatch to a place where I could conjure up the meanings of patterns and shapes or just lie back and appreciate the wonderful blobbiness of it all.
I wasn’t raised in a religion. There was no talk of Jesus or the saints or angels when I was a boy. I came to my desire for transcendence on my own and clearly out of a need to escape my circumstances. Looking back, I figure that I had two choices when suffering a bad asthma attack. I could fantasize about having my dad rush me again to the emergency room at the hospital I was born at in Hollywood or I could fixate on the mysterious world just a few feet above my head.
As I grew older, I came to desire a more sophisticated understanding of my relationship with whatever it is that exists above this plane on which we live our natural lives. I read the tracts of medieval saints and books by contemporary theologians, but I never truly replaced my initial childhood instinct that that which is sacred is simply whatever it is that takes us above the constraints, the smallness, and the pain of our lives and let’s us take deeper, healthier, more robust breaths of air—both literally and figuratively–than our current conditions allow.
Sure, over time I came to understand the blob I looked to at 6 years old to be the source of life, the essence from which we came and would perhaps return. But I could never imagine that source to be some sort of image of perfection, let alone a perfect being. Consequently, I don’t have a particularly comforting image of a God or Gods. I don’t believe in an all-knowing supreme being who understands all my pains and doubts. If God is the source of all life, I certainly can’t believe that He is still planning all this craziness. At the very best, I can imagine that She is the source of life in the way that a hiker in the wilderness is the source of a campfire that got way out of her control. I guess you could say that in my mind, God is a bit of a hapless figure.
I realized this last year after stumbling onto The Wounded Angel, which is, as it turns out, the most beloved painting in Finland. I had taken refuge in Helsinki’s Ateneum, Finland’s National Gallery, on a gloomy 14°F degree January day and never expected to be so moved by its prized possession. The 1903 masterpiece by symbolist Hugo Simberg is disturbing, melancholy at best. Two sullen boys are carrying an injured angel on a stretcher, her forehead is bandaged and her wing bloodied. Her head is down as if dejected and she seems to be using all her strength to keep herself upright on the journey. Poor angel.
I walked away from the painting that day thinking about other pitiful depictions of supernatural beings. I recalled César Vallejo’s glorious 1918 poem, “Dios”, in which he speaks to, and of, the Almighty with such tenderness.
But I feel God. And it even seems
that he sets aside some good color for me.
He is kind and sad, like those that care for the sick;
he whispers with sweet contempt like a lover’s:
his heart must give him great pain.
The poem (translation here by Robert Bly) ends with a beautiful tribute to a deity Vallejo sees as something of an awkward, somewhat impotent, figure.
I consecrate you, God, because you love so much;
because you never smile; because your heart
must all the time give you great pain.
So, it seems, our image of God doesn’t have to be perfect or all knowing or all-powerful for us to be drawn to Him and new ways of understanding our lives and the world we live in.
Last night, I walked my friend Frank home through L.A.’s Koreatown while he tried to explain to me the theological rationale for why Jesus, the Son of God, expressed such sorrow before he died. There are few passages of the Gospels more moving than “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Frank explained that these words were a sign of Jesus’ humanity, and that Jesus had to suffer as a man—”had to let sin overcome him”–in order to save us from our own sin. I told him I couldn’t follow the logic, and he laughed.
Because to me, it’s enough that this God-Man figure is depicted as suffering like a human, that these images resonate with our own experiences on earth, and, ideally, help us learn to take pity on others, to empathize, to realize that it’s the pain, the imperfection, the desire to transcend it all, that makes us all human in the first place.
