God in my spoon

My 5-year has been talking a lot about “God” recently. The comments are always off-hand and slipped in at moments I haven’t been able to immediately address them.  This morning at breakfast, he mentioned that God lives in the sky.  Where are you learning about God, I asked (surely not at home, where I involuntarily cringe whenever someone says anything that rings of the Catholicism with which I grew up and came to vehemently reject).  “God lives in the sky with his son and he protects us” was his reply. 

Pause, take a moment Mommy, because this has to be good.

“Some people believe that,” I offer gently. “I believe that God is everywhere, and inside all of us.” 

“Inside me? Everywhere?”

“Yep, even there, in Luci’s spoon. Luci is eating God.” (Why, oh why, do I have to be a smart-ass, even when my child’s basic understanding of the world is at stake?)

Rudy thought that was funny, and, now done with the conversation, stuck his head into a large glass hurricane vase on the table and coughed a few times.  “Stop coughing on God” I joked. He lifted his face out of the vase and turned to me, serious and adamant: “God lives in the sky and protects us. He is not in this bowl.”

Think fast Christina.  “Christians believe God lives in the sky and protects us. Mommy is Buddhist. I believe that God is inside of each of us, that we are God, and we try to live in a way that honors and respects the God in each other and everywhere. There are a lot of different ways to think about God. As long as they help you to be a good and kind person, they are all fine. None of them is right or wrong. It’s about what feels true to you.”

Blank stare.  Then, “Which race car do you want to be? I’m blue.”

I object to the fact that Buddhism is so much more difficult to distill down to simple, happy, comforting constructs than Christianity.  God in the sky who protects us is just so much easier. 

A year ago, Rudy found a dead bird on the sidewalk during a walk with Sandra and Luci.  He came running home to get me (apparently believing I had some special affinity with deceased wildlife.) I got a shoe box and rubber gloves and hobbled down the street with my walker and my big-eyed boy to retrieve the bird. He was sad about the bird and was hoping to keep it. I saw a golden opportunity for religious education.

“It’s important that we thank the bird for sharing the world with us, and then bury him so he can rest and be free. He’ll come back to the world again, in a different body, but first we need to help him finish this life.”  Wordless with grief over this anonymous bird, Rudy picked a site in our former flower bed and starting digging.  [Knowing this area would soon be cemented over, I thought it was an excellent choice and brought out the trowels.]  We got him in, wrapped in paper towels, and covered his grave with a small pile of beautiful river rocks.  We lit a candle (one of those tall cylindrical prayer candles with a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe glued to the front), thanked the bird for sharing the world with us, and offered our hopes for a peaceful transition and an auspicious reincarnation.  I was pleased with myself for working in a lesson on reincarnation, gratitude, and death as merely a transition.  Nice job Mommy.

Later, Rudy explained to a guest that the bird we had just seen fly into our tree was dead, we had buried him earlier. “Birds can’t fly when they are dead. They just lay there until they go to Heaven,” his wise 6-year old companion told him authoritatively. He looked at me, saucer-big eyes, hoping for a rejoinder. “Well, getting a new body takes some time. That bird in the tree is probably not the friend we took care of this morning.” Two little faces, perplexed and maybe a little bored, stared back.

“Who wants a popsicle???”

Later I mentioned it to a friend with a son Rudy’s age. She said her son was also asking about death.  She tells him that you go back to live in heaven with God, like you did before you were born, with all of the angels and big fluffy clouds.  So simple. So comforting.

I, too, want to pass on easy answers and a big kind Daddy who welcomes us back and lets us lounge on the clouds.  The Daddy God. When did that stop working for me? When did it all get so much more complicated?

People often assume that I must have thought (or be currently thinking, I am not sure), “Why me? Why did I get this terrible disease?”  I respond, in all honesty, that I have never had that particular form of self-pity. 

Why not me? Random shit flies in a chaotic and expanding universe. You try to duck. Sometimes you get hit, sometimes it is someone else who didn’t see it coming and don’t have time to get out of the way.  No, I have always thought “Why not me? Why would I be so special as to avoid the frailties of being human?”

The human brain searches for meaning, structure. A famous existential psychologist and concentration camp survivor, Irvin Yalom, once said “When we have the why, we can live with almost any how.” What is my structure, the construction of meaning around difficult events and circumstances?

Any meaning I construct is frail and wobbly. Ha, my structure needs a cane! The furthest I can get is to believe that what I do with this illness is more important that why or how.  Buddhism tells us that pain is unavoidable: We are in this earth-life to evolve by transcending the inherent suffering in the human condition. Like the lotus, rooted deep in the mud, in dark and frightening places where they may never be seen by human eyes. The lotus blooms a defiant 15-18 inches above the muck in which they grow, asserting their inherent perfection, their luminosity, regardless of a largely indifferent world. It’s an explanation I can tolerate; not saccharine, but not as hopeless as random bad luck. 

Yet it is impossible not to miss the Daddy-God, the option of appealing for mercy to a loving and all-powerful entity.  “Our Father, who art in heaven….This f*&@*ing sucks and I don’t want my kids to watch me suffer or miss any tiny moment of joy because their mom is sick.  How about a little somethin-somethin over here?  A tiny miracle. I promise not to tell, because then everyone will want one.  Too much? I’m willing to cut a deal. Give me my leg back and I’ll keep the searing arm pain.  Trunk spasms for fatigue.  Electric feet jolts for use of my writing hand….”

The refrigerator hums. I can hear my children breathing. Sitting here, on a meditation pillow in front of my laptop in the dead of night, I can be luminous when nobody is looking.