God - The Great Conundrum

My wavering faith in a less-than-perfect God

I don’t know how to meditate.

My rational mind allows me to take the path of meditation only as far as conscious breathing since it believes in the empirical evidence of medical benefits in doing that. But the moment it sees an unpaved, dirt road beyond the perceivable bend leading to the inner workings of the mind, it pulls a hard stop and I don’t know how to proceed.

The key points in meditation, like “let your thoughts come and go”, “chant a mantra repeatedly” or “keep your focus on your breath in a chokehold” are not viable for me because I know that the mind that I am trying to control is the same mind that is making these suggestions.

So to counter this roadblock on my spiritual journey, I recently braved a weekend’s worth of nonlinear, self-introspection and figured that maybe I should try bypassing meditation altogether and instead go directly to the end goal of meditation.

The general consensus is that meditation takes you ‘home’. It delivers you to the great unknown, where all things come to rest in eternal peace. This ultimate resting place is known by many names like The Deep Stillness, The Absolute Self, The Supreme Consciousness, The Universal Energy, or for lack of a better word, God.

Wouldn’t it be easier if I were to blindly trust God, give myself to prayer and scripture, and let Him deliver me from my perpetual angst instead of struggling the hard meditation way?

Ingenious thought, but only one hiccup —

I’m afraid I have wavering faith in God.

My lack of trust in the way He conducts His worldly business holds me back from surrendering all my questions and wholeheartedly leaning into Him.

“Gasp! How dare you! Take back that outrageous claim lest we should anger God or even worse, fall out of favor with Him. Gasp! GASP!”

The preconditioned part of me has a panic attack at the mere suggestion of hypothetical disloyalty to God on account of “self-analysis”. And understandably so, for here I am trying to shake the foundation of my belief system while still standing on it.

But truth be told, I have an absolute and phenomenal belief in God. It is so absolute and so phenomenal that it really shouldn’t require any kind of qualifiers.

So let me rephrase that — I believe in God.

I have felt the Universal energy’s guiding presence many a time in my life, if not in the life-altering, “OMG-it’s-a-miracle”, chicken-soup-for-soul kind of way, then at least as quirky, pint-sized mysteries wrapped in amusement and reassurance.

One time my home phone receive a random call that stopped after the first ring, piquing my curiosity well enough to draw me out of the kitchen in search of the handset. I noticed that I had accidentally left the safety gate open and my wobbly, less-than-a-year-old had quietly crawled halfway up the stairs and was about to take a tumble.

Thanks to the call from the black hole, I was able to avoid what would have turned into a stressful afternoon filled with mommy guilt and baby tears. Interestingly, there was no missed/received call on the phone display. Never before and never since had my phone done that phantom call trick, so there is no way I could pin this on a technical glitch.

Another time, I had to pick up my spouse at the Amtrak station in Ann Arbor very late in the evening. But five minutes into the drive with my GPS messed up and no signal on the cell phone, I found myself jouncing on a pitch-dark, gravelly side road wondering where I had taken the wrong turn.

Long story short, I was driving freestyle for 20 minutes getting on and off interstates without knowing if I was even driving in the right direction. I was guesstimating my way around letting the traffic lights make the decisions for me by taking only those roads with uninterrupted green lights.

Coming to terms with the fact that I was officially lost a good while ago, I was batshit scared about the prospect of having to ask for directions in what looked like a no man’s land. And right when I felt hopeless, I came up to the first stop sign in that entire adventure trip, or was rather led up to a stop sign, half-dazed and exhausted only to see another sign board next to it with an arrow that said ‘Amtrak’.

You say ‘quite interesting’. I say ‘quirkily reassuring’. But we both agree it’s pretty awesome.

Then from where comes the question of wavering faith?

Well, I take a look at my life and there is an abundance of love. There is a downpour of blessings from the floodgates of heaven. Undoubtedly, there are green pastures, still waters, and dandelions floating about. But when I turn around and look out the window, I see the other side of reality manifested in people’s lives as tragedies, hardships, crimes, and pain, the worst of which is the unthinkable horrors that little children are forced to endure at the hands of vile humans.

Ask any religious zealot why there is suffering in this world and half of them would candidly agree that there is no logical answer. The rest of them would wield the scripture with tenacity and talk about trials in life as hidden lessons, a test of will, or a means to a greater good.

A part of me is willing to accept these explanations for grownups because honestly, it is easier to think that adults are deserving of them; but I could never wrap my head around the sufferings of children no matter which way it is sliced and diced.

When a man sees tribulations, he can choose to disown God or endure it for the sake of the lessons behind it; but when a child is put through hardship, he perceives only pain and betrayal since his moral compass is not yet set to true north. Then for whose sake are the trials that a child is forced to go through?

I came across a similar question from a man about his granddaughter who has a medical condition, in the FAQ: Faith, Destiny, and Free Choice section of www.chabad.org, a website I frequent for my moral dilemmas. After honestly accepting that there is no good answer, the rabbi added the following:

“An exactly opposite scenario from your granddaughter can exist: if little Adolph Hitler, or any person that has done truly horrible things, had been killed in an auto accident at two years old, how many tears would have been shed at the ‘unjust loss of this innocent babe’?”

Please take a second to let that sink in.

Yes, it flies right over my head too.

I am not clear about the context in which the good rabbi made this statement, but am I to infer that when a child brutally suffers at the hands of a pedophile or is tragically killed in an accident, it is actually the Universe interfering in order to prevent the child from growing up into an even worse sinner? Or is it some kind of a twisted lesson for his parents and society to learn from the tragedy in order to make the world a better place, which means the child was nothing more than a scapegoat?

This is where I struggle with my faith.

I trust in God in relation to my life; I even have faith in His intentions for humanity in general, but in situations like these my faith goes off-centered.

How can a person’s faith in God/Higher Consciousness, whose very nature is said to be love, be anything but wavering when that same entity also allows suffering in innocent beings? How is one supposed to progress on the spiritual path where the quieting of the mind, transcending of the ego, and experiencing oneness is all in relation to an Absolute Consciousness which appears to be less than perfect?

Herein lies the rub.

I’ve had this dance with God too many times that I could never find a clear answer.

But if I were to play God’s advocate, maybe there really is no answer to such questions because my edged mind is not yet ready to understand an edgeless God.

Maybe this Higher Consciousness/Absolute Self/The One is not supposed to be perfect because this supreme entity is not like the traditional definition of God, where every action and reaction has been accounted for, where every event that has and will happen has been predetermined. Maybe this One Consciousness is rather just our collective consciousness that is constantly recalculating and evolving based on our ability to transcend or descend.

So maybe all I can and should do for now is push through my wavering faith, pursue quieting the thoughts, and find a way to settle into that impossible deep stillness, where who knows, someday I can drop the question.

Until that happens, as a fine writer once said,

“When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘No answer.’ It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head, not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand’.”

C.S. Lewis

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