There is a God. And I'm not Him.

Forgive me for going M.I.A. As you know, I’ve been in not-so-hot pursuit of a second master’s degree (I collect degrees like I used to collect baseball cards). During the past fortnight, I’ve written 75 pages, assessed three blind kids, decoded dozens of eye exam reports and am suffering from diplopia as a result. No one’s ever gone from being the evaluator to the evaluated this fast.

I’m gonna save my Hall of Fame Snubs for another day (Insert Andre Dawson Here). For now, I’m making a U-turn and opining on matters divine.

Our first God column. (After 5 ½ years of graduate school “I could use all the Karma I can get right now.”**)

To lead us off… I quote Father Cavanaugh, the priest in RUDY who helps Ruettiger get into Notre Dame. “Son, in 35 years of religious study, I have only come up with two, hard, incontrovertible facts… There is a God… And I’m not Him.”

I second Father Cavanaugh.

I grew up in a Christian home. People may wonder what that means exactly. To me it meant never being allowed to believe in Santa Claus and listening to bedtime stories from Genesis instead of Where the Wild Things Are. I sandwiched five years of public school between even more years of private, fundamentalist Christian education. My adolescence was less about drug experimentation and more about Bible verse memorization. It was during this time that God became more personal. I came to believe that what Genesis meant by God creating us “in his own image,” was that, like God, we are relational beings. And having a unique, personal relationship with God was possible, like relating to a parent, or a best friend.

While attending USC (that’s Southern Cal, not South Carolina-as easterners suppose), I developed a more academic approach to studying religion and an appreciation for perspectives other than my own. I studied Judaism through the eyes of a lesbian rabbi. I examined the arc of Malcolm X’s journey through Islam. I attended services at a Hindu temple and discovered that Hinduism is a lot more monotheistic than it appears.

My world was widening and I went to Harvard to map it out. There, I joined a circus of seekers, spiritual vagabonds. Among this band of misfits, I looked out onto the expanse of the world’s religions and tried to reconcile their many permutations with their many singularities. Peter Gomes taught me “to read is to interpret.” My friend Todd taught me “crazy begets crazy.” I cried in class while listening to the Muslim call to prayer. I read apocryphal Christian literature about Jesus’ childhood and Mary Magdalene’s discipleship. I studied how ancient Meso-American peoples prescribed to beliefs in the redemptive power of blood. I watched films documenting the spirit possession of African tribesmen.

All over the world, people are trying to capture who God is. As if God is a blurry image and humankind has its hand on a camera lens, attempting to bring Him into focus.

For Muslims, God appears in the written and recited Word. The “Quran” literally means The “Recitation” and the word “Allah” is more than a name for God. The Word is God. Muslim artists are strictly forbidden from depicting Allah in any form other than the four Arabic letters which make up His name. I love how Mosques are decorated in words. No pictures. No paintings. No scenes from its holy text-just passages upon passages in Arabic, wallpapered from floor to ceiling. As a wanna-be journalist, I could get behind this “word worship.”

For Hindus and Buddhists, God is as ethereal and as mysterious as light. God is a “-ness.” A Oneness. A Consciousness. For some, God can be found in Creation. Pramahansa Yogananda, a 20th Century Yogi, said, “God sleeps in the rocks, dreams in the flowers, begins waking in the animals and is fully conscious in humankind.”

For others, God is a She. I once bought this t-shirt from Urban Outfitters with a picture of the Virgin Mary on the front. When my not-yet girlfriend saw me wearing it the first time we ever hung out socially, she asked, “are you religious?” I found myself admitting “Well…I’m not Catholic. But I like the idea of praying to a woman.”

For Christians, God is a Person. A being we relate to. A being that is so invested in our experience, that He humbled himself and became a human. God very God, on Earth. Christians call him Jesus. I have to admit that this depiction of God resonates with me the most. To me, God is a walking, talking, thinking, emoting, living, breathing being.

But beings have personalities. They have characteristics and qualities that define them. They have flavor and sound and texture. So what does God feel like? What does God taste like? What does God sound like?

If I were to guess, God is a cross between Santa Claus and Sidney Poitier. Let me explain.

I believe God is jolly, cozy and generous. He’s quick to laughter, in a constant state of amusement. He’s a representative of Goodness and Tenderness like Santa Claus must be. But, like Poitier, God is also regal. He is well-spoken, intelligent, decisive. Like the actor, God is a revolution. He brings about change. He has a transformative power. As much as I can hear God bellow “Ho! Ho! Ho!” I can also hear God shouting, “They call meeeee Mister TIBBS!”

If I were to rotate my lens and attempt to bring God into focus, I would find God from the TopDeck at Dodger Stadium, during the national anthem, when the crowd is still and standing together. Seriously, I’m not kidding about this one.

Do you ever notice at a sporting event, when asked to “rise for the singing of the national anthem,” how the masses of seated specks seem to elongate? In that moment, it’s almost as if the stadium gets taller. At first sight, it’s an optical illusion, but it’s as real as the dirt on the mound. I love looking out on the crowd during the signing of the Star Spangled Banner. I love the way the crowd appears stretched from top to bottom, like the Rocky Mountains appear while covered in tall pine trees. The masses stand up, and the whole world seems to stretch with it. This is God to me. An experience.

That seems to be a fundamental truth about God, no matter how your lens brings Him into focus. If God is a word, He is meant to be read. If God is a –ness, he is meant to be accessed. If God is a person, He is meant to be talked to. God is meant to be experienced.

How do you experience God?

**Name the baseball film from which this quote came.