Where did God go?

I remember believing in God, but only vaguely. I remember saying prayers--some were just wishes, but most were pleas for everyone I loved to be safe and healthy. My prayers extended to anyone I knew that was suffering somewhere in the world, and often they'd go on-and-on. I thought if I could pray hard enough, I could protect everyone.

I was a nervous kid. Like, really nervous. We weren't allowed to have the news on because it made me too anxious (to be fair, it still does). My first grade teacher often asked me if whatever I was worrying about would cause the world to end. Going down the slide? Risky. Riding a bike? Terrifying. Sleeping in my own room alone? Unthinkable. If my parents had known about Xanax, they probably would have mashed some up in my apple sauce and we'd all have been better for it. Alas!

Looking back, I wonder if part of this anxiety came from experiencing the disappearance of a girl named Jenny. She was the daughter of my dad's law partner, and she died before I was even old enough to understand what it meant to be sick in a way that made people go away and never come back. I'm sure I didn't mourn her like the adults around me did. Like I said, I didn't understand. But I remember having an awareness of something awful having happened in the time that proceeded her death. There had been a little girl named Jenny, but she was gone to Heaven, to a better place, but her mommy and daddy were very sad.

Maybe because of this, my prayers were fervent and meant to ward off bad things. I didn't want God to take away anyone I loved, so I tried to be very good. But I worried. I still worry a lot. I'm working on it, but it's like second nature to me. When I was a waitress, the manager said, "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean." I've spent 30 years living in a state of, "If you have too much time to think, into worries you will sink." That last line isn't a real adage, but if you'd like to proliferate it, feel free.

I stopped praying eventually. It hadn't worked. Tragedy was all around us, and if God was punishing us for being sinners, who needed him? Better to think there was no God than a cruel one, right?

For me, one of the most attractive qualities of Judaism is that it seems to make room for questioning. Immersing myself in Jewish texts hasn't provided me with answers yet, but it has made me feel like my own experience with doubt is acceptable.  It was comforting to read Rabbi Harold Kushner's description of his own experience, "that childhood faith did not last. War, crime, serious illnesses affecting those we cared about, the emerging truth about the Holocaust, and the inevitable disappointments of life cost us that simple faith of our childhood..." (Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life). When I stopped praying, I'd felt the same way.

So now that I'm immersing myself in a faith, I have to grapple with the same doubts that robbed me of any sense of the spiritual in my life. Looking for divinity in a world as chaotic as ours feels like a fool's errand. On the other hand, there's a feeling I can't shake that there's something more than skin and bones holding us all together. I'm not sure yet what that means, but I've never felt more certain that I need to explore it. Maybe that will take a life time and I'll never get closer than this. Maybe I'll write in a month that I've got it all figured out. I know that I'll never revive the simple faith that I had as a kid--that belief that, "Duh, God exists!" and how else did we all get hatched (it was simpler times, like I said). But I'm hoping that any relationship with faith, even if it's a complicated one, I'll still find something to help shoulder some of my worries, and to shine a light into the darkest of storms.