Familyhood (9 page)

Faith

I
think of myself
as a person of faith. Not necessarily
religious
. It's not like I've even thought these things through particularly well. I just . . . kind of have faith.

For starters, I have faith in people. I like to believe that people are basically good.

But in the real world, pressure and circumstance conspire daily to cause even the best of people to behave Not So Good. So I also have faith that I will often be disappointed. I don't
like
it, I'm just not that surprised by it anymore. So my faith still pays off.

As far as the Big Picture goes, I would consider myself a Believer. Is there a God? What do I know? I know it makes me feel better to believe there is, so why not? Plus, how else to explain the splendor, the grandeur? I mean, we've had a lot of smart people so far, but I don't think any of them could have invented rain. Or an apple. Or the perfect grilled cheese sandwich. This comes from something beyond human endeavor. As Mel Brooks's Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man says, “There's something bigger than Phil!”

As to
what
that something is, I couldn't tell you. I don't have the details. I don't need to know specifically
how
it works; I'm just happy that it seems to be working. Life is short enough as it is, so I figure it's better to focus on things I have a chance of figuring out—like why men insist on flushing before we're done peeing. It makes no sense, it's counterproductive, yet we continue to do it.

As I say, I'm simple. My wife, on the other hand, is a much deeper person. She demands clarity.

A few months ago, we were enjoying a lovely walk along a lovely beach on a lovely day, when we came upon a dead goat. Not a whale, mind you, or a baby seal—something you could reasonably expect to see washed ashore. A goat. Dead. On the sand.

“Oh my God!” my wife says, grabbing my arm, pulling me with her as she inched closer to investigate. “Why is there a goat on a beach?!” She was transfixed by this anomaly.

“I don't know,” I shrugged. “Maybe it washed up.”

“From where?”

“A boat? Maybe it fell off a boat?”

“In
Malibu
? You see any boats going by with goats on them?”

I was defending a thesis I not only just made up, but for which I had no conviction whatsoever.

“Okay, well, maybe he got separated from a herd of goats or from his goat-herder and wandered off the road,” I offered.

“From where? There are no other goats around here.”

“Okay,” I said, now pulling possible scenarios out of thin air. “How about this: some people, from a culture perhaps more
goat-centric
than our own, were planning to barbecue it, and then . . . got distracted and went back to the car. And by the time they realized they forgot the goat, it was too late. So they left him here.”

“No,” my CSI-expert wife concluded. “Because there's no fire pit, and no evidence of human activity.”

“Hmm,” I concede, having run out of possibilities. “Weird. C'mon—let's keep walking.”

So we walk, but my wife is now very disturbed. Not by the goat, mind you. By
me
.

“How does that not bother you?” she asks, in a joltingly accusatory tone. That I didn't share the intensity of her perturbed-ness was more irksome to her than the perturbing offense itself. “Don't you find it weird that a goat is laying there, in a place where goats should not be?”

“Yes.”

“But it doesn't
bother
you?”

“No.”

“But . . . Why?!”

I shrugged. “I just accept it.”

I DIDN'T SAY IT
to be flip, or dismissive. I meant it. There is great liberation in being a simpleton. I was genuinely okay with a dead goat on a beach being “just one of those things” that will likely never be explained to our satisfaction. So why not embrace it as a “miracle” and move on? Miracles don't always have to be big and flashy, you know.

I once had a half-eaten cookie appear on my desk from nowhere that had no conceivable explanation. I hadn't brought that cookie into the house. I lived alone at the time and no one had a key, so nobody else could have put it there. (The idea that a burglar still struggling with the concept of burgling might have broken in and brought it to me as a housewarming gift did cross my mind, but was ultimately rejected.)

And it was a very specific cookie too. Not readily available, or even store-bought. It was a homemade, dry, chalky
mandel-bread
kind of cookie that is edible only if you dip it in really strong coffee for a really long time. Like my grandmother used to do. In fact, this was the very kind of cookie my grandmother used to make. I hadn't had one since she passed away some twenty years earlier, but I was certain this was a grandmother cookie. Then, with a chilling shiver, it hit me: Maybe this was from
her
. Maybe my grandmother “visited” from . . . wherever grandmothers go when they die, and left me a cookie. With a bite taken out of it. (That's how sweet she is; she even tasted it to make sure it was good.) Yes! I was certain. There was no other explanation. (How she found my apartment, or even knew I had moved to L.A., I hadn't figured out yet. But, again—this is not for me to fathom. It just “is.”)

And as ridiculous as it sounded, it made me really happy. What was at first a troubling conundrum was now a very pleasing, supernatural care package from my deceased grandmother. Is God great or what?! (I didn't eat the cookie, of course. I threw it out. But still . . . a miracle.)

AS TO WHEN
I may have started to believe in God, God only knows. I don't think I was born with it. It was something I must have learned, but that doesn't make it any less real or heartfelt. I mean, I also believe two plus two equals four, but somebody had to explain it to me first.

I would imagine that, to the extent I even thought about it, as a kid I probably figured my parents were God. After all, they made me. They gave me life, and from there continued to keep me alive with food, shelter, warmth, love, hats—everything I needed.

It wasn't long, though, before I began to suspect my parents were not, in fact, God. I don't mean this as a criticism. It just didn't make sense that God would be so concerned about me and my sisters, and so much less about everyone else in the world. It didn't add up; I had imagined God to be a more thorough deity.

But I found this discovery reassuring. If my parents weren't God, then they must be human beings, doing the best they can. Same as me. So, okay—good; we were all on the same team.

By the time I was a teen and started exploring the subject a bit more rigorously, I got a glimpse of how many diverse opinions, descriptions, and variations there are of what God might be and what people think God can do, and I realized I was going to have to make some choices. A little picking and choosing seemed in order. For example: Did God really see everything I did? Not so sure. I couldn't imagine anyone tolerating being that bored.

Also the idea that there was some sort of Master Plan in effect didn't hold up to scrutiny for me either. While I was happy to understand that God created the world and all that was in it, I never really believed He was intimately involved in running, say, the airlines. Or arranging for dogs to get hit by buses. Or whispering suggestions to nut jobs to blow things up. Or keeping the Cubs from getting to the World Series. I imagined the Lord would be too busy for this. And personally
against
these very types of things. Which, again—I found comforting; if God's not responsible for all that's bad, then He's probably as frustrated and heartbroken about these things as the rest of us. Maybe even more. Which now put
Us
on the same team, too.

EVEN IF I HADN'T BELIEVED
in God before, seeing the birth of my boys would have swayed me entirely. From the moment you first hold your child (and, really, every time you look at them thereafter), you can't help but be overwhelmed with the sheer marvel of it all. Are you kidding me? How can this be?! We started with nothing, and now
this
? A whole human being who can learn English in less than twenty-four months and kind of looks like my grandfather? How is that possible? And the heart and the lungs all know what to do? Who could've possibly made this happen? I mean, my wife and I are good, but we're not
that
good. Some other force is clearly at work.

It's a good thing that having children fortifies your faith, because you need it. As a parent, you get tested in ways you could never have imagined, and that extra dose of belief comes in handy. Maybe that's why they made birth so spectacular; to instill us with a faith that then gives us the strength to endure all that follows. It's like movies that have a great first ten minutes; it may not in any way reflect the next hour and a half—but the fact that you were so impressed up front will keep you there till the end, believing all the while that it will ultimately be worth it.

This extra sense of “awe” sustains us through the patches of
less
awe; those stretches of mundane tedium in which “awe” is replaced by “aw,” as in, “Aw . . . I wish you hadn't broken that.” “Aw . . . that is really disgusting—please stop that.”

And having the extra conviction helps when your kids start asking the same questions you used to ask. “Where does God live?” “What does God look like?” “Do dogs have the same God as people?” Addressing these questions is like playing the net at Wimbledon. You don't need to
score
so much as
keep deflecting
. Keep your racket up and try to just keep the point alive. And not get hit in the eye.

Even when faith wavers, sometimes just having a good sense of tradition can do the trick.

I remember a few years back telling my boys that it was the high holidays and we would be going to temple. My big guy was into it. He loved the ceremony, the familiar faces, and the funny guy at the door in charge of welcoming everyone, and the seemingly endless supply of apple juice.

My
little
guy, on the other hand, not so much. He was maybe five at the time, and while he'd certainly been in synagogue before, he hadn't clocked that this was going to be
recurring
. He didn't get that this was a place we return to on certain occasions, and today was one of them.

“Wait a second,” he said, apprehensively. “
Where
are we going?”

“You remember,” I told him. “The place with the singing and the praying and the standing and the sitting and then standing again . . .” He was not pleased.

“Oh, I
hate
that place.”

I couldn't have been prouder; that I had instilled in my son such a shallow appreciation of tradition and ceremony that he knew of our house of worship only as “that place”—which, by the way, he didn't like. I asked him why.

“Because!” he said, rolling his eyes. “It's so
boring
!”

“
Of course
it's boring,” I told him, hoping that my clever plan to agree with him would throw him off kilter and dissipate his resistance. “
Boring
is, like, the
main
purpose. That's how you know you're doing it right,” I told him, improvising like crazy. “It's not meant to be
fun
. It's meant to be . . .”

Hmm . . . I had backed myself into a potentially troublesome corner. It's meant to be
what
? Punishing? Challenging? The best I could come up with at the moment, under pressure, was:

“It's just meant to feel
good
.”

“Well, it doesn't,” he answered candidly.

“Okay. Well not
good
like you're used to feeling good—not like
swimming
feels good, or ice cream, or playing with your friends feels good, but good like ‘Hey, it feels really
different
in here. This doesn't feel like the rest of the world feels.' ”

“But I
like
how the world feels,” countered my sage five-year-old.

“Okay, then,” I proposed. “How about: this is the place where you come and
think
about how much you like how the world feels, and say thanks for all the things in the world you like.”

He considered this for a second.

“Besides,” I added, hoping to close the deal, “this is what families do.”

“What—sit there and be bored together?” he asked, certain he was the first to ever see it this way.

“Absolutely!” I assured him. “It's a tradition. When I was your age, I sat next to
my
father and banged my head against his shoulder asking when we could go home. My father, I'm sure, years earlier banged
his
head against
his
father's shoulder, and
his
father did the same thing to
his
father. Nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, I believe it's one of the Commandments:
Thou shalt sit here for many hours, get really restless and itchy, and think about nothing but when you get to whip your tie off and get out of here
.”

Somehow this worked. (He was
five
, keep in mind.)

IN TIME,
I know my children will discover that I don't have any real answers. That I'm just another father making it up as I go along, to the best of my abilities, but always with their very best interests at heart. Sort of like the Wizard of Oz. As a father, my job is to stand behind the curtain and try to put on enough of a show to keep the kids entertained, and believing in something greater and more mysterious than ourselves.

Because even if he wasn't all he was cracked up to be, the Wizard did give the Tin Man his heart, the Scarecrow his brain, the Lion his courage, and Dorothy a way home. Did they already have those things? Sure. But without faith, none of them knew it.