An Errant Sputnik

On my first day after graduating from a mental health recovery program, I found something I didn’t look for in a place I didn’t know I would be.

While reflecting on the feeling of powerlessness and the need for control that has been the filter through which I live the world, I considered the concept of universal superposition. I’m sure that I will do some misjustice with my words, but in my mind, I was considering how everything in the universe is made of the same data, arranged in different ways. All of that data is interconnected – not by a predetermined fate, but by the mysterious forces of quantum physics. Every wave is also a particle, and the relationship between any two of them affects any number of them, infinitely. ‘A butterfly flaps its wings’, so to speak. This data is distillable into a calculus that all input is interpreted through in my mind. Every waking moment is a barrage of connections between points that I have adapted myself into the niche of hunting. I describe this experience as ‘synesthesia’ because of the complex ways in which it forms waves through my sensory system and body, but if you fancy, I am mad.

In that madness, I considered a moment from the day prior – in therapy, we had played a game of ‘Mad Libs’ that involved considering an act of rebellion as a way to regain agency. In the moment of the game, I had thought to suggest the following:
“When I am ____ [angry] and I want to ______ [fight God], I will instead ______ [play a video game] because I value _____ [picking winning battles].”

Something about my invention felt notable to me, but I withheld sharing it despite knowing I would be safe to. I wanted to unravel this mystery myself, without the eager interference of my dear therapist. After twelve weeks of entanglement, I was eager to pursue my own hypotheses and independently study my theories without someone else’s curiosity probing my mind for consistency. However, it would be unfair to say that probing had no long term effect, as I found that I used the same tools as he did to investigate the wound. I have begun to appreciate how much of that is by design.

Gently, I asked myself, “What makes you want to fight God?” 

“God is responsible for my suffering,” I retorted, frustrated with myself for not already understanding. The feeling was mutual. “God made the world, and God made all the things, so God gets to taste my wrath for hurting me so badly.”

I chided myself with a reminder that I have been an atheist all my life, and I have always professed to have no belief in God. In my perspective, the laws of physics defined everything as appropriately as it could be understood, and we could never presume to see beyond that which can be measured and repeated. So, then, why would I hold a God I don’t believe in responsible for random suffering? 

“Well,” I pondered, “Perhaps God is just the definition I give to a place of resentment that I like to kick when I’m down.”

The honesty of my answer left a bad taste in my mouth. I knew I was going to have to access some of that honesty to push myself a little further before I could wrap my head around the feeling. Being raised in a household with a single mother whose views shifted from Catholicism to Mormonism over the course of my life, I certainly felt the effects of religious trauma, but I could not fully comprehend the shape of it. The only truth of Christianity I had ever felt was that adults really, really wanted me to believe it, and not for the reasons they would tell me. Adding a distrust for authority built by years of childhood abuse created a perfect storm for aggressive anti-faith beyond uncertainty. A dogmatic belief that humans, fallible and disgusting, could never understand or control something as beautiful and complex as the universe, and would constantly suffer for their attempts to do so. Hmmm…

My memory went to a World Religions class I took in community college in 2013, where a Rabbi from the Reform denomination of Judaism, who said something that had always stuck with me as the closest I could be to understanding God as a person of science. 

“People ask me what God is if I don’t believe he’s a big man in the sky,” He said, standing at the front of the class. “And I tell them: I don’t know. That’s the point; anyone who tells you that they, personally, know God? I wouldn’t trust them to explain anything to you. So what I can say is this: imagine the big, vast universe. It’s made with all these tiny atoms, made up of these sub-atomic particles flying around in a relationship with each other, and we can’t really explain why? That’s God.” I remember being stunned by this fusion of science and faith, and struggled to find a question or argument that could dispel my fascination. I had always taken the idea of ‘science getting bigger, God getting smaller’ as an anti-theistic rhetoric to challenge the notion of unknowability, and in that moment, I considered that perhaps, that which is unknowable by us is innately divine?

“And so,” I suggested to myself, “could you try experiencing something new?”

I sat on the floor of my room and grabbed my phone. On an impulse, I entered a search for ‘Reform Judaism Events Near Me’, and, wouldn’t you know it, there are plenty on a Friday night. I found that there was a Shabbat service starting at 6pm, which gave me just enough time to get ready and go before I could talk myself out of it. I switched off any part of my brain that could form anxiety-based projections about what would happen, and went about getting ready.

On the drive there, I listened to the new Remi Wolf album. It was an incredible, emotionally moving experience that I plan to celebrate with its own review. Worth noting, however, because the serendipity of the lyrics opened me to vulnerability. For the 40 minute drive, I sat with the feelings of longing, grief, rage, and confusion that made up the better part of my diet. For the first time, though, it felt like I could taste them. Rather than choking them down like nutrient paste, only valuable as a means for survival, I took the time to chew on them. I noticed what I could about their texture, their taste, what they reminded me of, and how I felt about feeling them. (One of the conveniences of utilizing the method of loci as a second nature is the ability to safely handle these sub-processes while maintaining independent function on other tasks, like operating a ton of steel flying through a sea of potential shrapnel.)

 By the time I had arrived to my destination, I was sufficiently fucking drained. The service wouldn’t start for another 15 minutes, so I spent 10 of them staring at my phone a few blocks away. A stranger who walked by greeted me casually and politely in a way that struck me as strange – Portlanders are generally an antisocial bunch, even if they are irradiated with the concept of inclusion. The moment disrupted me from my excuse-making, and for a moment, I thought, “Ah-hah! The universe granted me that interaction to show me that I am in a safe and good place! This is a good omen.”

I remembered the concept of delusional beliefs, and how they manifest within people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Eagerly, I disregarded the ‘good omen’ as an unrelated, unmeaningful event and went right back to believing I was already doomed. 

In that moment, my plan was sealed – I would walk past the synagogue, see that it was a place that was a physical reality, and then I would have data to assess safety for a future attempt. I had already done so much! I measured the weight of accomplishment against how far of a distance I had come in the last three months, and decided to reward myself by going home. 

Walking past the synagogue, three people stood outside, likely as security. I smiled politely and quickened my pace as I walked past them. Behind me, I heard one of them shout across the street to a different group: “Service is in this building! Come over here!”

My feet resisted me as I tried to pull them from the concrete. All of my excuses replayed in a moment: “I’m an outsider, I don’t know anything about the religion or culture, I have way different political and philosophical views than anyone in that room, I am going to make people uncomfortable, they deserve to have a space where they feel–”

I leaned over to the switch on the wall of my mind that controlled the excuses and turned them off. It felt good just to do it. As a reward, I turned back towards the entrance and approached. 

“I think this is actually where I’m going, too,” I stammered, offering a smile warily. I was prepared to offer my bag for inspection, experience a pat down, show them my ID, explain where I heard about the service… Without a word, one of the men reached over, opened the door, and I heard the first ‘Shabbat Shalom’ of the evening. Trying to ignore anything other than my will to be moved, I moved myself inside. A few people greeted me with a prayer book, gave me a brief rundown on how to pretend like I knew what I was doing, and I seated myself in a corner. I opened the prayer book backwards, despite having just been told the correct orientation, then corrected it and began to dig through the introduction in a frenzy for something productive to do. 

As I was reading, I was surprised at the perspective that was immediately available. Something about the words on the page – which I cannot remember, even writing this on the same night – struck a chord with me, and I found myself becoming emotional to the point of tears. I sat alone, shoulders hunched, shaved head and tattoos – a non-Jew dressed like a punk rocker in the synagogue, crying for reasons that I couldn’t even begin to digest. As the sermon started, page numbers were called out, and people were called to sing along and stand together. I learned that, at least at this congregation, there was a bit of choreography they politely annotated at the bottom of the book, where I would only read it after staring confused at the bobbing sea of bodies around me. 

Somewhere in the first twenty minutes, I felt a tickle on my arm. My eyes shifted until my gaze fell upon a tiny flying insect, weaving its way through the hair on my arm. I unwillingly twisted my face into a smile at the tiny thing, surprised at how welcome it was on my skin. I positioned my hand to give it a new area to explore, and it gladly took my offer, transitioning to the back of my left hand while I tried helplessly to follow along the text. Slowly, the fly made its way across the back of my palm, down the valley between my thumb and forefinger, and lowered itself onto the page of the book. I watched as it scurried aimlessly across words, having no concept that there were three different languages on the page. I lost myself, smiling at the simpleness of its ambitions and feeling a self-pitiless envy dance in me. 

The rabbi at the front of the congregation called for us to turned the page, and my heart froze. The tiny bug sat, motionless, near the crease at the center of the book. It had taken a moment to rest. There was no moment where the option to turn the page was even considerable, despite a tiny sense of social obligation within me to perform mimicry for the comfort of others. I sat there, staring at a fly who stared at me, and felt the crystallization of meaning rupture my sense of estrangement. 

I was so afraid that I would hurt someone with my very presence that I was not contemplating why I was there. I had become so transfixed on the idea that there was something inherently wrong with my behavior that I stopped trying to experience myself at all – I was filtering everything I was through the mathematics of other people’s emotional calculus, in a maddening hope that it would eventually become a formula I could solve. Meanwhile, a fly, the only creature in the room for whom I could have intentionally or unintentionally caused lethal harm in my carelessness, saw fit to trust me with its safety. I leaned closer, examining my recently converted companion, and saw that one of its wings was held at an angle that looked ununiform. Perhaps, I considered, it has taken its final flight. Maybe this tiny creature, as perfect and flawed as I, saw fit to circle the skies of the synagogue until it found a landing zone safe enough to rest, and of all the islands in the sea, chose me. 

I spent the rest of the hour of service in a nearly dissociative state, eyes swollen with tears as I met God for the first time. 

All of the fight in me, all of the rage, finally made sense. There was no one to blame for the way of the universe – I had known that all along. There was no sense of righteousness that could be claimed supreme, no moral code unlocked by man that triumphed in its quest to define our existence. There are only particles, which are waves, and waves, which are particles. Every barrier in between them is a consequence of my perception, not a higher governing law. The meaning I create of the relationship between these particles, the story I tell myself about how they have come to be arranged, and the trust I have in the direction they will take me… I know it now. 

After the service, I kept my book held open awkwardly to accommodate my passenger as I rushed to the exit. I eventually succeeded in transferring it onto a napkin (to the amusement of some onlookers) and made my way out into the night. After a failed attempt to offload the insect in a bush, I realized that whatever choices the creature had left to make did not include a plan to fly or run any time soon, and accepted that a biodegradable napkin on the ground was a better fate than being pressed into a book. I thanked it for its company, for its trust, and for introducing me to divinity. As I made my way back to the car, I wondered if that feeling was reciprocated.