When I rejoined my friends at the table the other night, I was blindsided by the question, “So what do you think about God?” It is a question that many people find important but which I have always been reluctant to speculate about because there is no way to determine whether I am ever closer to the truth or farther from it – or whether the question makes any sense at all.
It is a fundamental belief of mine that what I think, how I speculate about the nature of the cosmos, makes no difference to reality. This is partly as a result of spending much of my life in the presence of people who think their opinion makes all the difference in the world because it affects everything they do.
Some people could not believe we would uproot our life and move west because that is simply not done by people our age. We understand whey many people let their opinions calcify until their way of life is fixed. But one aspect of growing older that has never appealed to us is the way so many seem to change only in the direction of becoming caricatures of what they were when they were younger.
When somebody goes beyond the hundredth birthday, reporters gather around to learn the secret. It often turns out to be drinking an ounce of corn mash every day or avoiding men who yell. If I am ever asked the question (even before I turn one hundred), I would say that I stay young by keeping a childlike curiosity about the world, by refusing to accept any answer as the final answer, and, as Emily Dickinson put it, by dwelling in possibility.
I was raised to believe that truth was there for the plucking, that our major duty as human beings is to find repose by accepting the ancient traditions – that is, to find God by following the path laid out by our ancestors. But as I got older and explored more traditions than the one I had first learned, I realized that the same lesson would have been drummed into me if I had been born to a Hindu family in India, or if my parents had been Confucians.
I used to believe in Truth, with a capital T, and I spent years hoping it would become clear to me. What I discovered was that truth has a small t.
The quotation at the top of this essay, by André Gide, is one of my favorites. I am actually fearful of settling on a truth that would keep me from expanding, growing, discovering. It would alter the basic me beyond recognition. It would send me back to square one, where I began, when my parents and teachers could define the world and my duties with unshakable certainty.
Experience has taught me not to be afraid of the ambiguity and mystery of existence. I believe it is more fruitful to explore the world than to settle on a single way of looking at it. I am heartened that nobody ever lived my life before I got here and that nobody has come up with a coherent theory of reality that I can continue to accept without question.
So what do I think of God? I do not worry about whether God exists. I just try to live a life that will allow God, if there is such a thing, to believe in me.
But this is not the final answer, of course. If I ever stumbled on a final answer, I would doubt it.
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