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Searching for God

In the beginning

One late winter day when a melting sun spread like butter across the snowy field behind our house, my Mum, my little brother and I had a picnic lunch on the back veranda. Our cat, Queenie, came too, twitching her plume of a tail, her eyes ablaze with stirrings of spring.

We sat on a tartan blanket spread on the wooden deck. Dad had shovelled the veranda all winter and the green canvas awning would not be put up till May, so on that early March day, it was a sunny haven.

Mum lay back on her elbows and tilted her movie star sunglasses to the sky and sighed and said “I feel like a new woman!” Although I was only six I knew what she meant. It had been a long winter of dark days, of Dad away in Montreal or Chicago or Vancouver, of flu, colds and chicken pox and frequent visits from Dr. Church — Mum hovering in the background — with his stethoscope and big belly.

I still remember a bath infused with something to soothe my painful pox, and how tenderly Mum wrapped me in a towel afterwards. Years later when I saw an image of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, I felt again the sensation of rising naked, streaming and itch-free from the water as my mother’s towelled arms reached for me. I don’t know why Botticelli took me back to that bath, or which one of us was Venus. It wasn’t till I had decades more of life under my belt that I understood we both were.

But on that sunny winter day we nibbled ham sandwiches on white Wonder Bread and drank hot cocoa from a thermos. Icicles dripped and splatted from the eaves. We unbuttoned our wooly coats and listened to the happiness of chickadees and crows.

Suddenly and with great conviction, I took my little brother’s face in my hands and said “Why Doodle-bug, you look just like God!” From my mother’s reaction I knew I had said something noteworthy, but I didn’t know what and could not explain myself further. My small freckled brother only squinted into the sun with half a sandwich drooping from his mitt.

In the middle

For most of my 40s I volunteered for three, four-hour shifts a month at the Ottawa City Distress Centre. People called for all sorts of reasons beyond depression or suicide. I loved waiting for the phone to ring while I sipped tea and peered from the centre’s fifth story window at the beings striding or shuffling along below. Perhaps I had talked on this very phone with one of them. Or so I liked to think.

I was good on the phones. For the first time ever, I found I could truly connect with people. For one thing, I had to sincerely listen instead of, in my usual manner, wait for a chance to cut in and flap my gums. There were no visual cues to cloud my judgement. No clothes, accessories, hairdos or mannerisms to make me jump to unhelpful conclusions. All I had to go on was a voice and a mysterious conduit that ran between us through wires, various switches, terminals and space.

A woman named Alice called several times a week. Her warm voice gurgled like brook water into my ear. In our many talks I never discovered much about her situation. I imagined she was in care somewhere, either with relatives or in a home.

When Alice called, I could relax. Sometimes I put my feet up on the desk and tilted back the chair, settling in for something sweet. Depending on the day and who knows what else in Alice’s rich life, she claimed she was either pregnant with, or had recently given birth to, the baby Jesus. Although this was 100 per cent unlikely, I rejoiced with her at this thrilling news. She certainly never sounded distressed which made me happy for her. Perhaps she called because her family or caregivers were tired of hearing about Baby Jesus.

My most unforgettable call was not from Alice, however, but from a manic depressive man who planned to kill himself. He was not suicidal at the time, so there was no point in tracking his call and keeping him talking until police banged at his door. Nonetheless, he had a plan and was committed to it. His voice was reasoned, intelligent and also conveyed what I can only describe as certainty.

His family had stood by him through years of hell. When he wasn’t weeping, he was on spending sprees: once a race horse named Galveston Gal, although he knew nothing about the racing world; another time a stone mansion on 20 acres with tennis courts, a pool and three car garage.

“I know they love me,” he said. “I know they will cry a lot. But time will take care of all that. My wife will remarry and my kids will grow up in a sane home.” By then I was listening so hard that my forehead was on the desk and my eyes shut so nothing could get in the way.

I said very little. I think he was grateful for that. I hope I said I love you, but I can’t be sure I did. It was a long time ago.

Belonging

On a Buddhist retreat a few years ago, our teacher told us to spend as much time outdoors as possible. Each of us carried a magnifying glass and, besides being silent for the two week duration, we were instructed to examine everything.

“Feel your deep belongingness with all life,” he said. “We are family. We are woven on the looms of each other’s lives.” So out we all went, dispersing into the 300 acres of leafy woods, eager to be at one with the universe. Mostly I was relieved I didn’t have to endure endless sits in the meditation hall, waiting for the gong to sound and feeling like a failed Buddhist. Roaming forests, fields and waters, especially on my own, was my favourite thing to do.

I peered at moss, sand, fungi, petals, pine cones, webs, galls and gelatinous bird poops. The underside of leaves often held specks of mystery — possibly eggs or some minute creature perhaps waiting for an insect’s version of Godot.

Our teacher had set up an old Nikon microscope at the back of the hall. It was impressively heavy, and sat under a plastic cape, within a wooden box. This we could use for “deeper looks” as he put it, waggling his eyebrows encouragingly.

I had never used a microscope and my first zoom in on the carcass of a house fly caused me to holler “Holy Fuck!” which alarmed several steadfast meditators. The fly was on its back and had a hole in its desiccated stomach. I felt I was gazing into an echoing cavern beyond space and time. Where the hell was I exactly? Then I realized that a weensie spider — certainly invisible to the naked eye — was living in that cavern. There it lurked with minuscule glittering eyes in its dead fly home, doing whatever it had to do to keep itself alive and the world turning. I sat back with one hand clamped over my mouth. This was too much.

For the rest of the retreat, I was glued to that Nikon. I continued to see worlds within worlds within universes. In my one-on-one sessions with our teacher I babbled on about my discoveries. The way he listened, looked at me, made me want to weep and sometimes I did. I knew he was used to it. One day I was raving about looking at the yellow centre of some daisy-like wildflower and discovering it was made up of tubes. Then I saw that tiny white creatures lived inside the tubes. They bustled in and out from tube to tube obviously with much on their tiny minds. My teacher’s smiled and said “…and if we could look even deeper, no doubt we’d find smaller creatures living in or on those creatures — and so on and so on.”

For years as a journalist, I had been writing about the importance of biodiversity and how everything is interconnected. But really, what the hell did I know? It took a microscope and a dead fly for me to begin to understand what our teacher kept patiently pointing us towards. In his words: “Looking deeply into our current situation, we can see that this place and this time are actually vast mysteries of creative collaboration that ultimately involve all places and times.”

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