Opening the trapdoor

Also, why I use the g-word

In September 2019, I wrote in my journal about being overcome with longing.

Yesterday in a massive gothic cathedral, encircled by stained glass windows depicting scenes from the old testament, I felt as though I was about to weep. I long for that feeling of meaning, purpose, connection, safety, community, joy that many get through religion. How to achieve this without praying to a god you don’t believe in, in a church whose doctrine you take issue with?

In another entry, from 2015, I describe being transported during a psychedelic experience to the farthest reaches of space, becoming one with the infinite, understanding the universal breadth of reality.

Looking back on these journal entries is almost comical. I wanted some ineffable sense of belonging, a kind of cosmic acceptance that I had heard people felt through faith. I yearned for something, but I would never have called it “god.” The word didn’t mean much to me — in fact I regarded it with some suspicion — until suddenly, it did.

It went something like this: I became aware of a feeling that I had gone my whole life with a trapdoor in the corner of my mind that I had never opened. I sort of knew it existed, but I didn’t know exactly where it was or what it led to, and had never let myself think about it for very long, or even, consciously, at all.

For days (and in some ways, for years) I had been vibrating with anxiety, seized by a constant drone of frustration and hopelessness. In the hours before the trapdoor opened, I felt such an acute existential discomfort that the experience was such that I wasn’t simply feeling discomfort, I was discomfort. My very existence was agitation and discord.

Have you ever woken up in paradise and felt miserable and terrified?

In acknowledging the trapdoor, I was struck with a terrible fear. What could possibly be on the other side of it? Did I really want to know? Now that I was aware of the door, was it inevitable that I would walk through it?

I felt, somehow, taunted by this. A scornful, jeering voice said to me: we both know you’ll never open the door. You’re not brave enough to give up control, to bow down to something unknown, something bigger than yourself.

If there was ever something to make me flip that latch and peek through, that was it. In an act of defiance, I knelt and placed my forehead on the ground.

In an instant, the universe opened up to me. It was as if the room I had been in was suddenly turned inside out, or I had been deep under water and finally burst through the surface to gasp for air. It was a threshold, or a vortex, or a portal. It was, to use a loaded word, a revelation.

People have tried and failed endlessly to encapsulate the experience of god in words. It is with great ambivalence that I join their ranks. All I can say is that it was an expansive feeling beyond imagination. I vaguely remembered I had a physical body, my tether to human experience, like a plume of smoke whose form I was assuming for a time, both thrilling and insignificant. But mostly I was the sun, I was being, I was entire.

What a relief it was to rest in that expansive space of knowing. It was all so simple. This whole thing, my life, it wasn’t about me. I was sure that all I had to do with my time, with my existence, was think about god. To worship, to pray. If I did that, then I could at least be sure I was facing the right direction.     

I thought it would be easy, which just goes to show how little I knew. It can be hard to be in reverence all the time, to make a prayer out of my body, my thoughts, my whole self. It’s hard to prioritize the unknown, the uncomfortable, when I could just skate through. I have often thought: isn’t this supposed to be easier? Shouldn’t this always feel good?

An important note on the word god: I use it because it feels right to me, but every time I do, I want to give it an asterisk. I have a tendency to get hung up on language, and I know how much words matter. But I don’t want to let semantics get in the way of the important stuff. So here is my god-disclaimer.

It is the word — that single, storied syllable — that rang between my ears when I was overtaken by awe. I know, too, that it is a word that has inspired corruption and manipulation and been wielded like a weapon. I am learning to define it for myself, keeping in mind the countless things it has meant throughout history.

For me, it is a shortcut word for something beyond explanation. It is not a proper noun, so I don’t capitalize it. It most certainly does not have a gender. To put anything after “god is,” seems, to me, to be somewhat ridiculous. For everything god is, it is also everything else. I have tried other words but they are all words and so they all have their own limitations. I continue with “god” despite its heaviness. Or maybe because of that power, that history — it’s a word that carries a lot of weight.

So please, bear with me, and know that I am totally comfortable with basically any other word in god’s place — universe, infinite, interbeing, goddess, blade of grass, divine, creator, totality, source. Whatever. Words are made up, and god is averbal.

The first people (and dogs) I ever said “god” to

“I may say that never at any moment in my life have I ‘sought for God,’” wrote the French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil. I never sought for god, either; I was looking for something else. Opening the trapdoor felt like standing in the doorway to a room and wondering what I was going there to retrieve, only to realize that the thing was in my hand already. It makes sense to me that I, a wordsmith despite myself, needed a word — the word — to hold, to make it more real, to connect me to all the people who were seeking something similar.

When my relationship to the word “god” changed, a whole new line of inquiry opened up for me. It was my entry point in to a world that I had always held at arm’s length: the world of religion. What if it wasn’t just destruction and oppression and abuse — but also devotion, community, sacred attention?

I had never considered returning to school, always said I couldn’t imagine what I would go for. But when the idea of divinity school crossed my radar, I felt a spark of recognition. I couldn’t very well go back to my old life. Maybe I could comb through the annals of religion and find some harvest, some morsels to help me learn how to pray, or what prayer can even mean to someone who has no church and no guru.

I didn’t find a single holy book with all the answers, or discover a religious tradition that felt “right,” making all the others “wrong.” What I found, and am still finding, is even richer than that. That the world I live in is an enchanted place. That there are infinite paths toward what I think of as god. And that — what a relief — I’m already on mine, and I have been my whole life.