If it is true that one must be "sick" for religion to really matter, as Kierkegaard said, I at least took consolation from the company I kept. I thought of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the patriarchs Jews name in their prayer and many other times. Abraham - a man who felt himself called to leave everything that he loved and go to an unknown place. Isaac - who witnessed his father try to kill him and, the Midrash says, was left mute as a result. Jacob, my own namesake and model, who tried so hard to stop his brother from beating him out of the womb, who stayed home cooking while his brother went out and hunted, who was the wimp who had to cheat and deceive his way into stealing (or earning?) his birthright. These forefathers were men in intense pain, "Adam 2" in Rabbi Soloveitchik's term: people who had wounds that created space for compassion, love, and God to flow in.
Jacob becomes Isra-el. He wrestles with God, as I do. And Jews say twice a day: Listen, Israel, listen: God, the Presence (Y-H-V-H, the only way to say "Is" in Hebrew), our god, to whom we submit even as we wrestle, is One. All of being, all of now – not the yesterdays or tomorrow in our imagination, but the real now in front of us – is one with you, because there is no you, only the One. The Torah doesn't say that Jacob won the wrestling match, by the way.
I can understand my pain as teaching me the compassion I need to better divest myself of egocentricity and help, as I can, to ease the suffering of others. I can see the demons as angels, and bring all of myself, with all of my history, to every moment of experience, not losing myself like on a good drug trip, but engaging myself, sublimating myself, recognizing that these bits I call ‘myself' are not really a self, but are only expressions of the presence. Mostly, I know that I am not positing any ontological structure, any pearly gates or old men in the sky, and that the world I experience is not different in that way from the world of someone who calls herself an "atheist." But none of this understanding can convincingly quiet doubt. At least I am comforted by knowing I have no answers.
Ultimately, the only path forward may be for me to trust the yearning and surrender to it. Let the practices work. (They do work.) Be here now. Surrender the criticism and doubt, allow myself to feel faith. I have no answer other than my own awareness to point to the reality, rather than fantasy, of being. I can point only to the beauty of lightning bugs in fog, or the coincidences, or the complexity of a single mosquito. I can only gesture, and be silent in the all that I know is true.
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