Is God Hot?

Last Summer, God came knocking on my door. I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but it was sometime between April and June. I was in the depths of writing this newsletter, questioning whether the transcendent forces of the universe might be considered Hot. I was in or returning from Barcelona, where I went to look for my version of a deity: literary agent Carmen Balcells. I was at a loose end at work; I didn’t know whether I wanted to continue down the path I was on or try something completely different. I once again tried to date, unsuccessfully, and ultimately decided not to. And the idea of “how to be Hot”, which began as a bit of a joke, a vehicle in which I could play my part in the endless chorus of lousy dating stories in New York City, started to become something of a quest of self. Superficially, I understood this newsletter was a way to productively avoid writing the biography of Carmen Balcells. More profoundly, I was beginning to realize that rather than share her story, I felt more comfortable telling my own.

Through and among all this, two friends began to ask very different but equally important questions about God in my proximity. One of the two was (is) studying a Sumerian Priestess, Enheduanna, who was, in turn, obsessed with a Goddess, Inanna or Ishtar. Through prophetess and goddess, this friend began to trace the history of the transformation of a God—Inana or Ishtar has gone through various mutations, including, I think, Venus and/or Aphrodite. One day, my friend and I visited an exhibition of Enheduanna, “the world’s first author”, at the Morgan Library. As I trailed behind the magical presence of this friend passionately explaining the purpose of tiny cylinder seals hanging on the opposite side of the glass (they were the equivalent of a signature today, she said breathlessly), I realized that when she looked at the remnants of life in cylinders or eyeless, praying sculptures, she didn’t see distant, stone God(esses), but rather, living, breathing beings that can and have gone through different transfigurations. In a subsequent conversation charging through the glistening Spring streets of Manhattan, this friend called my attention to the localized Gods of pre-modern eras, who, attached to a sense of place, were grounded in what we needed of the land, not anything more. It was, as always, wondrous.

In parallel, another friend was caught under the thumb of another single, but much more constraining God. More than anyone I’ve ever known, she was committed to accepting this God into her life and learning to live under the rules and requirements that her God’s followers recommended. She struggled, I think, to contort herself into the shapes that would allow her to live comfortably with this God. When I saw her strain against the container she put herself in, I tried to point her to the other forms of Gods that I knew, hopeful that she might take to following one of those instead. There were days when she saw that possibility and reached toward feeling comfort in a personal expression of God. But many other days, as we walked across Central Park in the night, she conveyed that she was mesmerized by her God, rule-bound as he/she might be, because he/she promised powers of healing and transcendence. She talked with me and others about love, grace, peace, and eternity in each of these ebbs and flows. She took to studying the Bible and its needs with a fervent academic passion. You could reliably stumble into her crouched over a Bible crowded with post-its and scrawls on the lawns of a small park along the East River. She successfully lured me into a debate about the role of God in our human lives. In time, these two parallel conversations naturally led to the question: is God Hot?

***

I have always imagined God in male human form: large, fatherly, bearded, pot-bellied, maybe, crowned, definitely. This is, without a doubt, rooted in the Christian tradition in which I was raised. I was born (out of wedlock) to a family of middling to high allegiance to Scripture. To be more specific, “middling allegiance” describes my mother’s side of the family, who inhabit the more flexible constraints of cultural catholicism, savvily woven with an eccentric mix of belief systems such as Buddhism, Tarot, and Feng Shui. My grandmother has made her figurines of the Buddha, spiritual cleanses using parsley, and a monthly Tarot reading feel surprisingly compatible with the suffering faces of the baroque saints of the Roman Catholic Church decorating the tall votive candles strewn across her living room. “High allegiance”, on the other hand, characterizes my father’s family, where a clean-cut Christian faith is pervasive and cohesive. It is at the centre of all they breathe and do.

My grandfather, my father’s father, who passed away recently, was born to a family of missionaries who left Scotland in the late 19th century to travel through South America—first Bolivia, later Argentina. His father, my great-grandfather, was a minister for the Plymouth Brethren, an offshoot of the Anglican church, who believed the Bible was the only authority for church doctrine. During my grandfather’s service of remembrance, I learned that he grew up “behind the curtains” of the church, watching as his father preached. My grandfather’s family depended on the weekly offering to live. It was thanks to the church that my grandfather received an education; he was shipped to the U.K. on a bursary to study and was shipped right back to Argentina after the United Kingdom declared war on Germany in 1939.

In time, my grandfather became a music executive, working with the likes of Leo Dan, Mercedes Sosa, Plácido Domingo, and Astor Piazzolla. He moved from Buenos Aires to Mexico City and ultimately to the outskirts of London with his family to follow his career. However, through all that, his faith was the central unifying thread. During his last days, even under the thick fog of dementia, he and my grandmother would pray every morning and again before each meal. When he was well, meaning before the cardiac arrest that stripped him of language, he preached regularly at the churches he frequented. My father has taken up this practice, although in his own way.

Growing up, I accompanied my dad to church on Sunday mornings, cherishing another setting where I could take on the role of “the good student”. I would memorize Bible verses and ingest cartoons of vegetables retelling familiar biblical tales. Around me, the adults shared their understanding of belief and of this one, singular God who orchestrated their days, held them when they were down, imposed accountability when they were wrong, and who they hoped to meet one day when their bodies released their spirits. Outside of church, Christianity was not only coherent, but it was also ubiquitous. My dad, notorious for extensive chats with just about anyone, can quickly spot an opportunity to talk about his faith. He will volunteer his journey to Christ to create space for the other person to air their beliefs, a move that’s typically successful. “Dom, what a person, they have such a beautiful faith”, he would say as we walked through a dark, empty parking lot, many hours after I hoped we would leave the event.

After an early and brief period of regular Sunday School attendance and eager participation in a yearly “Christmas Pageant Spectacular” (spectacular primarily because of the real, live camels that strutted long, luscious eyelashes across the stage), once my family moved back to Mexico and, more importantly, I became a teenager, I lost interest in church. I had better things to do during the weekend, like sitting under the sun as my mother hung clothes out to dry in our garden. Or, later, go out to lunch with a boyfriend’s family when he was in town and then maybe go to the movies. Or, later still, be hungover.

At university, I was quickly transfixed by the secular promise of the intellect, and I found myself nodding along to my professor’s sharp critiques of organized religion, silent, of course, about the fact that they were criticizing the roots of their own institutions. The arguments probably became (or felt?) more appealing because we were in a country where religion very explicitly ordered our lives and calendars. The more immersed I became in gender and post-colonial theory, the more I found God a bewildering concept—why would I want a rather large man, whom I cannot see, watching over me? Is that really comforting? Does it really make me feel safe? Held? I began to hear too many stories of people shackled both literally and metaphorically by God-imbued kings, presidents, or dictators following a hungry search for power. I saw religion as a fool’s game. Even in its more local manifestations, I was perplexed by the contradictions in the realm of his Heavenly Ways: if God is magnificent and grand, does he really care how I dress? What I eat? Whom I love? What I drink? I understand the suggestions around being kind and not hurting others, but beyond that, why would he concern himself with the mundane details of my life? Why would I give up my freedom to honour him?

***

The first time I felt the church tug at me was when, toward the end of my first year in college, a friend from high school died unexpectedly during a Spring Break trip home to Mexico. On a strikingly bright Saturday morning many thousands of miles away from home, I awoke to seven missed calls and the news that a familiar body had been found beneath a bridge near our houses. I have driven over that bridge countless times. It is flanked, on one side, by a flower stand and on the other, by a church. I remember sitting in traffic in front of the church as a tween and letting my eyes rise along its sharp orange steeple ordained by a cross. The church’s structure, modern and abstract, pierces the landscape suddenly, and the parish it signals sprawls out underneath.

It was the first time that I experienced such a proximate and sudden death. This friend and I sat together on the school bus between sixth and eighth grade, and then, once we both drove to school, we continued our friendship in classes, lunch breaks, and every so often at parties or clubs. When we were fourteen or so, he tricked me into kissing him by asking me if I knew whether or not I was a good kisser. Four years later, when he told me he was on the waitlist for the university he was most excited about, I wrapped my arms around his waist and noticed that the tips of my fingers could reach past my elbows. I looked up at him and saw that he’d be very handsome when he grew up; once he filled his lanky frame.

After he died, I flew to Mexico to attend his memorial. I didn’t make it in time for the burial. When I got back to my university, it was Easter, and I found myself asking a friend if she might take me to mass. We went to a quirky Catholic church whose congregation had grown too large, so they now held service in a school’s basketball court underneath a greying white tarp. The message felt distant; the priest’s words, shrouded in a Filipino accent, couldn’t reach me in the second to last row behind hundreds of people whose ears were more receptive than mine. The following week, I ventured to the nearby protestant Church, which immediately felt more familiar. I never went back, though.

***

On the same day that my grandfather died, I had a baby tooth removed from my mouth. Even though baby teeth can accompany you well into middle age, mine was rotting and had been for a while, so I put on my big girl pants and coughed up a lofty sum so that a maxillofacial surgeon could yank the tooth out from my jaw and put a titanium screw in its place. During my recovery from a minimally invasive procedure, I had to take antibiotics for about ten days. On the Sunday before the start of Lent, a few days before all this happened, I went to St. John the Divine to hear the church’s choral group perform Evensong—I was in the area and have always wanted to see that cathedral come alive with music. During the service, the vicar reminded me that the Lenten period was due to begin, and I thought: convenient. I had been drinking a bit more than I wanted to, and I was looking for an excuse to take a break. I decided that, after the tooth thing, I would give up alcohol for forty days since, for a quarter of the time, I couldn’t drink anyway. Lent was a great excuse to coat my teetotaling with virtue.

What I didn’t plan was that every weekend since the start of Lent, I’ve been to Church. I’m not sure how I went from “let’s use the excuse of antibiotics + Lent to stop drinking for a bit” to consistently attending Church, but alas, here we are. One reason for my performance of devotion might be that I found a church on the Upper East Side where bedazzled ladies bring their pious pups, and, as some of you will imagine, I can’t resist the spectacle. To be honest, though, in between so much loss, I’ve been feeling unmoored. Church feels familiar. Whatever the reason, my ecclesiastical adventures have been fascinating.

***

At mass three weeks ago, the Vicar spoke about giving up chocolate for Lent as a young child and the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection. Somewhere in that liturgy, it dawned on me that the idea of God, in its purest, most abstract form, is impossible for us human beings to comprehend. Our narrow, singular perspectives that, in general, struggle with the concepts of contradiction and infinity can’t possibly absorb the idea of a single, almighty God. With that insight, I wondered whether the institution of religion was forced to innovate to appeal to the limits of our imaginations. Though there’s a long history of personified Gods, Christianity went out of its way to create a structure (in Jesus) to help people who, understandably, couldn’t grasp the concept of an omnipotent, invisible God. I’m not saying that Jesus wasn’t a human who walked this earth; he probably did. What I am saying is that the idea of Jesus, transmitted to us through the Bible and in church, was probably a necessary technology so that churches could continue to communicate the message of God.

Imagine the scene: a group of religious leaders, maybe priests or rabbis, I don’t know (I don’t know anything), sharing a beer in a scrawny pub. After exchanging local gossip, one of them raises the complaint that every week, someone in their congregation brings the same question: “What is God, really?” “That happens to you too? I thought it was only me!” “Yes, same here!” “Why don’t they just get it??” Why isn’t it enough, they retort, when we describe our God in the heavens as a father?! After furious debate, the bravest in the group might have stood up and said, “What if we imagine God channelled in human form?” And then a revolution took over.* Jesus was an innovation that solved a problem—too much abstraction—by bringing God as close to us as we could ever dream. Maybe too close.

As the light strained through four-metre-high stained glass windows, after her liturgy, the vicar called on us to join her at the altar for communion, asking us to ingest the body of Christ. My stomach dropped. I had just watched the Society of the Snow, and the idea of eating another human being made me feel queasy. Because I was feeling sad and nostalgic, I went up to the altar anyway, but crossed my arms over my chest so that I could receive a blessing instead of the symbolic body. While I walked back home, I realized that the bread—the flesh of Jesus—was part of the trick. If God could be human in Jesus, by ingesting him, you too could be inhabited by divinity.

***

My maternal family’s understanding of faith has no “right” answer: you can pick up incense, recite the Lord’s prayer, meditate, and freeze pieces of paper with the names of your enemies as punishment, all in the name of a singular system true only to you. These practices might be called spiritual but not religious: at the core, there’s a belief that there could or should be “something” out there, but given the wide variety on the planet and how little I (we) know about anything, we don’t limit ourselves to dictating what that “something “is, or how we should honour it. I’ve often felt more comfortable exploring my faith in this more eclectic view of divinity.

My recent adventures in church-going, however, have shown me that I can’t separate my belief in “something out there” from the firmly held image of “God as Heavenly Father” of my Sunday School days. As much as I would like to remain steady in my belief in the most abstract version of God that I can imagine, I waver because my mind and language can’t hold that vastness (or void?). At many moments while writing this essay, my hands floated above the keyboard, uncomfortable. In each paragraph, I fought against reverting to personal pronouns when the word “God”, the only word I should be using, felt repetitive.

I wonder if this is why some religions, like Islam or Judaism, prevent us from creating visual representations of God. They know that our minds are too small and that, though the Bible tells us that God created us in his image, it is we who create God in our own. We have to: we’re nowhere near creative or vast enough to understand the truth of what God is or can be.

So now, after all that, I think can finally answer the original question. Thank you for bearing with me. God in its (?) most abstract form? Probably Hot. Most likely extremely Hot. But the God that we humans understand? The one most of us celebrate and honour, the one we see and speak about every day? I don’t know. Look around you. Or, actually, look in the mirror.** Your answer is probably right in front of you.

* Interestingly, Christianity was not alone (nor were they the first) in stepping toward this innovation. Jesus was oneness brought as close to humans as possible, whereas, in Islam, the Prophet Mohammad channels God, though he never pretends to stand for him.

** Thank you, Camila, for this most excellent quip.