A question

"Do you believe in God?"

It was a gut-clenchingly direct question, a kind that I wasn't really used to.  I suppose for believers of any kind this is an entirely familiar question, one asked and answered on a regular basis, the affirmation a matter of habit: the Shahada, the Nicene creed, the Shema... devout atheists, too, have a ready answer.

But for me it was entirely unusual and unexpected and alarming.  I had to scout around for an answer.  "Yes" didn't feel true.  "No" didn't feel honest.  "I don't know" seemed inadequate, even lazy.    "That's a difficult question" felt too evasive.  "None of your business" was combative.

And he wasn't be rude or aggressive, this young man with the carefully sideswept hair and the gentle, limpid eyes.  Just very direct.  Avoiding the issue wasn't really an option.  We were in the middle of a busy intersection on the island of Puerto Princesa, I was perched on the back of his scooter, and he was looking straight at me like we weren't moving until I answered.

"Sometimes," I said.  I'm not sure if it was an accurate answer.  I don't go around gauging my belief in God like diabetics measure their blood sugar, and I suspect that if I did, results would generally be negative.  But it felt like a good answer to give him.  And it wasn't entirely untrue - there have been times in my life when I thought I believed in God.  That all those moments were years ago felt, in the tropical sunlight and the softness of his gaze, rather beside the point.

Tha was almost exactly a year ago.  It was the last time, I believe, anybody has asked me in so many words where I sit with God.  But in trying to explore my family's history, God - like poverty, like wealth, like racism, like violence, like love and deception - is woven deep into the fabric of the story.  I have seen miracles of human impulse that have given me a deep respect for the power of money and hatred and passion and lies; the power of faith is a mystery to me.  So the question sits, not like an accusation, but like a test.


"Do you go to church?"  A second cousin in Georgia, smiling warmly, opening her house in hospitality.  The same question came from almost every relative I met in the Philippines.  Maybe that's one point where my grandparents' very different backgrounds converged - they came from worlds of deep devotion.

To this question, a more common and more manageable one than I'd faced on the back of that scooter, I had the same answer as always: "Um, well, not really."  Very eloquent, I am.

"Well, what matters is your relationship with God.  I'm not going to preach, I'm just saying."  Briskly she changes the topic without asking, and I breathe out a sigh I hadn't known I'd been holding.

"I'm going to skip church and go out to breakfast with you," another Southern relative says generously.  I stutter.  Now my irreligious presence is disrupting the faith of others.  Do I respond with guilt or with gratitude?  Somehow I need to figure out how to write about these communities.  But for them belief in God and sin and hell is the solid fertile ground beneath their feet.  For me, it's like their humidity, invisible but oppressive.  I'm afraid that I'm entirely the wrong storyteller for this family.


On the other hand, there's my Montana family, who weren't the same kind of religious.  I only heard one story about churches; the little fact that my Montanan great-grandfather went sometimes to his mother's church, where they preached in German.  He did not, as far as anyone can tell, speak German.  What does that mean?  Can I try to understand that fact without understanding faith - can I see it as an act of familial devotion, or of habit?  Or do I need to try to know what it would mean to believe in words you cannot understand?

But for the most part, it seems, my Montana ancestors did not wrap their lives around religion.  Aside from my great-great-grandmother's immigrant congregation, churches appear very rarely in their narratives.  They put their faith in their mules, in their labor, in the curing power of kerosene.  When the rains stopped they turned to gambling or the Communist party, not to prayer.

But I am hesitant to say I understand this.  Perhaps their lives were built on a belief in God so basic, so foundational, so taken for granted, that it needed no discussion or sermons or prayers.  What matters, as my relatives have told me, is your relationship to God.  And since I can't ask them what they thought about God, I can't assume that their churchlessness was anything like mine.

What I know, I can't understand; what I think I can understand, I can't know.

(There's another answer)