XVI: In Which I Contemplate Religion and Love

When I was young, I experienced a brief but fervid religious phase, a sort of personal Great Awakening. I was probably 10 or 11 at the time, and I was beginning to become aware of the vastness of the universe and our insignificant place in it, of the frightening uncertainty of life, and, most of all, of death and the fact that someday I would cease to be. I was a cheery kid. I remember lying in bed at nights and imagining what it would be like to live in a coffin; some of the fine points of death, apparently, are not readily obvious to ten-year olds.

And so I started looking for answers to Life's Big Questions. That search resulted in the procurement of some very authentic and very unhip religious gear (tsitsis, a very "groovy" multicolor Seventies-vintage tallis and an equally hideous yarmulke that looked like a collapsed fez), regular shul attendance (my rabbi once referred to me as 'Super Jew' during this period, and I wasn't too young to know that I was being patronized, and to resent it), and, no doubt, plenty of smug sanctimony.

I was looking for something to believe in. It couldn't merely be enticing, though; I wasn't going to be satisfied simply because I was being promised spiritual fulfillment or a place in Heaven if only I toed the line. I've always figured God must have given us brains for a reason, so that if something seems to make no sense at all or, worse, appears to contradict all good sense, He would want us to reject it. The alternative is to accept a God who hands down arbitrary and unfair rules and principles… why? Because He's a capricious prick? Because He loves a good practical joke? If you stop to think about it for even a second, you realize that either that God doesn't exist or that, if He does, it wouldn't do you the slightest good to pray to Him.

And so I arrived at your standard rationalist understanding of religion: that it was created to keep people in line, to reinforce societal power structures, to answer questions for people who cannot live in a world where the answers to those questions are not reassuring, etc. etc. I have lived most of my life without the comforts of faith, and without missing them.

Or have I? Before I met my future ex, my relationships typically started with physical attraction and quickly devolved to pathology driven by an empty set of shared interests, attitudes, and goals. It was so different with my future ex--we had so much in common--that I naturally assumed I'd hit the mother lode, that I'd found elusive 'true love.' Everything after that, from dealing with a long-distance relationship for two years to getting married and even to our last few unhappy years was based on, well, faith; faith in a concept I have no more proof of than the existence of God, and faith that it meant things would have to work out all right in the end, even if the going got rough for a while.

Well it did and they didn't, of course, and here I am, perplexed and with a damn Foreigner song stuck in my head to boot. Recently I'd begun to believe that I don't really know what love is, that I never have and that I probably never will. Fortunately--Thank God?--serendipity stepped in. The other day I watched Juno for the first time, and therein lay the answer to my most recent search for A Big Answer. It comes from Juno's father, Mac MacGuff:

In my opinion, the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly what you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person will still think the sun shines out your ass. That's the kind of person that's worth sticking with.

You probably have to see it to get the full effect. And yeah, I know, it's just a movie, and life isn't like the movies. Still, if I ever meet someone else, if I ever fall in love and get married again, that damn quote's getting embroidered, framed, and hung somewhere it can't be missed.

So there you go.