Where We Find God

I have faith. I can’t describe it, but I know it is there and it is both a comfort and a source of strength.

And yet I still have fear. Of the unknown. Of the future. Of death. One could assume that with faith your fear would melt away. If you have faith shouldn’t you believe that God will take care of you? What is left to fear? But, I don’t think that faith works like that. I’m not sure exactly HOW it works, but I know that it doesn’t erase fear and uncertainty.

On Monday I attended the monthly Lunch and Learn that my rabbi does in a congregant's office downtown. It was just a few of us, and the topic for the afternoon was death, the afterlife, and cremation. When your rabbi asks you point blank what you think about the afterlife and your first reaction is immediate anxiety it is perhaps time to examine why you feel this way, except this involves thinking about the very thing that causes you sleepless nights and panic attacks and why, oh why, would you put yourself through that? Isn’t it easier to just go through life and ignore the things that cause our stomachs to contract, our palms to sweat, our pulses to raise, and not in a good way? Can’t we just avoid the things that we are afraid of? I am reading David Wolpe’s Why Faith Matters right now, and of course one of the things he brings up first is death and dying and fear. So, it seems that I will be confronting this sooner than later.

Articulating what I think about faith and God is difficult. I know that when I am with people I love it is easier to express my experience of God—it is in the relationships, the smiles, the laughs, the hugs, the comfort, the support. It is harder to express what I think about faith when it relates to something that I fear, especially when describing that fear is troublesome in and of itself.

This past week the Torah portion dealt with Jacob wrestling with mysterious figure (An angel? Esau? Jacob himself?) and then with his meet-up with his estranged brother, Esau. This is one of my favorite parts of the Torah, because while my rabbi calls Jacob a thug, I think he is a much more relatable figure than say Moses or Abraham. Jacob is altogether human, with human frailties and imperfections. When he wrestles with the stranger we don’t know who it is and are left to draw our own conclusions. But, I don’t think we can understand fully the wrestling episode without considering the reconciliation between Jacob and Esau that occurs in the next chapter. Jacob says to his brother “for to see your face is like seeing the face of God.” When Jacob had wrestled with the stranger he renames the place Peniel, which means “I have seen a divine being face to face.” Whether or not we are meant to believe that the stranger was Esau, or an angel, or God, or even Jacob, what I take away from this (and others have as well--check out G-d Cast) is that it is in our relationships that we encounter God. It is in the face of a person you love that you see God, that you can see your faith manifest.

So, how does this all tie together with what I wrote at the beginning of this entry? I’m not sure. I know that my experience of God has been profound in the past few months as I have struggled and as I have begun to regain my footing. I know that my faith has been strengthened because of the connections that have kept me going and I don’t believe these connections are mere chance. I have seen the face of God in the smiles of friends and I have felt God’s embrace in their hugs and their love. It makes the prospect of confronting that which I fear slightly less daunting.