Brief History of My Relationship With God

[photo taken in 2008 of me at my favorite museum, The American Visionary Art Museum, in Baltimore; no idea who the artist was]

Somewhere around age 5: The constant panic about thinking the sentence “I hate God” over and over in my head. I used to have insomnia over this. This, now that I think about it, was clearly the beginning of my life with OCD. The thing is, I did not hate God at all. I loved God! A lot. And I still do!

Going to Christian church with the white kids, age 7: There was no religion in our house at this point. But I knew all the white kids went to church and I was jealous. Church seemed a beautiful place, full of stunning architecture and wholesome people and nice choir music. What was there not to love? A more popular kid someone decided to be so nice as to take me to Oneonta Church’s afterschool program and there I attended my first services. I once heard a pastor talk about your conscience and about how lying was a huge sin and he demonstrated it all by shaking a jar of pickles. I guess when the jar was flipped that was what you did to your conscience when you lied. This had a tremendous effect on me. I developed a big fear of lying. But to this day I always go to churches if I can.

Middle school: Dad gets into Zoroastrianism, far more than just giving us Zoroastrian names out of Persian nationalism. We begin frequenting a Zoroastrian temple in Westminster. It’s yet another environment where I feel out of place, not rich enough to be with the Iranians or cultured enough to be with the Parsis. Still I flip through the Avesta, memorizes a few lines as prayers, wear all white before the eternal flame in the temple, and tell this other unfamiliar God to rid us of poverty, earthquakes, and self-doubt

Atheism, high school-college, 1990s: Need I say more?

2008, Los Angeles & then Brooklyn: I date a Hare Krishna monk. He calls me Sundari Pundit. He’s a chainsmoking white skater from Nashville who he grew up best friends with Harmony Korine, whose Burzum hoodies and knuckle tattoos and gentle voice lure me in; he ran away to India after heroin addiction and many lives later he makes women’s couture in Los Angeles. We go to the Hare Krishna temples, debate Vaishnavism with monks, consume prasad after worship. We love God together until he starts sleeping with the lights on at all times, and saying he sees ghosts in the faces of my friends. He believes in conspiracies and that we are unsafe, always. How to reason with that? This too will pass and it does.

2015, New York: Shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, I find myself on Twitter more than ever. More Islamophobia, a word constantly on my mind, another kind of massacre—an ideological one—in the aftermath of an actual massacre. I start to announce on Twitter I am Muslim—this is my identity after all, even though I would be the first to point out I have no practiced it or any religion properly in my life. I say it over and over until it finds its way into my heart. I am Muslim and these are the people I will stand with should it come to that, I tell what bit of the world reads me.

2016, upstate New York: An 18-wheeler hits me and I suffer a terrible concussion with another year of post-concussion syndrome. I may still have that. But it definitely brings on my Lyme relapse. And for a while no one is convinced I will make it. I remember little of the time. I remember somehow I finish my memoir SICK and turn that in and get on a plane to Tel Aviv for an activist anthology. I survive that and more and someone asks me how and at first I joke and then I meant it: God.

Are you kidding?my parents, atheists of convenience, ask me more than a few times.

It becomes a joke imagining me in hijab, the daughter with the tattoos of the old black lipstick and piercings and drink and drugs constant profanity. This girl can’t marry a man, now she wants to love God?

But I love God.

I have never not loved God, this much I know.

I have prayed my whole life, even when an atheist.

And I am not ashamed to say when most afraid of dying, when at my sickest, I have turned to God. And in this past year, the worst of my life, these past two years actually, I turned to God more than ever and—forgive the sermon—I saw God in absolutely everything. You go looking for a thing, they say, and, reader, God came for me. It felt like an untangling, when I could not pull things apart, something like divine intervention showed me how. So many coincidences, so much luck—I never felt more in good graces than when I felt closest to death.

This has never been fashionable in America, haven of political dissidence, stolen land of those who walked away from their God only to find their own God: money.

But God people have always been my people. And in this season of Kanye making some new millions of his newfound Christianity and all sort of white conservatives using the name of their Lord as they scramble to hold onto their slipping power and Islam continues as ever to bloom into bigger and bigger numbers all over the planet though not without considerable strife as ever, it is hard to find faith as it always felt for me: small, intimate, a night voice, a plea, a sob, a sigh.

A few months after I turned 21, I took the Eurostar to Paris for the first time and found myself hungover in Notre Dame sobbing violently not for the past but because I already knew my future would be almost unbearable. Years later, while driving through rural Mississippi, I used the bathroom at a megachurch and an off-duty police officer asked me if I had a boyfriend and why not. In Harlem, where I live for most my 30s, I ran around in a white tank top one hot Sunday when I first moved there until a group of old impeccably dressed old women stopped me with a young lady do you know what day of the week it is and I never made that mistake again. When the young men of a local mosque are hired to illegally demo the unit above me and in effect destroy my apartment and my health, in that same Harlem, I try to reason with them, and when they say my sister listen to us I say no brother of mine would take part in this.

Where was God then? Where is God now?

This is the question, this question the guide.