All This God Business

I was sitting on the club chair reading Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha when my 11-year-old daughter asked: “Mummy told me that you don’t believe in God?”

My face reddened as I put the book down. I was angry at my wife. I was also tongue-tied, as the truth was I still didn’t know whether I believed in God.

“It’s not that simple. I’d need a long time to explain.”

She said okay, but “What is the book you’re reading about?” she asked.

“When you’re old enough, I’ll explain the adventures that Siddhartha took so that he could finally understand all this God business.”

She smiled and ran away to play with her friends.

My daughter is now 27, and during the past 16 years, I wouldn’t say that I’ve found an answer. Rather, I’ve eliminated many easy ones that seem to satisfy most people.

My investigation has been more like via negativa. I’ve cast aside what didn’t work for me. I didn’t want to accept any hard rules, because it was like teaching a student the final solution to a mathematical problem without allowing them time to learn how and why the equation works.

Religion works for many, and I’m all for that. However, I personally find dogmatic rules and regulations rather off-putting, stifling even. I couldn’t accept that I must pray five times daily, or fast for a whole month when I hadn’t solved the big issue of whether there is a God in the first place.

My parents were devout Muslims, and I saw how well it served them. I can recall my mum reciting the Quran every morning and can still feel the peace that it gave her throughout her day. And when they fasted at Ramadan, they’d be softer, kinder and more compassionate. Not to mention the lovely gatherings we had at iftar and feeling the sense of community which we have now lost.

Also, I’d always be humbled by the certainty and hope they both had in life. They felt secure, and no major tragedies fazed them. It’s as if someone had their backs.

I never felt that security. Whenever I tried to follow in their footsteps, believing blindly, I felt like a fraud. I’m from the modern era, too scientific and always looking for proof of the divine. I know how hopeless and cerebral I sound, but that’s how I felt.

My mum specifically was very upset that my siblings and I did not follow the precepts of Islam. She would, on every occasion, admonish us. My father, more open, would still find ways to pass on the teachings of Islam through well-known scholars and theologians. For a time when I was in my teens, he’d take an hour a week discussing the history and philosophy of Islam.

The truth was I didn’t reject Islam or what it stood for. I rejected being handed a solution. I wanted to know how the equation worked and not just that it did.

Belief is a proposition you assent to. But belief was never what I had, which is why the question Do you believe in God was unanswerable rather than merely difficult. Wrong verb.

During his October 1959 interview on the BBC television program Face to Face, filmed at his home in Switzerland, interviewer John Freeman asked Carl Jung, “And did you believe in God?” followed by, “Do you now believe in God?” Jung paused and replied: “Now? Difficult to answer. I know. I don’t need to believe. I know.”

By this, he meant he had seen a power greater than himself at work in his life. He had no need for blind faith. He experienced “God” on a daily basis and knew how to connect with that force.

In her book, The Awakened Brain, Dr Lisa Miller defines spirituality as an innate human capacity for perception. She said: “A significant degree of our capacity to experience the sacred and transcendent—one-third—is inscribed in our genetic code, as innate as our eye colour or fingerprints.”

Rather than viewing spirituality as connecting to something bigger than ourselves, as I did before, Miller frames it as a perceptual capacity that allows humans to feel loved, held, guided, and never alone.

Now, spirituality is not something we do, but rather a perception that happens to us.

Even though back in my earlier article in 2017, I explained that I’m spiritual, now I feel that word signifies something I don’t like. ‘I’m spiritual’ was becoming fashionable shorthand for a non-materialistic worldview. The category became a demographic, a market segment, a wellness aisle, a phrase you can now say at a dinner party at zero cost.

Spirituality got absorbed by optimisation. Something that always seduces me but takes me towards judgement and competition, a place where my ego comes alive. It’s as if meditating daily makes us better than others who don’t. Or that to be truly grateful, you must write out three things that you’re grateful for every morning.

If I meditate because it’s protective against something, I haven’t escaped the achieving mind. I’ve given it better vocabulary. I’ve already written about the wrong rewards in my recent post, The Shortcut Generation.

Just imagine how simple it was before, when the Prophet said, “Tie your camel and trust in God.” (The saying was narrated by Anas ibn Malik and recorded in Sunan al-Tirmidhi 2517.)

No need for a neuroscience researcher to advocate trust in God.

After all the crossing out of ideas towards God, what remains is not reassuring. On one hand, I’m full of hope, and God. But on many others, I’m full of doubts, questions and regularly fall into existential angst.

Often when I’m on business trips, like a few months ago in Dubai, I get so taken up by all-day meetings, discussing business, and running to be on time that I quickly fall out of sync and neglect my morning journalling. After a few days, I enter a metaphorical dark tunnel, soulless, lonely, empty, rudderless and worst of all, without hearing the sound of my heart.

That’s when I envy the religious ones who believe and trust blindly. They seem to never feel alone. They seem to never be rudderless. They seem to always be in tune with their souls.

Whenever I do become hopeless and veer towards nothingness, words and ideas from literary writers, poets and philosophers soothe me. I just have to think of:

Seagulls flying in unison. A sunset over the Mediterranean. A dense forest brimming with tall oak trees.

Rumi’s field, out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing.

Gibran’s earth, delighting to feel your bare feet.

Spinoza’s God is not a human-like king sitting in the clouds judging us. Instead, God is the entire physical universe and all its laws combined.

Many waves in an ocean, many oceans on this planet, many planets in the galaxy, billions of galaxies.

Or with the things I’ve learned to do as I became a writer :

Solitude — just me, my thoughts and the vastness that surrounds me, all the noise of the day before settling like coffee residue to the bottom of the cup.

A few hours writing, where time and space collapse.

Conversations fuelled by curiosity, wit and humour.

In a few weeks, I’ll meet Savannah. I’m taking Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha with me to explain to her that today I have moments of knowing and long stretches of nothing, but like Siddhartha, I will continue to investigate all answers to God.

I’d like to leave that spirit of inquisitiveness in her.