God? What Gods?

When I was in sixth grade, we learned about the Greek gods and goddesses. I was completely fascinated: there was a god for everything! How wonderful! How obvious! How brilliant! Their stories, their bickering and trickery, their very un-god-like behavior, totally captured my imagination, and I couldn't believe how lucky the Greeks were to have them. I think I knew it was too good to be true when I tentatively and wistfully asked my teacher, Mrs. Sause, if the Greeks still believed in Zeus and Hera, in Aphrodite and Athena and Artemis.

She started back, twisted up her disapproving face, and said, "No, no; they're Christian, like you and me." She eyed me in a way that made me feel not dumb, but . . . dangerous, I guess.

Disappointed but undaunted, I continued to carry these icons with me. I remember a wonderful book about Aphrodite, Athena and Artemis, one of those exciting, "women's studies" books that put a divine, feminine and feminist spin on the girls. I loved the idea of having a different god for everything; it somehow made so much sense to me. Elements were powerful and had unique properties: wind was not fire, and the sun was not the moon. Of course different deities had different assignments. One god? Come on! There's too much to worry about, even for a god, or even God. Sure, you might feel sorry for someone like Hephaestus, toiling as a smith when Aphrodite got all the adoration (not to mention sex). Yes, Zeus sounded like a pig, but Hera got to trip him up once in awhile. One God sounded less and less safe: I mean, Zeus being the Almighty? When he's busy assaulting nymphs? Like anything else is going to get done. No, better to have the pantheon, a magical system of checks and balances, than one crazy Father who demands blood sacrifice, isn't it?

Much later in life, I became acquainted with the Hindu pantheon: the Greeks had nothing on these people. I'm not sure if there's even an accurate count out there of how many gods and goddesses are part of Hinduism. Hundreds, for sure, maybe even thousands. These gods are very specific and very local. Yes, there are the 'stars': Shiva, Krishna, Laxmi, Kali, Ganesha. But every town and village on the Subcontinent has its own dear gods in addition to the celebrities. I loved Ganesha especially: who couldn't love a happy, cheerful, chubby god with the head of an elephant (big misunderstanding with the father, that) who loves sweets and is called upon for auspicious beginnings. Beginnings are my favorite: that's why I love spring so much. That, and the fact I'm a Minnesotan. I started collecting Ganeshas to place around the house, much to my husband's dismay. There's some sort of directive to have, I don't know, forty-eight Ganeshas in the house for good fortune. I still long for a spectacular Ganesha statue that sat about three feet high and almost as wide, perched in a shop window with a price a bit out of my reach, much to my husband's joy.

My husband is an atheist. It was one of the first things that I loved about him. The night we met, I learned he was raised by atheist, Communist parents in Kerala who had a love marriage. Meaning that because of the difference in caste (this was in 1973, mind you), his mother never saw her family again after she married. I'd always thought that I was an agnostic, or pantheist, because of my affection for the many gods of many places and times. My Catholic upbringing was too late, after Vatican II, for me to experience the ordained version of pantheism, the saints, but I still could appreciate them from afar.

Then my father had a carcinoid tumor on his right lung when he was sixty-seven, and I realized that no matter what, no matter what I believed or didn't believe, he might die, and there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it. And there wasn't anything anybody, or any god or goddess, or God, could do about it, either. And then I realized that just because I liked gods, didn't mean I believed in them.

That was surprising the way a stubbed toe, or a thunderstorm, or the slamming of brakes to avoid hitting the car in front of you, is: startling enough to take your breath away, isn't it? Wow. I wasn't agnostic, or pantheistic, at all: I was an atheist. Here I had thought all this time my affection was belief. But when it came down to it, I believed in none of them any more than I would a fairy tale. It was sort of scary at first, like working without a tightrope: what if this were really it? I mean, no nothing afterwards. Nothing after death. No heaven, no hell, no reincarnation, no "seeing" everything and understanding it all. Just . . . ceasing to exist. It's hard for the mind to get around that one, isn't it? It isn't, of course, if you've got some version of what's going to happen after death that you tell yourself. But if you don't, well, then you're just there, trying to wrap your imagination around nothingness. You realize that everything else will exist (for a time) but you. And others will remember you, but you will not exist, you will not remember, you will no longer be here.

As strong as the mind is, it is not strong enough to sit in this predicament for long without panicking. However, if you have a belief system that explains to and reassures you that something not terrible happens after death, or even that you'll get to see those who have gone before you, I can see how attractive that might be. But it still seems like a fairy tale to me. I don't mean to dismiss others' beliefs, but really, no one has come back to tell us what it's like after we die. No one really knows: that's why it's called faith. Or belief. These are not reliant on facts or logic or science. Feelings are something else entirely, too: just because you feel strongly that the afterlife is this way or that, or that your loved one's spirit is nearby, doesn't mean that it is. Combine emotions with the mind and well, you have an overriding desire to come up with a comforting yet somehow plausible story of what's going to happen after death.

But it's just all so much story to me. And that, really, is what seems to last, to have eternity to it: stories. The same stories and dreams and visions have been with us for millenniums, haven't they? The names change, but the same stories just get stronger with time, with centuries, till they are cemented in our hearts and minds. We think stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending, but really, that's us. We're born, live and die. Stories, no. They just are. They are the ones that have eternal life, not us.