The Void // Devotion

This is a short essay, a short history of my understanding of God, though I have titled this piece, “The Void,” so as to not make others feel alienated, as I once felt. To the most frightened by the idea, who have experienced the unfortunate being force-fed the concept of God, the Void is so much easier to get close to. In a sense, Void seems antithetical to what others consider God, at least other religions, God being referred to as a ‘He’ or as an Entity or as having a human face. The Kabbalists however coalesce Void with God and it is with them I largely feel aligned in thinking. It is with the Void I mainly speak, to the Void I primarily write, with the Void I walk, and with the Void I struggle, sometimes not to die. At least, until it is time, and then, I will give in.

My parents came from different sides of the monotheistic spectrum, my dad having been raised Jewish in New York City and my mother raised Protestant in a rural valley in California called New Cuyama. Their meeting in the middle as a couple having children, and primarily because of my father, resulted in an obliteration of religious feeling, or the religious naming of anything. All mention of God was carefully avoided, we Never went to church or synagogue, and aside from visiting my Jewish grandparents for the high holidays, there was no traditional religious exposure of any kind. There were those high holidays though, and to them I owe my feeling of food and warm lighting conflating with times of the year in which we are supposed to give thanks because traditionally this is when God has stepped in for His people. These high holidays also happen to coincide with the turning of the seasons, however, I had no pagan exposure—beyond what any child of the seasons is born with— until I was much older. On my mother’s side, our visits to her family being solely during the blazing hot summers, in the least religious time of year, when one is most likely to be outside lounging half-naked by the pool, God was to me the close to death feeling of my grandmother sleeping on her arm at the end of her couch in the middle of the day beneath her slowly gyrating fan. Actually, I would never have used the word ‘God’ back then—I felt very distanced and isolated from the idea. I don’t know why or where it started but because it had never been mentioned by my parents in any instructional or intentional way, and certainly I never saw either one of them pray, I had nothing to go off of, and the literature I was exposed to was strictly secular and generally taboo. God to me seemed some stuffy irrelevant ritual that other families indulged in who were not as forward with their sexuality as I planned to be, who did stuffy things like sit in silence or talk to nobody.

In middle school I became friends with a girl named Heather who was very intelligent, very shy and not very forthcoming, but with whom, quietly but fervently, on the bus, we would engage in theological discussions. Her house was one of those houses of religious silence. But I was meant to know and experience viscerally her side of it as we were neighbors, our yards literally flowing into one another, which at this point I consider symbolic. Though everything is symbolic to me now.

She also belonged to religious groups, as did my friend Annie—which served for me as impetus to zing the other way towards all manner of sin, which at that point in life, was my main goal. I wanted to be defiled and I was very honest and transparent about it. Youth Groups became for me the reason to turn away from God altogether. I hated these worship groups back then. I hated the hungry recruitiveness of the people who went, I hated the condoning way of talking, the warnings laced in with words of love, I hated the feeble songs that had no agony in them or deep love like baptist songs, which I would in time come to love, and I hated the way everyone used these youth groups as some kind of meeting safe space to play at the same dynamics I wanted to play at but under pretense, that is, engaging in energy that had sexuality as its root. That was teased at on these youth group floors as it was everywhere else but the inclusion of God and the built in structure of warnings and taboos made it feel extremely hypocritical to me. So I was scared officially away from God.

For a long, long time. And I lived a life for a long, long time stretching far beyond high school of sexual freedom, of Godlessness, and running from the Void. But I was very unhappy, I was a voracious eater of drugs, I was a slut, and I was very far, very far removed, if not impossibly posited against what I most wanted in the world, in my secret heart of hearts—to be deeply loved by a man, made his wife, and to become a mother. I wanted that conservative, that age-old story after my parents’ relationship of vacuity, without vows and without God, frayed and fell apart, after all financial resources were gone, without an ancestral home, without even social prospects. With all that of the past eroded away, there was left no other fulcrum from which love could grow for me but a soul one, the connection between two souls. And through the philosophical concept of soul, ah, that is where I began to be caught and slowly reeled in by the word, and then the entity, and finally the Void of God.

What is meaningful in this life if social relationships crumble, if the family home is gone, and work someone else hires you for fails to satisfy? I dug deep in myself, through violent tears, through spontaneous prayer, and journaling in a kind of madness, down tunnels that have ancestral roots—into the world of folklore and myth, down the trapdoors. Down beneath into my psyche, and down in these channels where nothing lives but dreams, pain, and deep enough, deep enough—the Void. The Void is deep love, deep relief beneath everything painful. This healing Nothingness lives beneath singing pain and the madness of uprooting all the pain and tracing it back to one’s parents and beyond. The finding of this, beneath everything messy and condemning and killing, was for me complete and utter proof of God. I did not expect to find that there, but I did, all the same.

The Void is of course, everywhere, but in the deeps, it pulsates, it is a nothingness most soothing, it is a cradle which allows for all pain and transgression against yourself, from others and by your own hand, to be left behind. It is the confrontation with one’s roots. And then when one comes up again for fresh air, one is able now to close the eyes and sink down in the body to the roots. Looking up at the sky with the eyes open in the sun can have the same grounding effect. These simple activities, the only arena of healing and self-knowing, became for me a House when I had no Home, and a Mother after my own mother died of grief. And, becoming akin with these practices, beginning to understand the sacredness of everything, the sacredness of my breath all the way deep down into my womb, have I come to welcome, even crave the word and the connection with God in my life. For me, the deepest connection to body, to soul, and yes, to romantic love, comes after meeting with the Void, the rock bottom birth of God. And now I walk with God everywhere. I pray. At my table, we thank God before we eat. Though I am still very shy about it. We just say, ‘Thank you for this meal,’ though the other day, I saw my son put his hands together. I am not part of any religion, I still don’t feel very comfortable around preachers or ideologies; the only kind of church I visit is an empty one, but I have the word, the being; I am devoted to the Void, and that alone has been my healing.