Playing Hide and Seek with G-d

Inside Grace Cathedral in San Francisco other pilgrims walked ahead of me on the labyrinth, their measured steps muffled on the tapestry underneath their feet. The tapestry was modeled on the labyrinth chiseled into the floor at Chartres Cathedral in France. I shuffled along with my eyes trained on the carpet, the blinking flames of candles in my periphery. The curved path seemed to take me farther and farther away from the center, until, suddenly, I arrived.

The center, a rose design with six petals—each petal large enough for someone to stand upon and pray—was empty of other people. I stood still. Very still. I breathed in the scent of candle wax. I quieted my mind. After a few minutes, my palms turned upwards as if levitated. A feeling of peace I had never felt before washed over me. It was followed by a warmth that defied the October air. As a practicing Jew, I hoped that G-d would allow me this one, tiny moment of grace in a cathedral.

At the local synagogue—in the small town just south of the Canadian border that we moved to twenty years ago from San Francisco—G-d evaded me. Millions of dollars had been raised to build a new Reform schul, or temple. The first time I walked in, I wanted to walk out. It was not only the air that chilled me. The stark white walls punctured my soul. A grand stage rose above the chairs below, as if readying for a sacrifice.

My Judaism was more modest. It smelled of frying onions and cinnamon and schmaltz. And placing a hyphen between the letters G and D, a practice that reminds us we don’t really know G-d’s name. To force in the O would be a sign of our hubris.

The air in the new schul smelled only of cleaning products. G-d was not here. He must be taking Shabbat off.

After services, I escaped into the woods near my house, Snow White ahead of the woodsman. I needed to protect my heart and detox from the forced, refrigerated air. The leaves on the path crunched under my sole with a satisfying chh-chh-chhh. Why was it so hard for me to find G-d in that pristine shul?

To be fair, I’ve never felt found G-d anywhere behind closed doors in this town. The old shul resided in a dilapidated outbuilding rented from the Catholic Church where the smell of candle wax still permeated the walls. But when the old ceiling threatened to fall one too many times, we had to abandon conducting Shabbat services there. That shul-in-a-church, however, felt as if it had history, even if that history wasn’t ours.

Over my head, through the thick trees lining the trail, I heard a cry. A rustle. A cry again with elongated vowels. I looked up. An owl the size of a wastebasket flapped overhead. Brown ribbons striated his white wings. He was near enough my white hair startled. He, however, wasn’t fussed in the least by my presence.

The owl perched in a cedar and made eye contact. He was close enough I could see his eyes reflected yellow. We stared into each other’s eyes until I saw G-d lurking behind the amber. I almost caught sight of the letter behind the hyphen. Then he flew away.

As I hiked back to my house, I hopped over banana slugs the length of my palm. I was careful not to impede their progress or mine. My heart relaxed. A piece of me started to blossom that’s been clenched in a tight bud. The owl had spoken. Continue to look for divinity in unexpected places, which might include trails right outside my door, in another’s house of worship, or from the window of an airplane. I’d traveled many locations, from Barcelona to Bali to Budapest on my search. Each time the plane took off, I peered through the clouds and wondered: Will I experience G-d before I am at the return gate?

Now, twenty years after getting that peek of the divine from the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral, I’m riding a tour bus in France. We’re headed towards the mother ship: Chartres Cathedral. My hands emit a strange heat at the thought of walking the looping path inside the famous church, the path that mirrors the one I’d taken so many years ago in San Francisco. The tour group takes its place in the nave and sits on hard folding chairs. While the tour guide waxes on about the meaning of the stained-glass windows, I jiggle my foot, eager to jump on the path. At the sound of polite clapping, I bolt up, scouring the floor for the labyrinth. Where is it?

I find it underneath our feet, where it’s been all along.

Oceans of folding chairs have covered the design. Tourists march right over it, unaware of treading on holy ground. I watch them looking up when they should be slowing down and taking the labyrinth’s curves and turns with reverence. Instead, they snap pictures of each other from cell phones. G-d has been obscured today by sneakers. I can almost hear a cry from the empty rose in the middle of the labyrinth.

“Come find me,” it says, “I’m as close as the ground beneath your feet.”

The next day, I escape the tour group. I settle on a park bench at the site of the Holocaust memorial in Paris. I notice the grass is wild and going to seed. The grass is so high it waves in the light breeze. Why is no one mowing it? I steady myself and breathe in the scent of roses past their prime. Across the lawn, I watch as a shirtless man does yoga with great precision. The clouds part. I am still. Very still. On the next breeze, I hear the screams of my people, shouting to a G-d without a name. Their cries flutter down the labyrinthine twists and turns of my ear canal and morph into the yearning strains of a violin. I wasn’t alive then to save them but I will never forget the tune, the beautification of loss. It is here, without the walls of a shul or the path of a labyrinth, only a decaying park, I once again feel the peace that lays between the G and the D.

And it knows my name.