My Sunday school teacher used to tell me that God hears all our prayers. She said that sometimes God even responds to you, and in these instances, you can feel his presence in your body or hear his voice in your head. So every Sunday, when Father Fox gave us a few minutes to pray silently, I would do my best to talk to God:
Dear God, thank you for the roof over my head and thank you for the food that I get to eat today. And thank you for Mom and Dad and my brother and my dog Jupiter and please make sure nothing bad happens to them. And please protect Granny and Grandpa and Aunt Marsha in Heaven and anyone else I forgot about. And also please give me boobs as big as Juliette Shenton's by the end of fifth grade. Amen.
For some reason, God never responded. I waited a few seconds, straining my ears to see if he had any words of reassurance for me. I relaxed my muscles so that he could at least send a shiver down my spine. I felt nothing. Ultimately, I decided that my prayers must not be important enough for him, and that he must be listening to other people who were asking for more important things. I felt like this let me off the hook. If he wasn't paying that much attention to 10-year-old Olivia Cohen from Denver, Colorado, then I didn't have to pay that much attention to him either.
This attitude made going to church a much more fun experience for me (if not for those around me trying to pay attention). My brother, my dad, and I would each fill our pockets with little trinkets—a keychain, a Lego man, a set of ten-sided dice—and when the service got slow, one of us would extract an item from our pockets to pass down the pew for the next person to play with.
What I remember most about our church was the music. When it was time to play a hymn—"Holy, Holy, Holy," a weekly staple—the whole congregation stood and the head singer would start to croon. She sang an octave higher than the rest of the choir, with a vibrato that oscillated violently, like a rogue bobblehead: Holy, holy, hooooooly! Lord God Almiiiighty! My brother and I failed to stifle our laughter and our mom hissed at us to be quiet. On our way home after the service, we practiced our falsettos on "All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name": And crown him lord of aaaalllll.
Although the community was welcoming, I never felt at home in the Catholic church. I never knew when to stand or sit or kneel, I didn't know the tunes to the songs, and I didn't know the Biblical stories our priest referred to in his sermons. Plus, my dad was Jewish. Although he sat in service with us, he didn't pay much attention either, which made the whole thing feel much less serious. I never understood why he didn't take communion (which my brother and I described as "the part where we eat the cracker") with us. We assured him he wasn't missing much: Wine doesn't taste as good when its cup has touched a hundred lipsticked mouths.
When I was twelve, we started going to synagogue twice a year to commemorate the deaths of my grandparents at services called yahrzeits. The first time I went, I didn't bring any toys in my pockets. I wore my favorite hand-me-down blue-and-brown dress, vowing to be on my best behavior. I thought maybe I had just been engaging with the wrong religious community, that this new experience might help me finally access my spirituality.
If I expected this service to be any easier to understand than the Catholic Masses I was used to, I was sorely mistaken. Here, I didn't know the language in which half the service was conducted. I opened the song book to its first page to find, to my surprise, that I was on the last page. The cantor seemed to be skipping from page to page randomly. How did everyone else know where we were supposed to be looking? I eventually stopped trying to follow along and instead spent these services with my eyes closed and my head against my dad's shoulder. The cantor played an acoustic guitar, and she had a beautiful voice—a far cry from the shrillness I was used to in my church—so I listened quietly.
Mi she-bei-rach a-vo-tei-nu, M'kor ha-bra-cha l'i-mo-tei-nu: May the Source of strength who blessed the ones before us, help us find the courage to make our lives a blessing. And let us say, Amen.
Most of the other people in the services were elderly, and they seemed to know all the words by heart, singing at varying paces and with varying levels of hoarseness, a symphony of humanity that was at once comforting and foreign.
At this point, I had one foot in each of my parents' religious worlds. In both those settings, it felt as though there was a choreographed dance happening all around me, but I had failed to learn any of the moves, so I was left frantically trying to follow along. My sense of spirituality was at an all-time low. I no longer felt carefree about it. Is there something wrong with me? Isn’t having a connection to a higher power a part of being human? How does everyone else seem to hold this connection but me? Had I done something wrong to sever the link between me and God?
Then one Christmas, my family and I went to Episcopalian church with family friends. It was the environment I was familiar with: clouds of incense hanging low in the air, stained glass windows casting kaleidoscopic patterns of red and gold onto the wooden pews. The whole sermon was in Latin, and my brother and I were starting to feel fidgety—I had already pulled a mini flashlight out of my pocket—when, from behind me, I heard voices.
A hundred people, dressed identically in floor-length robes, walked in pairs down the aisle toward the altar. People of all ages, men, women, and children, sang “O Holy Night”: Fall on your knees; O hear the Angel voices. O night divine. The sound echoed off the stone walls and seemed to pour in from all directions. The highest voices harmonized with the lowest, and every voice in between was rich and resonant. Suddenly I felt it: the shiver down my spine, the hair raising on my arms. The feeling I'd been chasing: My God, this is beautiful.
In that moment, I wasn't connecting to any higher power. When the whole world fell away except for those angelic voices, I was connecting to myself, to my own spirituality. The music offered me a reminder of the beauty that humanity can create, and I felt connected to that beauty in a way I never had been before.
Since my childhood, I've realized that I'll likely never feel at home in a religious service. But I believe spirituality looks different to everyone. For some, it's saying a prayer and feeling the energy and love of all the congregation members around them. For some, it's hiking up a mountain and marveling at the splendor of nature from above the treeline. For me, spirituality is often something I find in music: letting it wash over me, turning off my conscious thought and letting the sound fill up my empty spaces, if only for a moment. Yielding to that feeling—that pure gratitude for the world and its creations, that my God, this is beautiful—to me, that's religion.
