I don’t know what God is. But the search keeps me grounded and feeling alive | Karen Rinaldi

Two months into the pandemic, I began a practice I called “When I look for God”. With so much changing so quickly, I was looking to find space during each day when I could ground myself amidst the uncertainty. The previous five years had opened up a spiritual yearning spurred by a life-shifting moment while surfing when God became profoundly known to me. These encounters of grace began to happen with some frequency. I was both compelled and confused by this new awakening.

God has always been elusive to me. I grew up Catholic, attended church on Sundays, went to catechism. I was baptized as an infant, received my first communion at seven, and was confirmed at 11. None of this brought me any closer to God.

I finally rejected the Church as a young teen for its part in sustaining and promoting human biases I couldn’t reconcile with a loving God – among them misogyny, homophobia, abuse. Then I felt myself called in middle age to explore what seemed to be deeply embedded in my DNA. Was this a hangover from my early life? I struggled to recognize a firmly constructed self as skeptic.

During lockdown, when I made it a practice to look for God in the newly limited frame of my existence, I would take a walk outside in the early morning, sit on a bench at the shore, and cast a wide gaze. I’d take deep breaths to clear a path to receive God’s presence. Sometimes: nothing. I tried not to want it so badly as to belie the point of the practice. I’d wait and if nothing happened after, say, half an hour, I would return home. At least I’d found some quiet time.

There were times when God appeared as if conjured: a pod of dolphins would break the surface of the water; two young whales breached close to shore; an osprey carried a fish back to her nest to feed her fledglings; a foggy morning allowed a veiled glimpse of a father and his adolescent child sharing a surfboard in the small waves.

My understanding of God shifted precipitously one day when a man approached the small bench I was sitting on and sat down next to me, too close for comfort. I shifted to the left to put some space between us. There were plenty of other benches nearby, and no one else around. He didn’t ask permission to join me, even though these were early days of Covid and people were behaving with caution. I’d been clearly enjoying my solitude, but he wasn’t clocking it. Instead, sitting not 2ft away, this intruder began to talk at me.

My space violated and my sense of peace now evaporated, I considered asking him to please find another place to sit. Then I recalled why I was there in the first place and decided instead to accept his presence and to listen.

I realized quickly that he was lonely, and not entirely mentally well. I don’t recall anything specific that he said, only that it was disjointed and abstract. My annoyance evaporated, and I was filled instead with compassion for this person who was clearly not OK. When he finally walked away, I had lost those initial feelings of animosity and even felt a kind of love I couldn’t name.

I had resumed a wide gaze to continue my search for God that morning when a grin emerged from a small epiphany: who says God isn’t also an intrusion or discomfort? Maybe God sometimes arrives in the disguise of a clueless dude come to ruin your perfectly lovely morning. Matthew 7:7: yup. God appeared that day in a way that challenged my assumptions.

It wouldn’t be the last time.

Sometimes, God is a fly.

In a particularly trying moment, a single black housefly kept hitting me in the head as I sat on the living room couch while working remotely. It was enough to feel beleaguered by life, but this fly was an added insult. With a Walter White-like intensity, I grabbed the tennis racket zapper, its lattice of metal electrified by pressing a red button on the handle: I was going to fry this bugger. I sat still, racket in hand, and waited for the fly to re-engage in its determination to drive me to furious distraction. When I caught a glimpse of the buzzing nuisance, I swiped the air, trying to swat the small frantic body flying willy-nilly around me. Damn if I couldn’t make contact. I did this for 10 minutes until a sudden awareness struck me.

Uh-oh.

I put the racket down and the God-fly, which continued to get in my face, was no longer a problem to solve. Instead, it became company for the afternoon.

After six years of practice, I still don’t know any more of what God is or isn’t than I did before. What I do know is that the act of looking for God brings respite from the ruminating mind and an openness to experience outside of the noisy self. A self that entangles me almost more than I can bear to acknowledge. To think about it practically, it’s a way of offloading anxiety and offers a relief from the imperative of acceptance. Anxiety is about the future. Acceptance is about the past. Looking for God is the practice of living in the present.

I trust now that I will see God when God allows it, often when I am not even looking. It’s no longer necessary to find a space of quiet or to create intention. Attunement is enough. I understand for the first time the assertion of the faithful, that God is everywhere – even in unwelcome or desolate moments. Or most simply, God is.

Of course, I don’t ever really find God. God finds me.

Even when God is a fly.

• Karen Rinaldi is SVP, executive editor at HarperCollins Publishers as well as the author of two published books and essays across multiple media platforms. She lives in Brooklyn and the Hudson River Valley