Ga ga goo goo God God

I’m out for coffee with my friend Tim. We both have newborns strapped to our chests in Baby-Bjorns, and have spent the past hour talking about how we intend to rear our children.

His Beatrice and my Gus are only several weeks old, but we both believe in getting a jump-start on our worrying. And so we talk of theism. Will we raise them with God? And, if so, at what age do we introduce the topic?

‘‘Who’s God’s God?’’ I remember asking my father when I was only five.

It struck me as a very sensible question. If God created everything, who created God? On the very first page of my children’s bible, God was already there. I would flip backwards to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, but there was only a table of contents.

It crossed my mind that the pages dealing with that pre-beginning might have fallen out, so when I went to my grandparents’ apartment, I looked in their bible, which they kept on the bookshelf beside the phone book, but it was the same story: ‘‘In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.’’ No prequel. Nothing.

‘‘God is beyond time,’’ my father would answer. ‘‘He invented time.’’ But it just made no sense. How could someone invent time?

As I grew older, my questions turned to other existential matters. I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of free will. If God is omniscient, how can we act freely? When I’d ask my father about it, he’d wax poetic.

‘‘Can you imagine the delicate touch it took to create free will?’’ he’d ask. ‘‘I’m sure those early attempts – those experimental universes – were filled with marionette people getting their strings tangled up in each other.”

As a child I would try to fool God, zigging and zagging down the street, trying to not even know what I might do next.

While sharing these memories with Tim, I unstrap Gus and hold him in my arms to console him as he cries. To look at his face is to see the mystery of all creation. When he grows angry, his brow reminds me of my father. When he smiles, his chin looks like my father-in-law’s. And while holding Gus above me and marvelling at the speed of it all, he spits up in my face.

If there is an Almighty out there, I’m still uncertain as to where he came from – but I am fairly certain he enjoys surprises. It keeps life interesting for everyone.