I’m not writing to you out of anything more than sheer and utter perplexity, as well as a remnant of faith that is tattered, multi-cultural, semi-religious, vaguely scientific, and deeply reverent. Whether you are a great Master and Commander of a ship called the Universe, or the Universe itself, a garment-body of one limb of spiritual reality, I respect you, as only an ant can respect the Pacific Ocean. Whatever you are, wherever you begin and end, you are Something, and possibly Everything. Therefore, I feel the need to stay in touch, touch base, and send my regards.
If I may be so bold as to identify the Unidentifiable, I should tell you that I don’t think of you as a He, except during church on Sundays, where frankly it’s just unavoidable. Nor a She, nor an It. If anything you are a The. You are, have always been, not “a” god, not “a” lord, not “a” creator. You are “The”. You are the The. The Alpha and Omega, The Lord, The God of Creation, and so on. Why gender had to confuse this magnificent rendering of your non-personage, I can’t imagine, but early humans perhaps were too busy tangling with lions and uncatalogued species of poisonous plants to linger over the appropriateness of your pronouns.
However, as a twenty-first century construct, I am not so terribly occupied. I walk down the sidewalk on my lunch break, and when it glimmers a little underfoot, I think “ah, there is God, in the light.” I know that sidewalks sparkle because mica is added to the concrete, but to my Judeo-Buddhist-Protestant-Euro-American-Mystic mind, I see you in reflections, in surface traction, in explainable phenomena more than in the unexplained. I think that as scientists burrow deeper and deeper into reality, they are finding you, and calling your bits and pieces sound waves and photons, quarks and dark matter. Older explorers and diviners called other parts of you Flying Squirrel, Rhododendron, and Connemara. One of your fingernails might be Pluto. When I see the sun, it’s the Divine Neuron that conceived me, and all my earth-siblings. I think we are microbes in your terrarium, and even all the wires criss-crossing our world so that we can tweet angrily in California at news anchors in Manchester, are just strange new products of Us and You combined.
Us and You is another problem to me. Where do I end and you begin? I am within you, a dream in your waking, a part of your wheeling cosmos, just as the molecule in my stomach lining participated fully in the first dance at my wedding.
Where do I give up myself and look outside myself to find you? Am I not already found by being a part of you? I can sit very still sometimes and feel the tension of this connection. I can strum it like a golden thread in my mind that makes a beautiful albeit terrifying tone, and at times I cling to it as my lifeline, and at times I admire it, like an artist of found art objects, and I feel that I created our connection as much as it and You created me.
God, I dance within you. Abel brought you fruits, but really he brought you himself. His thorn-scratched fingers, his calloused palms and dusty feet and aching back. I bring myself everywhere I go, and I wanted to tell you that this is my most costly gift of worship. I am where I am, and I cannot see or know all of you, although I desperately want to. The dance floor you’ve given me in yourself--it is too big! The parts I’ll never see, I miss them already.
This is all I can manage for now--my own mythos of you, the one where you are simply You, and I am I, the same as if none of this had ever existed, no Exodus, no Popes, no BC or AD interpretations of the sacred, no sects or sermons. Not even the historical confusion of a man named Jesus. Just you and I wheeling together would still exist without all that, and this is how I found my way back to you--the long way round with sidelong glances at more Tao and Zen and pop psychology than anyone should suffer. There is more of your truth in my palms when they are empty.
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