The God I Know

I sat on the back deck this evening, listening to the sounds of the crickets singing, feeling the soft breeze fragrant with the magnolia blossoms of the tree I planted a few years ago, seeing the stars peeking through wide holes in the drifting clouds, and seeing reflections of lightning way off in the distance… All of it put me into a bit of an altered state…

I wish everyone could Know the God I Know.. How I wish everyone could feel the way IT ruffles my hair with the wind, and breezes into my ear, “I am IN LOVE with you!” I wish everyone could see the magnificent love that I see in the stars and fireflies twinkling at each other, the munificent smile in the soft roundness of the rising moon, how my God wraps ITS arms around me and kisses my face with the great golden warmth of the sun…

I see my God reflected in every pair of eyes, ablaze in every heart, radiant in every smile… In the voices of mothers kissing their babies goodnight, the soft voices of lovers talking in bed in the darkness before sleep, the way the light lays across the land… I hear IT in the songs of crickets, running water, the shouting of the sea and thunder and music…

This is the God that I know… All loving, all forgiving, supremely detached and at once, deeply personal and reflected in every atom and molecule of the universes! God speaks!! Everywhere! In everything!! In me! In you!

Love and longing and eternity and distance and death and birth… That voice, the Logos, is in every sound, that love reflected in every love. So far beyond mere words and great hymns and the greatest feats of architecture and art and beauty, and reflected in all of it and shining and shouting and whispering and speaking from everywhere!

This God that I know… So far beyond religions and denominations and systems and techniques… The very spark that animates every living creature. It all grows pale with the clumsiness of mere words. It is Knowing.

And IT is far beyond my paltry skills of articulation, but I was inspired to try, just the same. I recognize and respect that this may not be the God that anyone else believes in, and that peoples’ theologies and systems differ, and that a lot of people simply don’t believe in God at all. For me, this is something that supersedes belief. I am a born skeptic. But this Knowing… I can’t remember a time when I didn’t Know this.

So… This is my attempt at supplying some kind of introduction to this God that I Know, however wholly inadequate, tho’ it may be…