When I was about eight years old, I went outside to find my grandmother in her garden. She grew tulips, daffodils, snapdragons, black-eyed susans, forsythia, lilac, lavendar, pear trees, nasturtium, strawberries, tomatoes, chives, rosemary, sage, chrysanthemums, and hollyhock. The bird bath shaped like a seashell enchanted me. Feeders full of sesame seeds hung from low branches, attracting sparrows, cardinals, and robins. She was digging with a trowel, moving a plant. I asked her, “Grandma, do you believe in God?” She thought this over. “Well,” she said, “I do believe there is something.” She was a Unitarian Universalist.

My concept of God has shifted and continues to shift from one of  impersonal emptiness to vibrant presence. I’ve seen a universe embroidered with the complexity of nature, like a fancy box with nothing inside. I’ve thought of God as an indifferent, amoral energy, both immanent and transcendent.  As I’ve explored Jewish ideas, I’ve come to experience this Oneness as all-encompassing. Once when I walked on the beach I felt like I was inside a tornado. The center of it was God’s living room, a place of power where Transcendent Being crosses into manifestation.

Imagine a giant piece of fabric, each one of us like a point on that sheet. We can’t see what happens on the other end or on the other side, but everything has a ripple effect that reaches us. We are connected. What happens to you also happens to me. In such a totality is it hard to imagine what “serving God” could mean, beyond cultivating awareness of the underlying fabric of existence so I am better able to act as a positive influence.

Given the extent of suffering in the world, how can God be ethical? How can God be loving? In the Isaac Luria creation story, the power and brilliance of God’s light is so great it cannot be contained. The vessels shatter, scattering shards throughout the world for us to find and liberate. In Harold Kushner’s book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, he suggests God may not be omnipotent – because if God is omnipotent, surely a loving God would not allow misery, devastation, disease, and violence. In Zen Buddhism, suffering is caused by attachment, by our inability to accept life as it presents itself. Maybe human beings are the part of God with the capacity to express love. Maybe we are the part of God responsible for healing human pain.

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