God

“God is an experience,” an old man told me as he reached for another cookie.

I swear I read somewhere that your uncoiled intestines can reach the moon.

We stood by the window and watched the howling dark, even though this isn’t what you should do in a tornado.

There will always be demands and obligations, but they do not need me before eleven o’clock.

The Joshua tree was named by Mormons who thought they saw their prophet pointing to the promised land.

Yesterday in twenty-first-century America, I idled behind a jeep with an InfoWars license plate.

“Science shouldn’t explain everything,” she told me.

My first memory of God: I was five or six years old and feverishly rubbing a white crayon into a dark blue piece of construction paper.

Cloudy skies, still no snow, and a high of 43 degrees.  There’s an old Roman maxim that fear gave birth to the gods. The historian Will Durant elaborates: “It was fear that made the gods—fear of hidden forces in the earth, rivers, oceans, trees, winds, and sky. Religion

The desert is a land of religious vision, the home of desperate saints and ascetics dragging themselves across the sand in search of revelation.

Maybe it's limbic and hardwired, this desire to see the divine rather than hear or touch.

My first concept of god came from It’s a Wonderful Life. I was four or maybe five years old, and I remember sitting on an orange-rust shag carpet with my parents’ knees behind me, all of us watching the pulsing globs of light that functioned as angels. Even today,

When I consider the man I want to become someday, I often picture myself as someone who prays. I have no idea why this impulse is so persistent or where I would direct my prayers or why I haven’t yet become this man. But I enjoy imagining myself climbing

Last night I woke in the middle of the night and wondered if it’s possible to believe in something otherworldly in 2020. Maybe my attention span is too shredded, my brains too cluttered. How many people believe in some kind of god by necessity rather than choice? Are there

This morning in the park, I sat across from a woman who was talking to the pigeons gathered around her feet.

There are so many things I wish I’d asked my mother. Tonight I’d like to know about her favorite saints. I want to know what shook her faith for so many decades, and the energies that brought her back to the church before she unexpectedly died. Today we

There’s an eleven o’clock curfew in New York City after last night’s violence by the police and the looting of some luxury stores by cretins. I flipped on the news and joined the nation in watching a moment of political theater so demented it boggles the soul.

The amount of incense smoke that darkens a temple’s ceiling indicates the popularity of that particular god. I learned this last year in Taiwan, and it’s such a beautiful image: the accretion of so many wishes, prayers, and confessions painted in ash across the centuries. Lately I’ve

I remember watching the darkness in my bedroom when I was small, hypnotized by the grey-pink flecks that seemed to dance in the air while I waited for sleep. One night I climbed out of bed to tell my parents that I saw fairies in the corner of the ceiling.

Whenever I get into a car, I want to point it toward the Mojave desert. I don’t think any photograph can capture the sensation of speeding down a desert road, the way all that blank land sends your thoughts cascading into rare spaces that blur the sacred with the

Strange how something you’ve heard a thousand times can suddenly knock you over. Maybe it’s a shift in the light, a stray fragment of head chatter, or a lack of sleep, but a familiar phrase can become vital and brand new. Tonight I sat by the window trying

I’ve gotten in the habit of walking to the river each night to look at the sky. Lately I’ve been overwhelmed with the desire to know the language of constellations, the location of celestial bodies. It seems like a tragedy to go through life not knowing the names

They named the virus corona because it looks like a crown. Each night I join the rest of the city in dreaming garbled dreams about apexes and plateaus. Like so many others who are non-essential, my radius has been reduced to agoraphobic dimensions: living room to bedroom and back again,

Now they’re saying the virus spreads by talking and breathing. We can kill each other just by being a person. One million infections worldwide, six thousand dead in America, and fifteen hundred dead in New York City. And yes, I’m beginning to pray even though I don’t

A late-night walk through the city to pick up some supplies and leave them outside my elderly neighbor’s door. I knock lightly and walk away like a prankster. So much can change in a week. I hear the undoing of a lock and her voice calling behind me. “Thank

I used to be so shy. There was a time when I would count how many words I said each day. At night I logged the number into a notebook. Sixteen. Twenty-three. Anything in the thirties was a good day. This new season of self-isolation brings those quiet adolescent days

The coronavirus continues to spread. Classes have been canceled and events are postponed. One thousand cases in America now and our government doesn’t seem to care. I wash my hands, keep my distance, and show up where I’m supposed to be. The subway seems a little emptier each

I remember standing before the gods on a rainy Monday morning in Taiwan. Once again, the question that haunts me when I approach any kind of altar: Am I allowed to pray before you if I don’t understand you? And how do I pray? Forty-something years old and I

Woke from a dream that I was pounding on a counter demanding a cash-back rebate because my soul was damaged. This surreal sensation continued when I stepped outside. Ash Wednesday and people walked the streets with smudged crosses on their foreheads. A beautiful ritual, ancient and haunted. Remember that you

They’re caucusing in Nevada today. Voters organize themselves in the corners of gymnasiums and hotel conference rooms. The networks were not happy with the result. How can a socialist win 49% of a six-candidate field? Editorialists wring their hands. Meanwhile, an artificial intelligence program predicted the migration patterns after

The motel manager was unnervingly chipper when I checked in, a shine in his eye that could have been religion or drugs. Now he’s walking the perimeter of the parking lot at midnight, staring straight ahead and making perfect ninety-degree turns. I close the blinds. I think about praying,

Woke with a yelp from a tense dream of standing on a Russian coastline while pieces of my life washed onto the shore. Will I ever believe in god? If so, it will probably begin in my dreams. The first gods must have been born while we slept. How else

I went to a 700-year-old church on Sunday morning and the service was purely tonal because I don’t understand Finnish. It was the most moving sermon I’ve ever heard. Bowing my head, I remembered a line from the poet Anne Carson: “I’ve come to understand that the

Now begins the season of Arvo Pärt and private hymns for a better year. On New Year’s Day, I sat in the pews of a medieval cathedral in Turku, Finland. Completed in 1300, its tower featured the first public clock in Finland and it standardized the time for the

Notes from an accidental visit to a temple in West Virginia.

The choral drift of Popol Vuh’s ‘Aquirre I Lacrima di Rei’ sounds like glaciers, mist, and devotion. After listening to this song six times in a row, it occurred to me that the word ‘theology’ means the ‘logic of god’—which seemed profound at 35,000 feet. Popol Vuh