Suddenly, God

By Jane Tawel

It is the second time I have been privileged to hear Ludovico Einaudi in concert. Both times, the tickets were an overly generous gift to my husband and me from our daughter. Both times, rather early in the concert, all in a moment, like suddenly being immersed in a quite spontaneous, warm, fragrant bath, I realized in a complete seamless, piece of understanding, that there is a God.

As I sit at home this morning, it is ironically, my inability to find words to describe that inkling of belief and my muteness, as compared to all the harsh certainty and the blather and bother people today seem so facilely able to spout about their gods; that translates my experience at the concert into some perhaps lasting modicum of faith. It is how I hang on to the truth of a God-ness relating to our human reality.

This morning as the newspapers fly onto the neighborhood yards, and the alarm clocks go off throughout my house, my inability to write coherently about how that one moment of God-ness felt, is how this morning I am able to convince myself, that it is Truth. My theoretical ponderings about That Being Who Is Other, Someone Who is different than myself and yet has created human beings in Her image, has stopped being tethered to a doctrinal assent of the mind; nor is it merely a feeling in my heart. It has come to have little to do with me and frankly I am weary of thinking that I need to believe in a God to believe that I am loved or worthy. No, it is the opposite of all the things I teach myself or think. It is the opposite of feeling that somehow I am something at all important or that matters. I happen to think our planet matters; but then it’s the only one I’ve ever known. Perhaps there are planets and beings on other planets that matter more. I happen to believe that human-kind matters; but I don’t believe that the powerful mighty humans, the queens and kings and politicians matter nearly as much as they have brainwashed us to think they do. While those who have ruled others throughout the world’s history, change their names and positions as often as they change their dirty underwear; they never really change the world. Changing the world is left to the artists and saints and all of us little Whos in Whoville who cheer them on. It is because certain, individual human beings have created the impossibly beautiful; or because there are those who have suffered individually in order to produce world-changing goodness in hearts and lives like mine; it is because of the artists and saints, that I believe there must be a…