Meditation

God is alive. Yaweh or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Buddha or whatever name or visage you feel comfortable hanging on it, it is alive. Or maybe "alive" isn't the best way to describe it, since that immediately starts creating anthropomorphic handles for easy manipulation. God is hanging around, dripping off of things, filling a vacuum that would exist without a God.
My proof comes from the number of football players I see each week, dropping to one knee, genuflecting and pointing to the sky. It comes from the monks in Myanmar, as they fight for freedom. It comes from the breeze off the bay that reminds me of the edge of the continent. It comes from my wife and son climbing into the car to go off to church for the first time in months.
I took just enough philosophy classes in college to make having this discussion with me an annoying prospect. At any given moment, I would happily pick up whatever side of the argument you would like as to the existence of God. The fact that I cling to the convention of capitalizing that three letter word suggests that my apathy may be more of a show than I am letting on. I grew up as a Methodist, but was pleased to hear, around the age of ten, that I could be an agnostic. This fit well with my need to ask those annoying Sunday School questions, like "did Adam and Eve have belly-buttons?" I liked the idea that I might be one of the clever ones who was already in on the joke. By the time I was in high school, the idea of a guy with a big white beard and light shining from behind him seemed like just a souped-up version of Santa Claus. I had no real interest in sitting in his lap. In college I worked hard to find flesh and blood answers to every question that I could imagine. During those years I took comfort in my ability to raise a question for every new answer I received.
But I still wish. I wish for things to happen. I wish for things to work out. I wish for people to get along. Sometimes it even works out. So many miracles occur out of tragedy, it makes me think of the third law of thermodynamics. It makes me think of Voltaire. It makes me think that I haven't read enough. It sometimes makes me wish that I did believe in something that had a nice sturdy floor beneath it, and a spire pointing up to the sky. I suppose the truth is I don't want to count myself out completely, just in case Zeus turns out to be real after all.