The first thing to know about me, at least for the purposes of this post, is that I believe in a higher power. Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, I don't really believe any single faith or religion has the full truth; but perhaps they see an aspect of it, in their own way.
The second thing to know is that I don't think it's meaningful to ascribe a gender as we understand it to an entity we're crediting with creating the world, the universe, laws of physics, or anything like that. I tend to alternate pronouns every so often.
A lot of people talk to God, still, I imagine.
Ever get an answer back?
It's subtle, isn't it? It's pretty easy to write off as your imagination, and for all I know, it might very well be. It's also very rare. Or maybe it's just very rare that I'm just able to hear it.
So I was letting my mind wander, as occasionally happens, and it wandered into one of the Big Questions: Why are we here? And I'd never come up with an answer that really resonated with me, but for whatever reason, I did that time:
Perhaps God created us so that She would have someone to sing to her.
And the idea just hit me like a ton of bricks. It was indescribable, and emotional. And it made a sort of sense. Few things affect me like music. It's everywhere. Important to just about every culture I've heard of. Movies use music all the time, because it's a shortcut straight to our emotions, even if it's sometimes a cheap shortcut. I suspect I'm not the only one that feels this way, but maybe I'm just weird.
I felt what might have been an answer, or might have been my imagination. Almost, but not quite nonverbal. Gentle, but firm, and faintly amused. No. Cute, but no.
Every once in a while, the idea would crop up, and I'd feel the same thing afterward. A gentle no.
Many, many years later, a variation finally hit me:
Perhaps God created us so that She wouldn't have to sing alone.
And She said:
You're getting warmer.
