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With the last tintinnabulations of our voice chasing each other through the air in ever smaller rounds, we look up at the great leader at the head of our congregation. He stood over us, smiling with a smile that would embolden the hearts of all those who saw it. He often smiled like that when we sang hymns and psalms. I used to think he was smiling in the light of the holy spirit, but was he? Perhaps he truly was moved by the sound of the lord high and holy above us and through us. Who am I to say what lay within that man’s heart?

I think that perhaps now I know why he was smiling. I used to think very unsubtle thoughts about the divine, the great theos politic. He was my lord protector, I his loving serf. I spent much time in quiet contemplation of my silly thoughts about the higher places of existence. My thoughts were deep and important, I once thought. They revealed to me the inner depths of the shining orreric mechanisms of the universe. When I read what few thoughts I wrote down at that time, I think that I must have been a mental defective. The thoughts are so idealistic. My god was a utopia and he was a glory for all the world to see; if only the world could see him as I did.

A lion and a lamb was my god. A sword and a shield. A contradiction of contradictions, each pointing in every direction and filling the world like some great omnipresent field of life and motion. His whims were not arbitrary; no, he was a purposeful and subtle architect of all things done around us. If something happened, he had done it. Maybe he had some ‘grand design’, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was like a small child choosing what happened on the flight of a moment and the spur of a thought. It was a nice thought that everything happened for a reason. Not some great cosmic reason leading to ‘everything turning out all right in the end’. Even then I thought such an idea as a silly fantasy. No, my god was controlling things as he saw fit in a moment and at a moment’s notice.

If your standard god of ‘everything turning out all right’ is a loving father, my god was a cheerful, if sometimes inattentive friend. There was evil in the world not because he was imperfect and not because people were evil. There was evil in the world because that is how it was. No more, no less. Things were how things were. Everything was change; everything was still. Everything was noise; everything was silence. Everything was order; everything was chaos.