GOD AND THE CLEVELAND RAIN

I used to believe in Old Man God, the Patriarch of Everything...

But somehow, the image didn't ring true and I kept asking, "Come on, what is God, really?"  I was trying to convince my sister once, when she declared herself an atheist, that God has to exist.  She was 13, I think, and I was 11. I wanted the magic of Because God Wants It That Way to explain all the mysteries of my world, which, at 11, were many!  She had given up on the mysteries, and authority, and trusted no one but herself to see her through life. 

The point is, we were the offspring of a couple of scientists, one of whom was also a mystic, and though she had died when I was 3, somehow, the theme continued quietly in the back of my life-experience... It blossomed when I was 18, but that's another story. The point of this one is that neither magic nor science was sufficient to comprehend the Mystery of Life, the Universe and Everything... (a hat-tip to Douglas Adams!)

At 12, I had a wonderful epiphany that God was Nature!  An impersonal Divine, all-powerful, all-pervasive...  Everything is Nature, even that which seems to be artificial--but  artifice is human nature , and  we make the most of owning opposible thumbs! Everything is God, because, well, that's God, all about being Everything...  This notion sustained me and my need to know, for a time.

But around the time the Mystical re-entered my life, and I quit ignoring it, I was in college in Cleveland, Ohio. I had begun to understand that there were things, persons, even, around me that I could not see with physical eyes: I had begun to witness evidence and  had to revisit the notion of a personal God, rather than God as simply a Force.

It was February in Cleveland.  

It rains in Cleveland in every month of the year.  It snows in the winter, but it also rains.  It was dreary, and I was always wet.  And I was wondering hard about that other thing.  So as I was slogging to class one day,  I said, sincerely, as if Someone might actually be there, "Okay, God, give me three days of sunshine, and I will never doubt again."  Contrary to all forecasts, the weather cleared that afternoon, stayed bright for three days after, and the rains recommenced on the next day. 

I have kept my side of the bargain.

All I had to do next, was sort out the details.