Sideways rain gave way to hail, rattling angrily off the windows and air conditioners. They were marble-sized or less—not like the ones upstate someone had posted pictures of, which were the size of a man’s balls and dented the roofs of cars. Still I beheld them with awe. They had come from so far away to land on our planting terrace. I imagined they were fragments of meteorites, or a warning from God. Frogs and locusts next.

Then the sun shone again and I tried to remember what it felt like, two or three minutes before, to be in the storm, and I barely could, the way you sometimes remember a dream.

Humans moved from polytheism to monotheism as their questions were answered, and only one question remained. They knew where the rain came from, they knew who the animals were. They knew what war was, what love was. The only thing they still didn’t know was what the hell was going on in the first place. What’s it all about. So it was through knowledge that we came to God the creator, through knowledge that we came to Eden. It was through knowledge that we became Adam and Eve. And it was through knowledge that we conjured up temptation.

Saved

My dad had an old college friend, Tomas Bitter. A Swiss man, swarthy, manic. He and his wife Françoise lived up on a twisty flower-lined road, in a chalet overlooking Lake Geneva. They had a platoon of ruddy children, with a cantankerous, Germanic grandmother who lived in the little house across the street.

They were God-promised Calvinists, and this fact - probably told to me by my mother, so mundane and so derisive, one day, over her shoulder in a car - inhabited their home like some spectral presence. Everything seemed peculiarly clean and quiet, with inanimate objects - chairs and bookcases - manifesting unworldly gravity.

One day I was looking through their album collection - a sad, bourgeois and perfunctory row filling half a shelf as I recall, careful not to crowd the tchochkes. One of the kids had a copy of Bob Dylan's "Saved" in there and I pulled it out, mesmerized by the garish, bleeding hand. I must have been nine or ten - I don't think I knew that this was Christ's hand, reaching down from the heavens to the outstretched hands of his children below. I might have thought it was meant to be Bob Dylan's hand. However, I also knew that this album had something to do with the religion of the people who lived in this house and, more properly, with the solemn, pious spirit they shared it with. But the blood, the flesh; the trembling, outstretched fingers: it was so carnal. The idea that these two things might somehow be connected, I'll never forget.

We live in a sea of serial numbers, tracking numbers, radio frequency IDs. Of things reduced to the purest abstraction. The closest we can come to effectively representing an object is via an obscure and breathless spray of digits and letters, beyond math, beyond language.

This is how we get closer to God.


You have to reason your way through the question out loud, they told the contestant before the show. You have to think out loud.

As Americans we should be grateful God does not exist. If he did, what do we imagine he'd have in store for us, we who have everything, we smug, gluttonous lords of the land of the treats and the home of the cozy? Do we not imagine He'd redress the grotesque inequities between us and the Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth Worlds? Would he not spill something out of our cups and into the trembling, dark hands of beggars on the streets of Bombay? Of dirty-faced waifs in Basra? Of the countless multitudes who inhabit recesses of the world not yet penetrated by fresh water pipes, nor sewage systems, nor sitcom syndication? You better believe He'd shake it up. So what are we really doing when we gather at our altars before lunch, after fucking, before football, after breakfast? We're worshipping His absence and praying He never shows.

Newton was a bit like Columbus. He made a big discovery, but he didn't know exactly what he had discovered – or how momentous his discovery really was.

When Newton discovered gravity, he discovered God. What is God – what could God possibly be – if not gravity? Without gravity, the entire universe would be completely empty and there would be no reality of any kind whatsoever. Think about it.

This view is consistent with other notions of God – or suspicions as to the nature of God, anyway. We are often tempted to assert that God is love. This sounds "right" in a sort of abstract, instinctive way – we like to imagine God as a ubiquitous, positive force. Well that's right. God is a ubiquitous, positive force. Literally. And it is love. Everything that binds or draws one thing to another, everything that staves off entropy, the single thing that has enabled matter to coalesce into worlds and higher and higher forms of life – it's simply gravity. And to the degree that we feel that God must be an agent in the life of the universe right down to the minutest elements in human affairs, well… that's true, too. Perhaps not in the way that we would like to think (God does not answer prayers, let's face it), but God – gravity!- is unquestionably the agent of everything that happens in the universe.

It's deceptively simple. We have overlooked it perhaps because it's too simple, and not satisfyingly romantic or spectacular to our overstimulated imaginations. Also, we have a foolish – tragic, sometimes – tendency to believe the greater the question, the more complex the answer. Often the opposite is the case. Good scientists and mathematicians really appreciate this paradox – when faced with a difficult problem, they know to look first for the simplest answer. And it's a law of troubleshooting, expressed in the owner's manual of practically any gadget: Not working? Make sure it's plugged in.

Looking for God? It's everywhere.