God, having nothing more to say for Its infinitely indifferent self, giggled on the sidewalk. Which was odd, because a second before It’d kicked It’s feet like an angry child.

But these are just frivolous antics–the kind of thing we immature beings use to while away our quicktoss moments. The really bad stuff is what God does to everybody else.

God will form the waves into a mighty twisting dark wall of water. God will crush ships full of hearty, ruggedly good-looking, stoically persevering sailors with such blender blades of salty springtime sea. Or, again with no real provocation, God, via the intermediary of 100 foot killer waves, will crush, drown, and, by tossing around trees homes cars and other objects about in a wily-nily sunnyday tantrum, bludgeon, gouge, decapitate, and/or eviscerate whole villages, towns, cities even. Why? That’s just how God sometimes rolls. That’s just what God sometimes does.

I’ve also known cases where God will build terrible diseases out of chance and tight warm oily-wet nooks. These diseases will kill hundreds of thousands of people and leave a million devastated by loss of friends, material and psychological security, and political stability. Not that long ago, God, through a kind of relentless lazy half-assedness, mixed together foolish ideas, political confusion, material longings, and the crazy lurching proudcat grabbies, engineered a horrific holocaust, imprisoning, torturing, and ultimately murdering people by the tens of millions. And here and there, whenever the breeze gets stagnant and the swamp turns a little greener and stinks a little brighter, mini-plagues of similar boring, but extremely effective meanness kick up and carry off a hundred or a thousand easy, walking barefoot in on the caked dirt or chatting merry robin in the kitchen souls, leaving the remaining hearts and minds sick to the gills, used up, done, forgotten and forgetful, stupid like the idiot you kept in the corner back when you had everything organized. I can show you the spot in our town where God, in the form of stupid ideas and a mixture of soft, gooey, and chaotically-sharp and -jagged feelings swirled around some poor young black man–a kid really–and beat him with hard human fists into a bloody pulp before hustling a rough hemp rope around his neck, hoisting–using simple physics–him up, and letting him dangle, already mostly lifeless, from a wonderful oak climbing tree in a nice little park where people often have picnics and tell funny jokes–right in the center of town.

Certainly, certainly, God is the worst of all of us. It all boils down to indifference. Infinite power plus infinite indifference: a terrible combination!

If you get oh so very wise.
If you open up to the very outer extreme and reach out with the gentlest, most good-willing open hand.
I guess then you can understand it all.
And I guess it turns out that it isn’t really God’s fault, or it is but not in a bad way. Or something very encouraging.
But most people, being middling-wise at their best and just-lucky-they-aren’t-in-a-situation-where-evil-is-super-easy-and-applauded (or, that luck lacking, worse) at their worst, don’t know about this. Most of us either have to pretend God doesn’t do everything or pretend nothing matters or pretend something else like that that we can’t really believe or even care enough about to notice.

Look, God isn’t good or bad. God is just everything crunching all permutations and spitting out all results. I don’t believe that. I wonder what, if anything, I believe about God.

What is going on?
A mystery, that’s for sure: it’s a mystery!
Some people have it figured out, but most of them don’t really after all when you get right down to it and examine their hearts from all sides. Do any of them? Probably not the ones who have it all figured out; probably only the ones who only love and who treasure loving so much that they keep quiet about it–even to themselves. These people must understand how God’s perfect and everything ultimately OK. But I’m worried that their trick involves not telling themselves what they understand, meaning that everyone either doesn’t understand, or understands but doesn’t understand their own understanding, making that understanding effectively a not-understanding.

Hard to say.

AMW/BW