Who?

SARA BLAU

Sometimes I’m grateful for the algorithm. I can google “Northern Lights” and suddenly my Facebook feed provides me with a steady stream of breathtaking photos of the Aurora Borealis, as she dances across and astounds the Northern parts of the world.

Watching the stunning streaks and designs that appear across the vast expanse of the sky, I find that it does not feel like an exaggeration to say that the Northern Lights are my proof of God’s existence.

I am an artist. When I see a complex painting with intricate details, my first question is, Who is the artist? I would find it ludicrous to hear that the paint just spilled itself and created a masterpiece on its own. And even with the introduction of art created by AI, I want to know, Who programmed AI? How did this come to be?

So the logical question for me is, Who created the Northern Lights? Who is orchestrating them? And after following this question again and again, I always end up at the same place - an Energy, an Outside Force, a Supreme Being is behind it all. I once heard a rabbi say, “It takes more faith to believe that the world came from nothing, than to believe that some sort of Powerful Force caused it to be.” I concur, and I call that force God.

It’s almost like there are two approaches. One is that the existence of the world is a given, while God’s existence is questionable.

But if one concludes that at the core of every created being is an energy, the one energy of the Supreme Being, one realizes that the world only exists as long as the Supreme Being wills it into existence. Which is the second approach – that God’s existence is a given, and the world’s existence is questionable.

I don’t believe that believing in God comes from a purely intellectual standpoint. I believe that it is an emotional experience too, one that I can feel viscerally. When the sun’s bright rays are shining on my face, I again feel that magical question, “Who made all this?” I know God from Godliness, and I know it not only in a cerebral fashion but as I experience it with every fiber of my being.

I know it from the sense that there’s Something greater than I am. I know it from my personality flaws and imperfections. I know it from the miracles I have seen in my life when I surrender to God and stop trying to control it all. Admitting that there’s a God, and that I am not that God, has brought me so much peace and tranquility that I am convinced that men and women of faith are stronger, not weaker.

For just as the algorithm has someone who programmed it, and the Northern Lights have a Supreme Being orchestrating them, every created being is united at its core by the energy behind it all.

Who? God. That’s Who.