A. Blinken On the news and on the street I see and hear the most horrifying and ridiculous things in the name of God. I just can’t believe the people who’ve laid claim to knowing His wishes. In matters of faith I look to Granny Wise, who has been, in her life, a member of three of the world’s great religions, and now says she worships "twenty gods" after the Thomas Jefferson quote: "... it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." I remember the moment I came to understand God as Granny sees God; it was near the end of her Buddhist period. I was 15; it was a brilliant summer night, Granny and I were out on the flat rock at the creek; it’s a great round granite plate where Granny comes to think about Grandad Aaron, and I suppose, his terrible death. The stone was still warm from sun, and we were looking up at a sky that was clear of smog and un-dimmed by surrounding lights; the stars against the cold black of space were so blue and sharp they stuck your eyes. I’d sneaked off to smoke some weed after chores and I could feel the vast dimensions of space and for a little while enjoyed the fear that I might fall off the boulder and plummet forever. Granny can be quiet a long time, but the silence got to me: "So, that’s where God lives," I said. Granny, beside me in the darkness said, "yep. But not in heaven, if that’s what you’re thinking. God lives in the stones of space, in the stones of the creek, and in you. He knows every freckle of you; he knows you stole some weed from me without smelling it on your sweaty head." I was grasped by one of those weed moments, and I literally felt God flow from me to the universe and back. It was formative. Never after that did I believe I could do anything that only I knew about; God knew every act and every thought. A few years back, when a local girl died a horrible death, I was shocked and heartsick, and like a lot of people, I demanded an answer from the Lord on why she was killed, and not some more deserving resident. Granny told me, "because there was work her death would do." "What the hell does that mean?" She thought a minute. "Life is a still pond in full moonlight; everywhere damselflies touch the surface trying to decide between the moon in the sky and the moon in the water. Where one touches, a ripple is made, and when one falls to the water, her death struggle ripples through the light making the moon dance. The girl dying made ripples through everyone’s life, changing all of us through the way we feel, even her killer. Of course it’s awful she died, but never senseless, A.B." I tried to press her further that day, but she held her hand up, said, "Isaiah forty-five verse seven." That night I looked it up in the little Bible she’d given me 25 years before, when I first came to live with her: "I am the darkness and the light, I am order and I am chaos, I am all these things, there is nothing beyond me.’ When I see the news I see darkness and light, order and certainly chaos. On the one hand, those who act in the name of God, however twisted by dogma their logic, make ripples, and they are, indeed, the work of God. It’s hideous to me, but they must serve a purpose I don’t understand. On a more personal level, when I see presidential wannabes arguing over who is Christian enough to run a country supposedly free from religious coercion, I realize how close these lunatics are to picking my pocket and breaking my leg.