Hide and Seek

The God-game is hide-and-seek. He-She-It always seems to depart just before I get there, leaving a trace of glory behind, like the track of a mountain lion never seen. Earth is full of footprints – the multifleshed incarnation of the Divine, of the intentionality of God.

An encounter with the holy is mysterious because it shatters our normal habits of thought. It jars our categories of understanding because a starry sky, or the birth of a child, or a passage of Torah we have heard a hundred times, or the smell near a bakery, becomes transparent to a depth beyond itself.

But the medium is only a symbol, a finger that points beyond itself, a container, a metaphor, a momentary incarnation of the mystery that can never be fully grasped or comprehended. An experience of the holy, unlike scientific investigation, does not give us verifiable knowledge about objects or events. It is not about facts but meanings. Spiritual experience has no factoids. It is about experiencing the ordinary as miraculous.

Sam Keen (Jewishly adapted)