Dear Morgan,

Let's talk about God.

Ascribing cruelty and retribution to God has always struck me as a non-answer to the age-old question of suffering, like what's not on the paper when a frustrated student can't do the math problem, throws his pencil across the room, and storms out is a non-answer about the student's poor diet, terrible home life, or non-mathematical brain wiring. The answers aren't there.

Morgan, I know God was never the cruel one.

He's not shoving handlebars to see children wreck their bikes and break their bones. He isn't snapping rubber bands because it's a giggle to make tired teachers say ouch. He isn't whispering for radicals dressed in black to abduct and behead their countrymen.

He doesn't visit cancer upon people who commit hate crimes and then just sort of let it happen to good people, too. God doesn't discriminate, and he doesn't desecrate, and it's disturbing when people want him to do either.
And you, Morgan, the night you were murdered, it was no fun in Heaven.

You can be sure God didn't put on his reading specs to see what you had been wearing.

God out and out sobbed.

I don't know why we all so vehemently resist a sense of the supernatural or the sacred. Even if we haven't seen a full-blown miracle, many of us have been aware of presences, spiritual residues from bygone people or deliberate visits from ghostly loved ones. And yet we don't often openly tell or examine our mysterious stories.

Maybe we're afraid they'll make us sound crazy instead of devout, insane instead of honest. I don't know.

I do know: God seems to me, from here, Morgan, on this long-awaited Day of Announcement, mighty big, certainly incomprehensible, generous, loving, and obvious.