I want you to know that it no longer matters to me how smart you are. I promise, I trust you enough to accept you as you appear to me. This means that I will take what you say to me at face value. This means you have a responsibility to be honest and open.

I am not a religious person, as they say. I am somewhat spiritual, as they say. I have zero stakes in any religious cultures but I am more than anything, a reader and have critically read God my whole life through parents who have been and are zealous followers of two culturally very different understandings of God.

I offer God the deference of a Proper Name because I want everyone to know God is a stand-in for something or someone else, probably. It’s a symbol.

What I have to say about God comes from the universal but mundane experience of defining space that cannot be defined, and interpreting how we have sought the attention of the invisible throughout the history of humanity.

In the opposing frictions of the envisioned personal imagination and the hallucinated details of reality, the mind inks our negative space with the interpretation that we believe will make the most pleasing sense to the most people we know. Her hair is blond even though the illustration is black and white. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky when we sang indoors.

Due to a childhood of patriarchal indoctrinations, if I had to embody God it would probably be masculine. So if I switch between they and he pronouns, just know that in my universe they were once a he. He is frequently You.

The most amazing thing about God, I believe, is that there is no amount of attention you can pay them that does not please them. You can take any amount of any kind of attention from Me. Would that people could, too.

Shoot anything toward the sun and it will return a shadow. If these are mere feelings, and feelings are not real until they are uttered, and words cannot hurt you, then I can say whatever I want. God does not have limits on the amount of feelings I can have. I talk a lot to you.

I have devised a safe place in my mind, where I send my imagined inner self during turbulent times. This is how I have replaced worship—the carving out of a sacred space. Through therapy, I have given it an allegorical image from my younger life. It’s so sacred I will not say what it is, which means it is an undefined place to you, and that gives you an opportunity to have faith in me. Can I be god to you? Today there is a real place in real time where I go; a facsimile of the sacred place of my imagination. And in it I am rarely alone. And in communion, I hear you. And can I tell you what that feels like?

It’s like hearing from God.