You can't prove to anyone that God exists.

C. S. Lewis claimed that he was swayed by Anselm's Ontological Argument, but in a later essay he admitted that such intellectual proofs become acceptable only after faith has already taken root by some other means. Such proofs are always preaching to the choir; Anselm knew this; his intent was not to demonstrate the existence of God, but rather to show that God's existence was inherently rational. God, to Anselm, was a priori. God required no justification; God was axiomatic.

I took a shower.

They say that for every convert to Christianity, there are nineteen evangelists who are certain they have failed, and one who takes all the credit for himself. I'm not sure where credit is due in my case. Austin Water Utility? Price Pfister?

Does God exist? What do you mean by God?

What do you mean by exist? Descartes started all this; he managed to piss away the entire phenomenological world in his quest to prove the existence of God. He failed to prove anything about God, but thanks to his efforts, we are shockingly aware of how uncertain we are about the existence of anything else.

Bertram Russell, the notorious atheist, was once asked, "What will you say if, after you die, you find yourself standing in front of the Pearly Gates, confronted by God?" Russell quickly answered, "I would say, 'God! You didn't give us sufficient evidence!'"

There is a painting by the artist Jon J. Muth that transfixes me. It is exquisitely rendered, almost photorealistic. In the painting, a young girl is in a doorway. The foreground is a darkened room. Through the doorway, rich golden supernatural light is pouring over the girl's face and into the room. The girl is staring at the source of the light, rapt. We cannot see what she sees. I wonder if Muth has ever reflected that if everything were visible to us, his painting would mean nothing to anyone. Ask yourself how valuable it is to be able to perceive meaning in such a painting. When you answer that question, you will have plucked the moon from the sky and eaten it like a plum.

It is not a requirement that one be naked when encountering God. I think it probably helps. But you can't plan these things; if you go around naked hoping to meet God in that state you're probably going to be foiled. The one time you put on pants to answer the door, the person you thought was the UPS driver will really be God in disguise.

I was naked. Naked, my body is like most other bodies. Skin and hair on the outside. Blood and guts on the inside, organs and meat and bones.

My skull houses a brain and also a mind. Neuroscientists puzzle over the mind-brain question. Where is the mind? How, if at all, is it separate from the brain? Some believe that 'mind' is an emergent property of the brain's relentless activity. Some believe that the mind is utterly separate, connected to the brain by some kind of spiritual thread. Still others believe that this is a stupid question. I think they are all mostly right.

I was naked and covered with water. Water is deeply symbolic in all religions of which I am aware. There are six hundred twenty-nine references to "water" in the Bible. Water is: new life, sustenance, source, nourishment, purity, judgment, healing, birth, generosity, life itself. blessing. Regardless, when Jesus uses water as a symbol in the Gospel of John, the woman at the well has no idea what he's talking about. She thinks he's still talking about plain old water. Moments later, when he tells the disciples that he has nourishment they know nothing about, they assume that someone has snuck him a sandwich.

What kind of water was the water in my shower? Was it plain old water? Or was it symbolic water? Holy water? Does anyone really believe that the water in the baptismal font is any different from tap water? If you drank it, nothing would happen to you. Unless, of course, you are a vampire.

I do not believe in vampires, or the tooth fairy, or the Easter Bunny. I think Oswald probably acted alone. I don't think an alien spaceship crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in the fifties. I do believe in God. You might say that experiencing God's presence in a shower can be construed as evidence for the existence of God, but if you didn't believe in God to begin with, don't you think you could explain it away?

From the wikipedia:

Religious ecstasy is a trance-like state that is deliberately induced using a variety of techniques, including prayer, meditation, breathing exercises, dancing, fasting, thirsting, and the consumption of coffee, wine, and/or psychotropic drugs. The particular technique that an individual uses to induce ecstasy is usually one that is associated with that individual's particular religious and/or cultural traditions. As a result, an ecstatic experience is usually interpreted within the context of a particular individual's religious and/or cultural traditions.

This explanation, despite its desperate attempt at impartiality, cannot help but feel a bit smug about its subject matter. That it misses the point entirely is not the fault of its author, who probably meant well, but rather the faltering of reason in the face of the mystical. The non-rational cannot be expressed in rational terms without sounding like nonsense. Eliot, for instance, writes about Hamlet's bafflement, though of course this is utter nonsense. Hamlet can be baffled about nothing; he is merely words on paper. Who, then, is baffled?

Hamlet is baffled, according to Eliot, because his experience does not match his feeling. There is no objective correlative for the internal struggle that Hamlet feels. Eliot believes that for this reason, Shakespeare has failed in Hamlet, and that he ought never have attempted it. What would Eliot, stoical Anglican that he was, have thought about religious ecstasy? Is "the doorstep of the Absolute" an abstraction?

What proceeded from the Showerhead was grace in the form of water, like baptism. The grace was the formidable part, the water an afterthought. What issued forth was love and joy in the shape of steam and vapor. This all happened suddenly. One moment it was water, and the next it was more than water. In experiencing that water's transformation, I have a new understanding of the wine in the chalice, and what it becomes when consecrated.

Here is what I experienced in that moment: raw, infinite love; an apprehension of the unity of all that is; an embrace. And in response, gratitude and joy so deep they felt like sorrow. Immense gratitude. I sank to my knees, whispering "Thank you, Thank you." Tears and rivulets of shower water coursed down my face. I could have remained longer in that place, but it was too intense, too much of everything, too much. I had to withdraw into myself again, feel myself as an entity again, before I was lost in the everythingness of love.

(And what would have happened if I'd stayed? Would I have caught fire and burned away? Would I have become enlightened like Buddha under the bo tree? Would I have turned into a sunset, a peach, a shepherd's song? These are questions for poets and madmen, not thinking people.)

I regained my senses, but I could not stop crying for the longest time. I sat on the floor of the tub, saying "Thank you, thank you," over and over again. I was addressing God because I had understood in that moment of perfect love that God was with, in, and surrounding everything. I was grateful simply for being.

Oh, how I have longed for such perfect gratitude in the days since. Can you imagine the joy of being permanently grateful simply for the blessing of mere existence? Sometimes I can approach it. Just barely. A hair's breadth away.

That was not the day I started to believe in God. I don't know if there was a specific day. At some point in the past I'd stopped being an atheist and joined the rolls of the agnostics. And at some later point, I left there for the Christian camp. I can't say exactly when. What day did you become an adult? At what instant does attraction turn into love?

So what significance does the shower have? What is its greater meaning? I believe that the shower was, ultimately, an affirmation. It was the response to a prayer that I never uttered, because I wasn't aware of its necessity. But God read that unformed prayer in my heart. It said, "God, I have come to the door, where before I saw no door. I am knocking, where before I saw no threshold. I am asking permission to enter, where before I believed that there was no one to ask."

The shower was simply God saying, "Welcome home."

Telling this story, I am reminded of a zen koan:

Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing to steal.

Ryokan returned and caught him. "You have come a long way to visit me," he told the prowler, "and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift."

The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.

Ryoken sat naked, watching the moon. "Poor fellow," he mused, "I wish I could have given him this beautiful moon."

I wish I could have given you the very thing that I felt that day, but all I have are these words. They are good words, but they can never be more than that. As much as I would like to give you the moon, I will have to settle for painting a crude picture of it with the materials at hand. This is not false modesty. This is just the way of things.

Another bit of zen wisdom is that a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.

It is beautiful to hear stories of God's grace, and they are lovely things to consider. But in the end, they don't mean much to anyone other than the individual who experienced them. And even for those people, such experiences do not remain fresh. The mind has a way of paving over the extranormal, whitewashing all experiences to fit in with our understanding, smoothing out the wrinkles in our already-complex worldviews. The shower pushed me along a path, but it no longer sustains me. It cannot; its work has been done.

But we need not look to the heavens for miracles. We need not look beyond our own backyards for outpourings of God's love. Some people, more devout by half than I will ever be, have never had any kind of religious ecstasy at all. And yet they believe. For some, the witness of the saints is enough. For others, the graceful cant of a butterfly in the air is enough.

And for some, nothing will ever be enough. Some will deny everything, right up to the grave. Of course, all of those denials will end at the moment of death; one way or another.

Some, like Bertrand Russell, require better evidence.

I have no evidence to give. I have only myself, my words. Call it my testimony if you wish. Call it my faith story. It is not evidence. It is only myself, poured out into words and sentences and paragraphs, as expertly as I'm able. I cannot offer evidence, but I can offer myself. I have no proofs, no photographs, no polygraph results. The vast majority of religion is, at the end of the day, hearsay.

But oh, what good news I have overheard!

The End