So, God is there. Simply there. Nothing fancy for Michael, no choral music, no auras or penumbras. No mescaline tricks. Just God. For me -- the word catches me in the chest and makes my breath pulse, blood thump in my temple. For me it's almost erotic. I feel the danger of the word. But for Michael at that moment, it's ordinary, always there, he just hadn't known how ordinary. Later, on the drive home past fields flooded with rain and melted snow, foothills of the Berkshires, Michael asks himself, What was it like? It was like breath. He breathed in -- all right, that was God. He breathed out, and his (impure, exhausted) breath became a part of a perfect God. Odd, it was so simple. It was Saturday morning service, the synagogue suffused with sun through the stained glass of what was once a Congregational Church. Being wrapped in the tallith was like being wrapped in God. The knots of the fringes of a prayer shawl symbolize the mitzvot, the commandments for a Jew, but that had nothing to do with what he felt. Rather it was like being held, held up, by hands in a sea. . . .
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