Sometimes, when I’m feeling sad or worried, I look around me and sense a presence, a greater mind outside of me, beyond me, looking out for me and hovering nearby for no other reason than to love and protect.

What if we are that divine, loving presence for each other?  I once wrote a science fiction short story as a teenager about an alien planet whose inhabitants believed that the divine was the created.  In their stories and myths, God was the culmination of everything that existed, the gestalt of all material forms and events.  The universe was the mother and father, and God was the child.  At the end of time, God would be born and swallow up time and encompass and become everything that was.  They would say of one another, “ah, she is a mother of God” or “he is a father of god.”

Among these people, they believed it was their responsibility to raise God, so to speak, to continuously look out for God.  When they entered their temples to pray, they would say, “Dear God, how can I help you today?  How can I give you strength today?  What can I teach you?”  When they sat down to eat, they would not say a prayer of thanks.  Instead, they would eat knowing that their own bodies were a part of the universe, and the universe was in the process of giving birth to God, and so they ate the way a pregnant woman would eat, as an offering to the child, as an act of love.

At night, they would turn their minds to God and be the divine presence, the overseer, hovering nearby for no other reason than to love and protect.