Given my reluctance to say much, directly, about God in these posts and in any of my publications, and my reticence to employ traditional scriptural supports, much less proofs, for a theology of God in any of my theology-culture analyses, readers (and friends) have found various ways recently to ask me what I really am thinking about God these days.

Here is the very short version, in the first person. A fuller elaboration or defense will have to wait for another occasion.

I more or less relate, in a way that feels real and that is connected to experience and practices, to a trust in a gracious “more” subtending life from moment to moment, and calling for more life.

That is “God” as I presently understand “God,” and this “God” is that which is worth calling “real,” and known under many symbols in multi- and non-religious perspectives.

But this “God” is more personal than I can wish or even dare to imagine, because every moment is gift; I am recipient of a life I did not invent and in crucial ways cannot control. And this “God” is at the same time more impersonal than I can realize or even tolerate realizing; life is finally so small and our concomitant wish for extra-human influence to save us from this smallness is so strong.

Human experience is the sum of influential relationships both conscious and unconscious, personal and anonymous, and my life seems to be headed toward a confrontation with myself that must also be a final integration of all of my relationships, which means a “reunion” with every love and fear, every worldly force on life that I have known.

I feel this way about loved ones in particular: I can say yes to an infinite soul-career in and beyond the universe with them, when I die, but this is purely hope. But if life is, as far as I can figure out, nothing more, it still adds up to a spectacular desire for life to participate in the power that made life this way.

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And because this is Rock and Theology, I wondered which song might best articulate my sense of God right now. It is probably “Faithless,” by Rush, from their 2007 album Snakes and Arrows.

For our readers, what is your own sense of God, and what music best describes it?

Tommy Beaudoin, in California