Days become weeks, weeks months and perhaps years too, rare if ever does the conversation arise. I mean a direct, heads-up discussion about what we mean when we use the term God.

What qualifies as experience of a divine presence for me? I could never hazard to answer on your behalf. Sometimes after pondering I will attempt to answer for myself. Usually though I cannot find the right words to capture my sense of the matter. Not that I am ignorant, just words seem to go only part of the way.

Three or four of us stood together, discussing an author who, in a time past had been known personally to one of us. The conversation naturally turned to this author’s work. He writes for evangelical readers. Then I was asked directly, to give an account of my personal conception of God at this juncture in my life. The fraction of a second that it took to consider the question was eternal…  I replied that I just couldn’t offer any label to handily describe my sense of what God means to me.

Nietzsche says here that this question, however it comes, requires that one write with his/her blood. Language is bent, forged, into a rare and pure, and delicate, and yes, a mad pointing to what is beyond ordinary speech. Language becomes something like a dew-bedezalled rosebud, or the undulating flight of a butterfly, or the float of a shimmering bubble.

…I love only
what a person has written
with his blood.

Write with blood,
and you will find that blood is spirit.

…He that writes in blood and aphorisms
does not want to be read, but learnt by heart.

In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak,
but for that route you must have long legs.

Aphorisms should be peaks,
and those spoken to should be big and tall.
The atmosphere rare and pure, danger near
and the spirit full of a joyful wickedness:
thus are things well matched.

What have we in common with the rose-bud,
which trembles because a drop of dew has formed upon it?

It is true we love life;
not because we are used to life,
but because we are used to loving.
There is always some madness in love.
But there is always, also, some
method in madness.

And to me also, who appreciate life, the butterflies, and soap-bubbles,
and whatever is like them among us, seem most to enjoy happiness.
To see these light, foolish, pretty, lively little sprites flit about – that
moves Zarathustra to tears and songs.

I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance.
…Now am I light, now do I fly;
now do I see myself under myself.
Now there dances a God in me.
–Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Thomas Common, Reading and Writing no. 7

I’d prefer to never conclude a post without suggesting a tune. This classic, Stand Tall by Burton Cummings captures that essence of the ineffable, that a God will know how to dance.