text: In a previous life I had been a rabbi. I died surrounded my friends and family, knowing that I had done well to help teach and bring meaning to the culture and religion I had dedicated myself too. After I died, I awoke in a pitch-black void. I could clearly see my body, yet I couldn’t see anything in the darkness. I had a clear feeling of being underwater, yet the numbness of the vacuum surrounded me. In this void of contradictions, I drifted, or maybe simply stayed still. Eventually a long rectangular line appeared before me, opening-up into a single human-sized eye. This eye was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, its dark pupil surrounded by alternating bands of black and gold lines that pulsed and shifted. Carefully I asked, “Are you God, O Lord of Heaven?” For a minute we sat in silence, I thought myself stupid for expecting an eye to respond when it lacks a mouth. But the silence was broken by a booming voice which came from everywhere, and nowhere. “I am the one you call God, who crafted the universe as a gift to my children within it.” For a moment I sat there in awe, meeting god was quite a momentous occasion after all. I said, “O God, why do you appear before me as but an eye, how could you make the universe when you lack a body with which to work.” And the eye I called God looked at me and responded “Child, how do you think I made the Universe? I gave up my blood to fuel the stars. My muscle and bone are the cores and mantles which hold the planets together, and my skin the crust which surrounds them. My stomach was a necessary sacrifice for the black holes which makes your galaxies possible, and my heart was given so that life could spring forth from the planets.” I was simply stumped, how could a God powerful enough to make the universe, be unable to do so without giving up his body. “God” I asked “that explains how they physical universe came to be, but what about the rest of you. Unless you were but a single eye with limbs, there must be more, right?” God chuckled at this question. “Yes, there is more. The last of my faculties I gave as gifts to my children. I gave up my brain so that my children could build, and learn, and feel. I gave up my mouth so that my children who were left downtrodden could call for help. I gave up my ears so that my children could hear those calls.” An irony that these are gifts human had seemed to squander back on earth. Wars of colonization, slavery, genocide.... All things that the gifts of the lord were meant to help us avoid. But instead we used his brain to build weapons, our mouths to shout orders, and our ears we covered, for we couldn’t bear the screams of the downtrodden. “God,” I muttered “I’m afraid that humanity has squandered those gifts, but there must be one last gift you have given us. After all something had to happen to your other eye.” The eye who declared itself God looked at me, conveying a puzzled look, despite lacking the face to show it properly. “My other eye?” God said “My child, I gave up all but one of my many eyes! How else could I have given you the many gifts of sight?” I was astonished, God had more than two eyes? This couldn’t be right, weren’t we made in his image? “God” I asked once again “You still have one eye, what gift did you reserve to yourself?” And the Eye known as God, looked at me and shed a single tear “The gift of seeing others as they see themselves.” “God” I asked, my final question for this eye who was only able to see the Gods its children saw themselves as “what did you used too look like before you gave up your body to make the universe?” And in my own voice I heard “More Awe inspiring than we could ever imagine.” I still don’t know who said it, God or me.