For much of human history, people needed to believe in a God who would take care of them and make the world better.

The idea of God has faded in our country,  even though there are more believers than ever in other parts of the world. Sitting on my farm, meditating, praying, and thinking, I find that many of us have exchanged grief for anger and grievance.

That pressure of survival seems now to yield so much fear. So many now worship money because they need it so badly to live.

There is a daunting turn towards hatred and grievance. We are all screwing each other, summoning haters from every corner, and encouraging them to come out of the dark. I want a better way to live, a Spiritual way based on love.

I’ll be honest, as I have often (not always) been open on my blog and in my writing.

For the first time in my life, I would like to think that God is watching over us, ready to strike at any moment and save our nation and our planet. I think this almost every time I take a deep breath and watch the news.

But the journalist gene in me doesn’t permit that, although the idea of a God is popping up more and more as I see the world retreating into a time of hatred and conflict. Suddenly, the notion of God has taken hold.

I wonder if it’s my age. I’m told older people seek God as insurance against the uncertain. That is not enough reason for me.

Perhaps there is a God, and he is waiting for his time again, like that New York Basketball team millions of people are rejoicing over. If there was a Jesus, I was thinking this morning, when will he pop up to chase some priests and billionaires out of the temple?

The young people, as always, give me hope. They have the will, courage, and creativity to do better than we have done.

Our President pushed me to do good; the Judges in Washington might get me into the arms of God.

This morning, in my meditation, I played a sort of Spiritual Game. What if I did believe in God? What would that change? How would it affect me? I took some notes. The skeptic and soul in me is full of cynicism and doubt, which is at the core of journalism and police work, I’ve learned (I was the journalist).

But there is something more I need as I age.

Here’s where I ended up this morning.

If God is all and His Word to us is all, then that must mean he is the reality and controlling factor in every situation, religious or secular, and that He exists only for His glory and creative purpose.

That means our favorite distinction between the spiritual life and the practical life must be false. I can’t divide them in my mind yet.

One affects the other at all times, since we are creatures of sense and spirit, and that means we lead schizophrenic lives.

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Students of the God business write that Christ’s whole ministry was an exhibition, first in one way and then in another, of this mysterious truth. We are all one thing, not many things.

What I am coming to believe now that I have some time to think about it – that a Spiritual life, which I have been pondering for most of my mature life. That is simply a life in which all that we do comes from the center, where we would be anchored by God if there were one.

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It would be a life soaked through and through with a sense of reality and calm, and with a sense of his overwhelming reality (or nature’s, perhaps). I would be a self-giver to the great movement of the will of a much bigger force than me.

I am always stuck on this. Giving my life over to God means I am no longer responsible for it; they are. That doesn’t sit right with me, but it would make my life easier.

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Most of the conflicts in my life, I’ve come to realize, stem from trying to deal with the spiritual and practical aspects of my life separately, rather than seeing them as parts of one great whole.

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It’s tempting, helping me to accept the cruelty and ugliness of the outside world with the Spiritual and peaceful parts of my other life, the one inside and in the natural world, which I have come to see is the point and perhaps the end of my Spiritual Search.

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Maria came in from her morning walk in the woods at just the right time with a gripping story about a Slug she had come across while sitting near a tree. The Slug was fascinating as he slid slowly down a plant’s side, changing color to match his surroundings and moving steadily toward his food.

She took pictures of it, something I never saw or thought of, and we couldn’t take our eyes off it.

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It was almost shockingly beautiful; I was awestruck by the work of the natural world and what goes on almost entirely out of human sight. While we fight millions and billions of creatives, live, move, eat one another, breed, and die. She saw a spider sliding down its web to catch a bug too small for us to see.

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Nature is amazing, complex, and beautiful beyond anything else, and makes the things we humans fight and worry about seem pathetic and pointless.

One can only imagine what force created it. A rich and powerful country like ours has been reduced to a pile of greedy fighting schoolboys out in recess at middle school.

There must, I thought, be a God to assemble the complexity and savvy of a slug. I spent a long time looking at the picture.

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There is no real occasion or need for tumult, strain, conflict, and anxiety once I reach the living conviction that there is a God, and he is all, if I ever do. I’ll be off the hook in one way.

The idea of a God is that all takes place within him, He alone matters, He alone is. Our Spiritual life is his affair, not mine; the dread behavior of humans is his doing, not mine. Believing in God would mean being drawn, at his pace and in his want, to the place where I want it to be—the end of my search.

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Progress doesn’t cease; it gets done by a greater power than me.

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This morning, sitting in my living room, dogs at my feet, a fire crackling in the stove, sunlight pouring through the window, I thought of the slug –  simple and efficient – and even beautiful. I compared his life to the trials of being human.

I never gave much thought to the gastropod mollusk, known as a slow-moving, slimy creature found in damp gardens.

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To accept God, my dependence on him would be absolute, faith beyond my imagination, a great Liberation and calming feeling. This is the core of Mysticism, which has drawn my interest. Our desire for Him would be done; this great desire I have would have to be in the grip of his will and would be done. This great desire can gradually swallow up and neutralize all my small, trivial central desires and worries.

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I’ve often admired the faithful believers; they seem to have less to worry about.

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Life could then become one simple and beautiful act of adoration and giving, an undivided response of the creature to the demand and pressure of the greatest love, Creative Love.

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Then I looked at my Iphone and saw it was time to get outside and take some Pastoral pictures, my love of the moment and the morning, something I do selfishly for me in the hope it brings peace to others as well. I wouldn’t give that up for anything.

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I got up, got my boots off, checked that my Leica had a fresh battery, and went out to find Maria in her search for the place she loves and worships – nature. This meditation about a God is as far as I got today. More to come.

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I was still envying the slug, one of some something’s great and rarely seen creations.