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ecclesial exercise: what were the minimal number of four magical cards need we turn over with preconditions or results on the upsides and downsides if what was showing was: (1) Beatifically good; (2) Cursed with extraordinarily bad luck; (3) Not dependent upon personal virtue; (4) Inordinately fortunate in all of life’s trials. The pay-as-you-go God people would need to pick up (1) and find fortunate life and (2) to find the fate of the non-believer to establish that God was coldheartedly true and fair with the results of flipping (3) and (4) being none contributory. The grace-to-all-sinners God people need to turn over card (3) to find good life and (4) to find sometime sinners nonetheless fortunate to confirm their belief in the unconditionally of the loving generosity of God and making finding out about the underside of cards (1) and (2) unnecessary. This liturgical discussion and gamble with God’s cards, perhaps a caricature of the Talmudic, rational discussions with the rabbi, felt irrelevant to my spiritual needs.

Missing was mysticism’s promise of the disappearance of I into a union with the divine, the Heart Sutra’s eternal emptiness of form and the eternal form of emptiness that gifts with spiritual perspective and not-necessarily-logical intuition about unseen Absolute Reality. Forced either-or, binary, card-turning cognition in the search for God’s logic is unrewarding. As the Dalai Lama, in his Heart of Wisdom Teaching, says, “…all phenomena are emptiness, without defining characteristics, they are not born, they do not cease…” In trying to penetrate the mystery and promise of this emptiness, it was difficult to surrender my internal parody of what sounded like that day’s Southern California New Age stuff about global nonaggression, sexual politics, Beadles music, distressed jeans and pot. In the synagogue of my neighborhood, experience with a deeply felt, never-you-mind-about-anything God of detachment with love, was not on the menus of Friday night or Saturday morning services. All I could feel was a faithless and nonnegotiable fear.

In the work of many mysticism-positive scholars, a classic being Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism, 1961, it has been speculated that this ineffable state as a union with a powerful unknown, transcending description in language, becomes more socially prominent during times of cultural efflorescence. She pointed to the

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