"The universe is always listening to you.
It is also ever speaking, but you must pay it the courtesy to listen.
Listen to the universe as well as the universe listens to you."
-unknown
Ben sought God without knowing it, at first.
He had attended church with this parents, where he had been introduced to the doctrines and stories of the Christian mythos. In Sunday school, he would hear remarkable tales, where faith alone sustained it's adherents when lions attacked, seas raged, or even when three children were thrown into a furnace to burn an agonizing death, but walked out untouched by flame.
Of course, he did recall being taught the meanings in the stories, too. It would be no good to teach children that faith would preserve them if they stand in traffic or jump into their fireplaces.
The flesh is ephemeral. The soul was immortal. He understood that well enough.
Bloody lessons of the Old Testament gave way to the kind parables of a gentle teacher called Jesus. This man had a way with words, and Ben could grasp easily the intentions in the writing. Sunday School was easy. Everything made sense in his growing cosmology.
During church services, the sanctuary was always cold. His nose would run and he'd feel drowsy. Often, he closed his eyes and just listened. On the whole, church was boring, but he'd listen to every word. The pastor was warm-hearted, and crafted his sermons well. There were lots of ideas for a young mind to grasp and experiment with in his own head.
On their way home, in the car, Ben would chime in about salient points in a sermon or remember the punch line to one of the pastor's jokes. Everyone would stare at him and say, "We thought you had slept through it!".
"No," Ben would say, "I was just listening".
The messages always taught tolerance, self-examination, self-improvement, and all under the watchful, loving eye of "our heavenly father".
But, wait... our father... "who art in heaven"?
Ben had a great imagination, but something still smelled of bullshit in all of these pretty words.
He recalled a few things that the faithful seemed to repeat often:
They would say that the one God was omnipotent. It had created all matter as we know it, and crafted our planet in a mere week. Busy guy. This God could also _do anything, _be anything, _was, in fact, everything... "The alpha and the omega" Beginning and End. Good guy to know, yes?
So, how to know this God? The church had so personified the deity, that Ben felt he should be able to call him on the phone. But where was the ghost in the works? In which direction did he reside? Why keep calling the creator of the universe a "he", anyway?
Too many questions. Ben became irritated. Then he became combative.
On long walks, or bicycle rides, he'd try to commune with his maker in some meaningful way. He loved to talk to the creator, for the creation was such a heart-breakingly beautiful thing, and Ben was grateful for it. The cosmos owed him nothing, but he did want to hear from the architect of it all. So, he began to ask the creator to speak to him.
Over time, Ben felt cheated... He would write of the beauty of creation. He would pour his heart out to his maker every day, but the conversation felt one-sided. The silence from his so-called divinity was becoming intolerable. He made an ultimatum: If there really was an architect, a creator, a "prime mover" out there with omnipotent ability, then it should be able to communicate directly to him in a language he could understand!
There. A challenge was laid before the cosmos, and Ben stood defiantly behind it.
Days passed, and no voice came to him. He longed to hear that call which would tell him that his own small voice was being heard.
He returned one hot summer day from a long and contemplative bicycle ride. He found a cool, fresh peach in the refrigerator and walked out of the kitchen. He fumed again, shaking a mental fist at the divine in bold defiance, and took a bite of the peach.
The fruit was at it's peak of ripeness. It was chilled, it was sweet, and it filled him with the kind of pleasure a cool, ripe peach should. How fine when something meant for our continued existence meets the mind-bogglingly complex systems of our means to consume it. He mused, "This peach was meant for my nourishment, and advertises this in the most spectacular way imaginable". He had forgotten, for a moment, the rancor over his silent God.
He stopped in the living room, and felt something both wonderful and chilling.
He had received the reply to his ultimatum.
How could he have been so foolish? Did he really think that the creator of the universe would be able to speak accurately to him in a spoken language? He had heard the words of a living God, in a mere fraction of it's full and mighty vocabulary. No words of man would suffice. No language of man would suffice.
Ben had asked the creator to speak to him, and his answer had come, unexpectedly, in a peach.
