The Face of God

All My Life"
By Joyce Keller

All my life I've wanted to believe in God,
gone to church,
followed every spiritual teacher in town,
meditated and prayed,
attended 12-step programs,
but still I felt abandoned and alone in the universe.

All my life I've wanted to see the face of God.
Is he really just a mean old man in the sky?
Perhaps God is a chubby Buddha,
or maybe the Dalai Lama, always laughing.
Or is She a woman, the green Tara, weeping pearl tears,
the Virgin of Guadalupe, crowned with roses?

All my life I've tried to solve that old mystery,
Who are we?
Where did we come from?
Why are we here?

Then one day I saw the pictures
sent back by the Hubble Telescope:
Hot blue stars born out of the red glow of galaxies,
a pulsating firestorm of fluorescent clouds,
the obsidian sky of deep space.
Spirals of comets, like swirling diamond necklaces.
Black holes, exploding supernovas,
a hundred thousand light-years away,
endless, unimaginable, eternal.
And I knew that finally I had seen the face of God.