Does God live on Mars?

October 11, 11:14 AMSpiritual Life ExaminerRabbi Ben Kamin

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When it comes to this question, the prayer book has nothing on Carl Sandburg.  Sandburg was the quintessential American poet and romantic who hailed life as “honey and salt.”  He was also a premier and colorful biographer of Abraham Lincoln.  He was a prairie sage who brought forth from Illinois more celestial wisdom than Sinai.   A prolific writer and avid civil rights laureate who helped launch the NAACP, the veteran of the Spanish-American War died in 1967, just months before his hero, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

When it came to God, Carl Sandburg also had a sense of humor and an irreverent awe—qualities painfully lacking in American society today.  He wasn’t as focused, as some clergy types and politicians in these heated times, on determining the exact location of God Almighty on behalf of fellow parishioners or constituents.  He left it to the imagination—OMG!

First, the prayer book:   One of them reads, rhapsodically I think, For the worlds beyond count are but a breath of your spirit, the lucent suns only beams of your light.  And then there is Psalm 8, beloved by Jews and Christians alike:  When I behold your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, I ask, what is man, that you think of him?

(Woman, too, I might add.)

So it would seem, from the classical sources, that God is not confined to this planet, and therefore also dwells on Mars, Jupiter, and beyond—a healthy perspective for us earth-centric and self-absorbed stock market androids and hot-tempered voters.

But leave it to Carl Sandburg to put it best:

God gets up in the morning

and says, “Another day?”

God goes to work every day at regular hours.

God is no gentleman for God

puts on overalls and gets

dirty running the universe we know

about and several other universes

nobody knows about him but Him.

Works for me.