Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Hi. culture and spirituality. Hala Al-Yan is an award-winning Palestinian-American poet,

novelist, and clinical psychologist.

Her books include The Salt Houses and the 29th year.

In this essay, Hala struggles to explain her belief in God to her atheist husband.

She reflects on the elusive vocabulary of the divine and the personal experiences that

are necessarily interwoven into our understanding of religion.

It is early evening and the lights are low and we are arguing about God.

Or perhaps we are arguing about clarity.

Explain what you mean, you are saying. A man in the sky, fire and brimstone, what do you believe in?

I shrug. I don't know. Your devotion to atheism is steadfast. The world is a place of statistics and flukes, and what is unforgivable to you is ambiguity.

You could handle, you say, a straightforward Muslim, a Catholic, someone who operates by the book, any book.

I take my cues for faith from heartbeats and foliage. This is inconceivable to you.

You hate when I use the word God. It frightens you on an instinctual level. It's disorienting and

untenable, but more than anything, you dislike anything that can't be explained in calm, logical tones.

I don't help with this.

A lover of fiction and magicians, I'm perfectly content not knowing how things work.

As a child, I was devastated to discover that engines, not the breath of huffing creatures, kept airplanes afloat.

Not having a single answer means that there are endless possibilities, and I've always been happiest

at the opening notes of the movie on the first day of vacation when the world unfurls in front

...