[Excerpt from Jacob Needlman's book, What is God?, that I thought some of you may appreciate.  Also excited about his Awakin Call on Saturday.]

The year is 1943. I am nine years old.

It is dark night, full summer in Philadelphia, hot, humid. I am aware that my father is sitting outside on the front steps.

We have only just moved into these small rooms on this spare, newly constructed street pretentiously named Park Lane. The street is an island of low-rent apartments in a sea of wealth: leafy streets, large, gracious old houses -- and all embraced by Philadelphia's incomparable Fairmount Park with its stretches of untamed forest and its rushing, mystical Wissahickon Creek.

I go down the thinly carpeted stairs and gingerly open the screen door, trying not to disturb my father's silence. I had thought to walk up the street into the sweet air of the park presence. But this time, I don't know why, I sit down next to my father. I have never done that before. His solitudes were never inviting, often following bursts of anger or simply mysterious and, to me, as a child, inexplicable. Always more or less frightening.

I sit down, noticing that his head is titled toward the sky.

In front of us stretches a vacant lot, part of which my father has cultivated as a "victory garden" (during World War II, the government asked citizens to help the war effort in that way to reduce pressure on the nation's food supply). In that garden, now enveloped in darkness, there live corn, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, lettuce, scallions, string beans and much else, planted and unplanted, some of it contained by the wooden fence and some of it rampantly flourishing in the wild lot behind the fence: lowly weeds with frost-green, sticky leaves, white-tufted, milk-weed, crowds of dandelions, and -- to me most important of all -- buzzing, brilliant insects, butterflies, some like fluttering snowflakes, others like flying wildflowers and others colored like jungle creatures, all heartbreakingly gentle and beautiful; snails, spiders, big, angry horseflies -- and, lord of everything, the pale green praying mantis suddenly appearing out of nowhere in a moment of grace, as from another universe, so near on the leaf, so still, so complex, so seemingly conscious and wondrously deadly. And then, closest to my heart, grasshoppers -- dancing, leaping, flying, singing grasshoppers, some earnest, some clownish, some as thick as my thumb, others almost as tiny as a crumb of bread in the palm of my hand. It brought tears of wonder and love to my eyes to see the identical intricate structure of this improbable creature written in both the tiniest dot of being and the largest individual member of the species.

Out there, now, occupying the whole of the soft darkness: fireflies -- we call them "lightning bugs." Hundreds of them, intensifying the darkness by randomly glowing and vanishing in the same present moment; intensifying the silence with their noiseless rhythms of illumination. Like flickering stars they were, here, on earth.

But it was when I looked up into the sky that, at that moment, I appeared. It did not happen right away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that my father was still looking up. And so I kept my gaze upward, noticing the stars, some of which formed into constellations whose names I knew. Imitating my father, I kept my gaze upward, just looking.

And suddenly, incomprehensibly, all at once, despite the heavy summer air that always absorbs most of the starlight -- suddenly, as if by magic, the black sky was instantly strewn with millions of stars. Millions of points of light. Millions of worlds. Never, before or since, have I seen such a night sky, not even in remote mountains on clear nights. It was not simply that my eyes had become normally adjusted to the darkness; it was as though an entirely new instrument of seeing had all at once been switched on within me. Or, as it also seemed, as though the whole universe itself suddenly opened its arms to me, saying to me: "Yes, I am here. See, this is what I really am! Do you like my beautiful garment?"

In an instant, less than an instant, a powerful, neutral current of electricity streaked down both sides of my spine -- so quickly I had not a moment to have a thought about it or an emotional reaction to it. Many years had to pass before I was able to understand something about what it was that came down through me.

My eyes stayed riveted on the millions of stars, the millions of tiny stars with hardly a black space between them.

I wondered about my father, but I didn't dare turn my head to look at him, afraid that these millions of worlds might somehow not be there when I turned back to them.

I don't know how long we both continued to sit there, silently. But finally, speaking in a voice that I had never heard from him before, he said: "That's God."

Something, someone suddenly appeared in me, as new and different as the voice of my father was new and different. As though I were summoned into being by that new voice from outside and inside myself. I remember it as clearly now as though it just happened: I saw my thoughts slowing down and somehow becoming longer and thinner, like an attenuating gray cloud, gradually dissolving, leaving a nearly blank, dark space in my mind. And then, one thought, one question, appeared and filled my mind: What is God? What am I? It was the same question, it was one question, one experience.

And yet, at the same time, it was also one answer, the same answer. And only years and years later did I begin to understand that experience and that answer: I am.