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The American modernist poet E. E. Cummings ended up as a somewhat lonely, politically conservative Unitarian. It happens. He wrote some glittering verses glorying in the natural world and its colored wonders, and would jot down religious thoughts here and there. “May i be i is the only prayer,” he once noted.

This is perhaps a modern desire, one tied to many a young heart. I prayed it as a teenager. But I soon lost interest in the quest for my “I,” which quickly turned into a cold and dreary march down a factory assembly line, with a mute and numbed device on view at the end rather than the incomparable and shimmering self I hoped for. God, I discovered instead, is far more fascinating, alive, beautiful—everything.

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