Do you know the story of Siddhartha, now remembered as the Buddha?Although it is told in various iterations, it basically tells of how the young prince Siddhartha becomes the Buddha.  As the tale goes, a child of immense wealth and privilege, Siddhartha grew increasingly dissatisfied with his life.  Is there anything else, he wondered, to existence besides material abundance?

    So one day Siddhartha left the palace for the open road.  As he did, he encountered, in succession, an elderly man, a sick man, and a dead man.  He had never seen aging; he had never experienced sickness; he had never known of death.  These sights shattered all of the categories he had established for understanding the world.

     In his Siddhartha, author Hermann Hesse, a German novelist whose works were highly popular in the soul-searching years of the Sixties and Seventies, recounts the prince's journey.  As he tells the journey, after many months of wandering, the prince arrives at a river, a peaceful, flowing river.  He is struck by the river's steadiness, its rhythms and quiescence, the way it seemed to flow unhindered, unbidden, ever and always free.  And always remaining the same.

     So should be, Siddhartha concluded, life.  Life is a river, a single and continuous present, never beginning, and never really ending, either.  We live into existence as a river.  It's all we need.  In the river, we see truth:  everything is one.

     As I reflect on Hesse's account some fifty years after I first read it, I realize that, yes, truth encapsulates and defines existence, and that, yes, truth is the genesis of life and meaning.  Yet I also realize that we little human beings seriously err if we suppose ourselves capable of creating it.  How could we?  We only know what we see.

     And that's not always true, much less truth. 

     Maybe we really do need a God.