Missing

The debate about God's gender is misdir­ected. What we call God is actually a married couple. When they decided to create humans in their own image, they compromised and manufactured approximately equal numbers of both genders.

Each female She creates is close to Her heart. She becomes the woman for just a mo­ment as She shapes her and, in this way, is able to try out different heights and weights, emotional depths and IQs, skin tones and eye colors. The same applies to every male shaped by Him. On certain nights when they're feeling liberal, each creates a member of the opposite sex, just to see what it's like.

When you die, you go to live in their large home and enjoy a parent-child relationship with them. Every human in the world is a child to them, and they devote tremendous effort to their parenting skills.

It is heartening to see that they learn from us in the same manner that all parents learn from their children. For example, it turns out they didn't know how to express the work­ings of their universe as equations, so they are greatly impressed with the ideas of their physicist children, who phrase clearly to them for the first time what they wrought.

On the other hand, it would be misleading to tell you that it's always been a happy fam­ily, because there was a period of time when that wasn't true. Their marriage was an ar­ranged one, and over the millennia they grew unhappy with each other's company. By careful observation of their humans over the years, they learned that sometimes couples don't work out, that people separate, adulter­ate, divorce—and none of it is so terrible that the universe crashes down. And so, in the manner that all parents learn from their chil­dren, they separated.

There were many acts of bitterness. They stung each other with unfair accusations, us­ing information so personal it shouldn't have been broached. Hurt, in an idea of quick re­venge, She created a planet of all females. He retorted with a solar system of males. She encircled His line of planets with a band of women on meteors. The two of them armed the new humans to battle it out, women against men. Both sides were supplied with weapons ranging from sarcasm to tanks.

But something strange happened. The planets and meteors were silent. Orbits dragged like slow whispers through the empty space. No battles waged; not a shot was fired.

Upon close examination, they discovered that the monosexual inhabitants were miser­able, crushed like existentialists under a feel­ing of the absence of something terribly important, something they couldn't put their fingers on.

Eventually, She dropped Her hands from Her hips and He from His. She spoke the first tender words in months, asking if He was hungry. He responded by offering to cook something for them both. The planets of men and women drifted back together, and the race started again, with its pursuits, seductions, choices, competitions, tempta­tions, arguments, and a great cosmic sigh of relief as they all fell emancipated into each other's arms.