In 1994, I was unexpectedly stranded in Washington DC for a weekend. I took the bus tour and saw the sights. I read Nabokov's The Gift in the shadow of the Washington Monument. I traced my fingers across names of Vietnam vets for over an hour. And, most sobering of all, I visited the Holocaust Museum, in which I was stunned into silent tears by the scent of old leather in a room piled high with shoes.

It would be months before the spiritual implications of that room began to make themselves known, before a flood of feverish thinking and reading and poetry-writing would take over, before I would wail in the darkness lines like: "God / find me / How long must the sparrow fall? / How far must the sheep wander? / How lonely must the soul become? / The tomb was empty / Where are you hidden? / I am lost / in looking / for you." Such a room does not let you go back to what you were before you entered it. Not if you have a beating heart.

And does your heart beat, oh my Lord? I ask you now as I've asked you every day for twenty-one years. And did you see them, your millions, your chosen ones? Did you hear their prayers? They say you stopped the planet from spinning for the sake of a king's boil. But before this you did nothing. Tell me that you saw and wept, yet lacked the power, and I can love you still. Or tell me that you had the power and would have cared but did not know, did not hear those weeping prayers, and I will understand, I will forgive your inattention though it grieves me.

But do not say you are the God of Joshua, the God of "herem", the God of genocidal conquest, the God of "kill every one of them, man, woman, baby, destroy them all for my glory", the God of might and jealousy but lacking even the tiny spark of love that makes my own puny and distracted heart burn with sorrow and impotence. For how can I bend my knee to such profound evil? and how could I love such a monster, though he scream on threat of eternal pain that I must? And how can I sing in choirs to that? And what can the opinion of anyone who has not thought about a room full of shoes and the goodness of God matter to me, though it cost me friendships and livelihood?