effects.........................

I have sought God in the meanings that have inspired people to live in such a way that their lives seem to point to something larger than themselves . . . It can be an affirmation, someone who gives you the confidence to be yourself.  It can be forgiveness, a way of saying, yes, you know and I know that it was wrong, but that was yesterday, and you have work to do today, and perhaps tomorrow will bring the chance to heal what you harmed.

      People with the Abrahamic monotheisms have always known that for most of us, most of the time, God, more infinite that the universe, older and younger than time, cannot be known directly.  He is known mainly through his effects, and of these the most important is his effect on human lives.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

the winding ill-lit stairway of our life...........

There is nothing wrong with referring at this point to the ineffable.  The mistake is to describe it.  Jankélévitch is right about music.  He is right that something can be meaningful, even though its meaning eludes all attempts to put it into words.  Fauré's F sharp Ballade is an example; so is the smile on the face of the Mona Lisa; so is the evening sunlight on the hill behind my house. . . . Anybody who goes through life with open mind and open heart will encounter these moments of revelation, moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words.  These moments are precious to us.  When they occur it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across an open window, through which, we catch sight of another and brighter world—a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter.

-Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic