“So, uh…do you believe in God?”
I have the feeling that this question often belongs to a longer string of awkward queries, like: “Do you believe the earth is flat?” “Do you still believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny?” or “Do you think the world was created 5,000 years ago?”
Unfortunately, institutionalized religion—despite all the gifts it has offered—is also largely responsible for what I’d call the dumbing down of spirituality over the centuries, waging a millennia-long war with science that only now, in the 21st century, shows signs of ending. But I digress. To answer the questions above, I’ll say: “yes, no, no, and no.”
To be more precise, I’d return the question this way: How can someone whose work is marrying people not have faith in the goodness of humanity, in the hopefulness of creation, and in the possibility of a better future? Who can stand in the presence of two people pledging to build something out of nothing, and not be moved—often to tears—by the hopefulness those vows embody?
Isn’t this, after all, what God really is: grace in action, hopefulness made concrete?
Just yesterday, I heard an interview with the great Bill McKibben about his new book Here Comes the Sun, on the revolution in renewable energy now happening around the globe. McKibben’s central theme is that we stand at a hinge moment in history, where solar and wind have become the cheapest, fastest-growing energy sources on earth—offering not just a last chance to save the climate, but a first chance to build a more just and resilient civilization.
Think about these figures: Solar and wind are now the cheapest sources of energy on the planet. Since mid-2023, the world has been installing solar panels at a staggering rate—about one gigawatt a day, accelerating to one every 18 hours by fall 2024. In 2024, an estimated 92.5% of all new electricity globally came from renewables—and in the U.S., the figure was closer to 96%. By April 2025, for the first time ever, fossil fuels supplied less than half of American electricity.
As McKibben notes, we can’t stop global warming completely—but perhaps we can stop it short of the point where it makes civilization impossible.
I felt a surge of hope hearing this, a happiness I carried all day. Partly because I hadn’t realized the revolution was happening at such scale, and partly because it made me notice how much I had normalized the quiet desperation of planetary decline.
So when you ask me whether I believe in God, I’d say this: the way this energy revolution is unfolding is a lot like how I see God at work—behind the scenes, in quiet, majestic, gorgeous, and ultimately hopeful ways, often unnoticed, but always requiring our participation.
I believe we are living in a sacred world, a sacred universe. And the wedding ceremony that binds two people together always unfolds, for me, in the presence of that sacredness.
The truth is, weddings have a way of drawing the question of transcendence into the room, whether spoken aloud or not. My role isn’t to hand down an answer but to help create a ceremony true to the couple’s own story. Sometimes that means God is named, sometimes not, and sometimes God shows up in the most unexpected places—like rural Pakistan, where grassroots solar installations now provide cold water and refrigeration for vital medicines in homes that once had none.
“Here comes the sun,” the Beatles sang. By 2023, their song of that name became the first Beatles track to surpass a billion streams on Spotify—the first 1960s recording ever to do so. Why does it resonate so deeply? Perhaps because it awakens something in us like a thirsty plant stretching its roots toward water.
Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century abbess, mystic, composer, and healer—one of the great visionaries of the medieval church—once gave voice to the Spirit of God as a sunlit, greening presence flowing through creation and stirring our yearning for good:
I am the one whose praise echoes on high.
I adorn all the earth.
I am the breeze that nurtures all things green.
I encourage blossoms to flourish with ripening fruits.
I am led by the Spirit to feed the purest streams.
I am the rain coming from the dew
that causes the grasses to laugh with the joy of life.
I call forth tears, the aroma of holy work.
I am the yearning for good.
So, to answer your question, “Do I believe in God?” I suppose I’ll have to say simply: Here comes the sun.