One winter I ordered a Radio Flier sled from the Sears catalogue, and I rode that sled down runs we fashioned in the backyards near Ash Street, bumping and sprawling and hanging on, the sled a fragile line of control on the beaten path.
Sometimes I would slam into a snow bank or an obstacle. One moment I was whizzing along our bobsled run and the next smacked into something and flipped, sprawled on my back, watching the tilted sky seem to move.
When I found God, it was like that too. I was minding my own business, just a kid, curious about Him, and then, wham! He found me, and the collision with Him was scary, like slamming into a snow bank on the bobsled run.
Sometimes His presence is like the frothy, foaming ocean tides, cleansing and warm with a secret, primal energy. There is mystery in this moving, living water that has been a presence in the world during all our history here.
As we ride this planet, we are creatures on a world that sails silently in its special orbit. We are here, contemplating who we are and where and when, but somehow we have lost our sense of God.
The sun spins golden energy through the atmosphere. Softly in the morning or near dusk, it has lit on leaf and stem, calming us, though we seldom pause to notice. As our planet moves through shadow, such softness is here, and oxygen, an intimate gift of breath and life. And there is light from that star furnace fueling life on our world. It warms, calms, covers with measures of energy and promise.
Like the ocean, it has been our constant companion. Some worshiped it. There were cultures with sun gods, as there were gods of the wind and air. There was Poseidon of the sea, of course. There were many and we have these myths collected in paperbacks on our shelves.
Today it is fashionable to doubt that God exists, except in imagination, and we say God is the product of weak minds needing comfort, reassurance, or crutches to hobble on. Some believe that this One is the same as the pagan gods, that all is superstition, messy and ridiculous. Many feel we have moved beyond superstitious reports that God is in the universe. We suspect that it is possible to move on now, dusting our hands as from a messy, necessary task. We are proud and feel that we can begin to put all that behind us.
And yet I slammed headlong into God racing down that bobsled run, sprawled on my Radio Flier sled, barely maintaining any control along the packed snow path. I found God, who shadows us, always present as we struggle on our planet. In the subtle cooling of the air as shadow falls, night rises with some thing that moves deliberately, steadily toward us.
Reminds me of how water rises, or snow on those calm gray winter days when the air fills with fluttering shadows. I tip my head and watch them, millions of them coming down. Slowly they fill the world and change it. As dusk arrives, there is a transition from one sort of time to another.
When you think about it, shadow marks much of our experience in the world. This planet is in shadow much of the time. Night rises. Our planet turns slowly, slightly tilted on its axis. We orbit the sun and always have.
I decided long ago that I would at least attempt to describe the experience and to create a portrait of God as I have come to know Him. I want to sketch the world as I see it after encounters with Him. Along the way, ideas form about who we have been and what we are becoming.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
On a page immediately before Preface
We are aware of Him.
Holding a child at the campground, stillness in the air. Or at the seashore the low whisper of the ocean, like breath, the air heavy with salt and scent.
Something happens at the ocean. Seems I should remember a hundred other days, or thousands, though I was not there.
Memories stir restless inside, though, and an ability to follow them as one might track the scent of baking bread.
Something more than hunger, a light and elusive thing. Maybe frogs in a calm pond, deep in the woods. Something is there, and some thing calls to us. This is why we need to talk.
We live in a world with many clues. And there is this One, this spirit, this presence that stalks us. Some feel it is a monster. They are scared. And yet it is not a monster, just something mostly unseen. In our time we have done our best to escape His clutches. We do not want to be changed.
Holding a child at the campground, stillness in the air. Or at the seashore the low whisper of the ocean, like breath, the air heavy with salt and scent.
Something happens at the ocean. Seems I should remember a hundred other days, or thousands, though I was not there.
Memories stir restless inside, though, and an ability to follow them as one might track the scent of baking bread.
Something more than hunger, a light and elusive thing. Maybe frogs in a calm pond, deep in the woods. Something is there, and some thing calls to us. This is why we need to talk.
We live in a world with many clues. And there is this One, this spirit, this presence that stalks us. Some feel it is a monster. They are scared. And yet it is not a monster, just something mostly unseen. In our time we have done our best to escape His clutches. We do not want to be changed.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Miss Juanita's Clocks
I was aware of a warm, gentle presence in the world all around me, even as I stood beside the pond in the side yard of Miss Juanita's house, next door to Nana's on Dorchester Avenue.
As I stared at the flat, still water, I felt God's presence, though I'm not sure I knew it was Him at the time. At first I associated it with the pleasure of being alone and thought it was just the way it was to be by myself. I sought time to be alone, out there in the yard deep in thought.
Miss Juanita collected clocks, which fascinated me, though I was only allowed into her house once. On that one occasion I was scared. Just the sense of how it smelled in there overwhelmed me, not to mention the rooms pressing me with new and different sensations.
There is something about being in someone else's house, especially when it is forbidden and mysterious with the ticking of clocks, wonderfully strange. I remember gloom of little side porches and shadow under the dining room table on that one day when Miss Juanita invited me in.
Nana had told her I wanted to see the clocks, and so one late afternoon in early Spring at a few minutes past five o'clock, Nana led me around the side yard to the door that opened on Miss Juanita's receiving room and from there down a dim hall and into one of the side porches thick with combined ticking from shelves and shelves of clocks. There were very many of them ticking, their tiny gears spinning, scratching, rasping in the shadowed room.
Mesmerized and torn by shyness, I couldn't relax. Miss Juanita was in the room, inspecting the clocks as though she was their marshal, and Nana observed me as she chatted. Both of them watched me closely, lest I touch or stumble into them. I was dizzy and self conscious in the complicated world of Miss Juanita's clocks.
Each clock was unique. Each was slightly different and represented a variation in what it means to be. Each one represented another shade in how it was to be there, spinning through time. This was a secret world, as though Miss Juanita had led me into a complicated master control room for all of time--the world as it was in her house.
I was only allowed to walk through the first floor rooms. I didn't go upstairs, but I sensed that this time was a presence in the entire house. It was like going back in all the time implied in the shadows on her veranda, the slow stillness of time where there was nearly always just the hint of scratchy mint and vines and earth. There was the thoughtfulness of how it was to be there in that world, nearly as though we had slipped up on tiptoe to some other world. That's how it was.
I longed to return but knew I could not. Miss Juanita was very mistrustful of children and sent messages through Nana that we were not to be skulking around her yard and particularly not near her goldfish pond. I was drawn there, though. Something powerful drew me, perhaps the long hanging vines and tempting bushes, or the way light played down through the trees. There was also the knowledge that somewhere in there, in her house, was a world I had never observed except on that one April afternoon.
And there were the clocks. I wanted badly to get in there and be with the clocks all by myself. Just to be there with them and experience time as it was in that house.
As I stared at the flat, still water, I felt God's presence, though I'm not sure I knew it was Him at the time. At first I associated it with the pleasure of being alone and thought it was just the way it was to be by myself. I sought time to be alone, out there in the yard deep in thought.
Miss Juanita collected clocks, which fascinated me, though I was only allowed into her house once. On that one occasion I was scared. Just the sense of how it smelled in there overwhelmed me, not to mention the rooms pressing me with new and different sensations.
There is something about being in someone else's house, especially when it is forbidden and mysterious with the ticking of clocks, wonderfully strange. I remember gloom of little side porches and shadow under the dining room table on that one day when Miss Juanita invited me in.
Nana had told her I wanted to see the clocks, and so one late afternoon in early Spring at a few minutes past five o'clock, Nana led me around the side yard to the door that opened on Miss Juanita's receiving room and from there down a dim hall and into one of the side porches thick with combined ticking from shelves and shelves of clocks. There were very many of them ticking, their tiny gears spinning, scratching, rasping in the shadowed room.
Mesmerized and torn by shyness, I couldn't relax. Miss Juanita was in the room, inspecting the clocks as though she was their marshal, and Nana observed me as she chatted. Both of them watched me closely, lest I touch or stumble into them. I was dizzy and self conscious in the complicated world of Miss Juanita's clocks.
Each clock was unique. Each was slightly different and represented a variation in what it means to be. Each one represented another shade in how it was to be there, spinning through time. This was a secret world, as though Miss Juanita had led me into a complicated master control room for all of time--the world as it was in her house.
I was only allowed to walk through the first floor rooms. I didn't go upstairs, but I sensed that this time was a presence in the entire house. It was like going back in all the time implied in the shadows on her veranda, the slow stillness of time where there was nearly always just the hint of scratchy mint and vines and earth. There was the thoughtfulness of how it was to be there in that world, nearly as though we had slipped up on tiptoe to some other world. That's how it was.
I longed to return but knew I could not. Miss Juanita was very mistrustful of children and sent messages through Nana that we were not to be skulking around her yard and particularly not near her goldfish pond. I was drawn there, though. Something powerful drew me, perhaps the long hanging vines and tempting bushes, or the way light played down through the trees. There was also the knowledge that somewhere in there, in her house, was a world I had never observed except on that one April afternoon.
And there were the clocks. I wanted badly to get in there and be with the clocks all by myself. Just to be there with them and experience time as it was in that house.
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