Give thanks to the God of heaven, for his steadfast love endures forever. Psalm 136:26

                When I let go of the rigidity of our everyday world and then, allowing the stillness to lure me to other places, I am sometimes in that warm, shadowy room upstairs in Nana’s house in Middlesboro, Kentucky. There is a window on my right as I lie there on the bed. The softness of damp air spills into the room in the early morning and a warm, dry heat on a summer’s mid-afternoon.

This was the upstairs room in my grandmother’s house where I slept during visits. I was nearly four years-old there in that room where I experienced such immense comfort—not merely physical but a deep sense of internal security as well. That one room in particular wrapped me in warmth and the jittery, excited taste of the presence that I encountered during my alone times in Harlan and now was so powerfully here with me in my grandmother’s house.

                My sister, Jeanie, and I would play a game following afternoon naps in that room. One of us would spin the world globe that sat on a small desk while the other held a forefinger lightly above the surface, touching ever so slightly. The one spinning the globe would chant, “Round and round and round she goes. Where she stops, nobody knows.”

This was probably some chant that emerged from barkers at carnivals where hundreds of the gullible have stood, feet in sawdust, out in the night, mesmerized by lights and calliope whistles and clowns. Some guy smiling and strutting gives you three-chances-for-a-quarter to knock down bottles or spin a wheel, or topple cardboard rabbits with cork shot from a popgun. Something like that.

                But I would be fascinated to look at the surface my finger touched when the globe stopped. Sometimes it was the ocean. That was not much fun. But many times it would be what seemed to be an exotic area far away in some dark region of Africa or perhaps Egypt or magical Switzerland.

               

                Easing gently into this other world, this other time, though, is when I most notably sense God’s presence, and within that world I am reminded of special moments such as the ones at my grandmother’s house in Middlesboro, among the many others. The memory of them simply wraps around me. The common denominator is this—they all have a sense of security, peace, and love at their center.

                Here is where I began to understand the idea of God’s love for each one of us. God’s love is so much more than the prissy weakness many associate with Christianity. It is powerfully there. Begun, perhaps, in the security we feel as infants and children when we are fortunate enough to have unconditional love from parents and family. That is how it was begun, certainly, for me. Perhaps as this presence—God—initially has crept up to me and begun to coax me toward him, he has used the wonderful love and peace I experienced as a child.

I was fortunate to have two amazing, loving grandmothers deeply committed to God. That is not to mention my incredible mother, who was always fascinated with the idea that we can communicate with God.

Any of us can, and it is really the essence of the Holy Bible—what it ultimately teaches. Whatever we might acknowledge –or not—God really is near us, just as the Bible assures us.

There are some who believe those of us who desperately seek a connection with God are weak and desperate to find solace and relief from the agonies of the world that confronts us with its responsibilities and dangers. However, our need for God stretches far beyond this. And besides, it is not weakness to cry out in the midst of desperation, even as King David in the biblical Psalms. Unquestionably courageous in battle, a man among men, he was aware of God and in many of these beautiful Psalms yearns for God and asks for protection.

Yes, we are in a dangerous world, even at the best of times. It is a signature of human existence. Once there were predators that literally snuck toward us as we lay hidden in some warm shelter, a nest filled with the scent of our pelts, the exhalations of our breathing, and hidden as best we could would be the precious offspring, so new and dependent upon us. Even now, we exist among frets and dangers, death and heartache, anxiety and a quest for survival so much part of our daily routine that we scarcely pause to think. It is etched deeply into the most primal parts, deeply it goes, grasping our very genetic materials, intricately engraved across our DNA.

Our desperate need for God goes far beyond some brittle, cowering need for protection or legends to help us feel better about death which stalks us or the mystery of what there is after death. Perhaps this is one of the great secrets. And I am quite certain that part of the aching, awful tragedy for the ones who shunned God in life will be the horrible realization after death that it’s all true. Everything that resonates through the Holy Bible—is true, and that what they presumed was weakness and desperation of fools who needed protection is actually the living, quietly breathing reality of something so immense and beyond us that we have scarcely even begun to fathom the implications for who we are and what we are becoming.

How terrible to experience the intense, sudden realization—all in a moment—that you literally wasted the time given to us on this planet, in this world, and likely have forfeited the ability to continue.

But I do believe we would do well—very well, indeed—to begin with those warm, precious moments when we have felt most secure, loved and protected, as first steps in understanding the immensity of God’s love for each of us. It is powerfully there, though it confounds our reason that there could be the maker of the Universe and all that is within it, a presence so profound and beyond us and yet so desperate for an intimate relationship with each one of us.

Though it surpasses human understanding, it is nevertheless true. And it is high time that we acknowledge this in our own moment in history and begin again to seriously pursue a genuine quest for this and all that is promised. Presently, we are so awkwardly in darkness and so confounded and confused, and yet we are ready for an amazing transformation that will propel us with renewed zest and wonder toward all that God is waiting for us to come toward at long last.

Of all human activities, man’s listening to God is the supreme act of his reasoning and will.—Pope Paul VI

This quote causes a stirring within me. And it reminds me that there is something large that has been in the depths of me, there in the night as I lie down in bed, or in the morning when I wake up and reach out again toward this entity, this presence.

I have known since I was sixteen or seventeen that there is something important that God wants me to write about. It has felt so awful to have it like a huge something deep within me that must eventually be born, but has eluded me for decades. I have attempted to get it onto paper since before word processors.

When I was in my twenties, there were the big manual typewriters. Each one had its own feel, its own personality. It was a delicious experience just to press the keys, to hear the keys tap and the carriage ratchet. At the end of each line I would grasp the silver lever of the carriage return and nudge the carriage across so that the words would begin again on the left of the page even as it advanced the roller to the next line. Then, gradually, the carriage would rattle toward the left as I typed, and in this way each eight-and-one-half sheet of clean paper would be filled with words.

  Now, today, I am sitting in the car listening to the soft patter of the rain. It is yet another of the subtle things we take for granted. What does the soft, steady measure of the rain have to do with moving toward God’s time? Somehow, the process of settling down, easing out toward the quiet and stillness, causes me to slip into memory and from there toward this other world—God’s world—which always surrounds us but which we have trained ourselves not to acknowledge.

Allowing the stillness within the steady rain to grasp something within causes me to remember that NBC live telecast of Peter Pan when I was five or six and we lived in Harlan, Kentucky. In the steady patter of the rain, this stillness begins to rise within me and take me in much the same manner as sleep does, I am drawn toward other places, often in memory.

On that summer evening, our living room was filled with low, dusky shadow as twilight crept in. I remember a subtle sadness underlying the way I felt on that evening, sitting on the living room couch with my mother, my sister Jeannie and my brother, David. I was oldest. But we were fascinated by Mary Martin as Peter Pan, the story, the sense of drifting out upon the summer air, all the windows open in the house and the dusky, low light of a summer evening easing into our house. And this was a black-and-white Motorola television, the one my dad had brought to our Harlan, Kentucky house several months before.

But the steady patter of the rain as I sit in the car all these years later causes me to ease back to that time in my memory, and the awareness of other time enhances the stillness and somehow allows this sense of this presence which is God to build into me. As I listen to the steady rain and glimpse the wetness of the dark lot through these rainy windows in the car, and the bleary light of the globes on tall, slender black poles positioned in the lot, I guess part of what settles quietly within me is this stepping back from the intensity of our everyday life when we are focused on the immediate that we see with our eyes and on the individuals, the intricacies of what it is to live day to day.

Perhaps the point is that as I ease toward the stillness that begins to rise from somewhere deep within, it reminds me of water rising beneath the wooden hull of one of the battered, much used rowboats that are tied up at wharfs and docks near lakes and rivers. I have moved out onto the still waters on such boats, feeling the steady, powerful pull of some incredible other time and reality. Moving out upon the still, mesmerizing surface of a lake, it is as though something there is drawn up through the wood of this boat, nearly like thought or something somehow measured not by sight and touch through our physical senses but through other parts, elusive and ephemeral. These are mere vestiges, underdeveloped in our time.

So I suppose the answer to what the steady patter of the rain and how it moves me into another time sometimes accompanied by memories is that it begins to tug at something deep within and move me toward a world which surrounds us, though we have never really learned to inhabit it. However, this measure of stillness and other time is connected to this presence which is God. And perhaps it is also prayer. Christ’s disciples asked him, “Lord, teach us to pray,” because they were interested, understanding as they watched him deep in prayer, spending so much time in prayer, they knew that Jesus was experiencing something vital, powerful, intense.

When we learn to really pray, it involves a letting go of the everyday, anxiety-ridden time, the critical, distracting world which rivets our attention upon this limited, human perspective. Effective prayer teaches us through practice and a yearning for God to move into a realm that is his, using a hidden, crucial ability instilled within us that we have allowed to atrophy.

So yes, I am excited when I see the quote of Pope Paul VI. “Of all human activities, man’s listening to God is the supreme act of his reasoning and will.”

                  It is true, and it is our challenge. This is key to what we must practice and learn to do and—through this—begin to understand who we are in relation to God, and why it is we are here. Even settling back and allowing something as steady and commonplace as the rain to draw our focus from the intensity of our usual anxieties can be a starting place for slipping into the prayerful state which finds us beginning to move toward this presence, toward a world and a time that is his and which calls to us constantly, though we have learned not to hear.

There is something that happens, and I can only suggest that it has much to do with this peace that passes understanding.

                It is mid-November, but the grass in the Pigeon Forge area is still a delicious green, though there are dried leaves now in the little dip on the other side of the white fence.

                Well, that may be an interesting detail. It certainly isn’t some major idea. But I suppose the only way that I can approach the deep ideas, such as they may ever be, is to begin lightly. I really think that is the answer. Just to begin with these keystrokes, tapping keys lightly and allowing even my trivial ideas to flow. And along the way I will think of others.

               I have been thinking about what happens when I experience this stillness and become aware of God there. Time begins to ripple and rise around me. And as I was beginning to think about that, I then had an image of a scene from Y-12 in Oak Ridge. It used to be called the Secret City, and for one year I worked there. What I remember most is how I would walk deep into some of the most classified part of that city, passing old brick structures from the nineteen forties. It really was like going back in time. And there was a tunnel I would walk through at one point, and it reminded me of that animated movie Roger Rabbit. The main guy in the movie drove through a tunnel in order to reach that other world, where the so-called tunes lived. 

                Here, though, this tunnel led into the really old and classified part of Y-12, and the sidewalks were vintage, nineteen forty-five concrete, and the old brick of the building I walked beside was damp and oozing moisture. At one point, there was a vent of some sort and some odiferous vapor would be expelled in a white cloud. I held my breath as I walked past it, imagining dark labs of the past where terrible concoctions were brewed.

                And perhaps this is what I mean when I say that time begins to ripple when I am still. It happens this way, that I get still and ease into what I think of as that other world, the one which is synonymous with this presence we think of as God. Yes, for me the fabric of time ripples because often I am transported to other places in my mind. Often, they are memories of other times when I was younger, as in the sudden memory of my experience of Y-12 in Oak Ridge. But nearly always, when I am drawn into that other time through this stillness that comes, there are ideas that rise gently within me. Ideas that usually have something to do with who we are and what we are becoming.

                Sometimes it isn’t so much an idea as it is a sense, an intimation where I feel as though there is something elusive there, just beyond my present ability to capture it. And I understand that here, as I feel drawn intimately into this other measure of the world that surrounds us, is God. We do sense some glimmers of this other world and we on some level understand that there is much that eludes us and yet it calls in some long, timeless fashion. It is one of the universal experiences that defines our species. We know this when we read literature, much of it dating back the earliest times when our species learned to write. And some of these stories are transcribed from oral traditions which have their origins even farther back in time.

                And I suppose this is the idea for today, for this particular moment in my living, breathing, nibbling at fingers. Oh, yes, I suspect I will nibble at them today because I just now used the sliver clippers to carefully trim my fingernails. Each one is curved, like the crescent moon. Except that each one of my fingernails has that solemn, human signature. These are among the many parts of ourselves that we take for granted. We do not see them, in a way. Just as I trimmed my nails, allowing each to fall onto the little notebook I use to track expenses. Each one fell into the middle, the little runnel between the left-hand and right-hand page. And I was aware of a slight, nearly imperceptible sense of satisfaction at seeing them there before I rolled down the window and upended the little notebook, allowing them to tumble out into the dark, rough lot where my car is parked.

                We are strange, contradictory creatures, held captive in physical bodies which grow and shed and replicate themselves many times as cells regenerate and fingernails slowly grow, as does the strange, silky hair on our bodies. But lifted within, quietly residing, gently and innocent and vulnerable are these spirits, these souls as we call them. And it is the human spirit, the soul, that is the essence, the reality, of who we are, though we are confused and have yet to understand who we are. We have yet to understand who we are in relation to God, and to do so is the great challenge that spreads out before us as we move ever nearer to our unseen destiny out there in what we refer to as the future.

                May God have mercy on these nimble, stubborn spirits, each one precious and created by him. May he help us to understand at long last who we are and the purpose for which we were created, long anticipated and much thought about. The suspense is palpable to the many who in the stillness wait to see what we will become, and whether it is even possible for us to finally be what we were created to be.

I have experienced him as the very essence of Time, stretched across the planet, moving in stillness and brooding, reverberating power, deep in thought and plans for what we are yet to become.

                 Sometimes I sit and nibble my fingers, which is I suppose one of the behaviors some of us humans have when we are anxious and in the midst of something that seems overwhelming. We do worry a lot, though the Bible challenges us not to.  

                I do, though. And since I can remember, even when I was in fifth grade, I would look at my fingers and be distantly surprised at the white ridges of skin near the edges of my fingernails, where I had gnawed the skin. Surely I am not an animal, and yet in one sense I am a creature with similar unconscious behaviors. And the only reason I mention this is that it is sometimes a constructive thing to step back and look at ourselves as we are. I mean, we can never see ourselves completely as we are, as Scottish poet Bobby Burns wrote hundreds of years ago. I remember sitting in my high school English class listening to one of my teachers read that poem. I think it was Mr. Cain, who was a big black man with a passion for literature and teaching. In nineteen sixty-seven, it was really unusual to have a black teacher in a high school in East Tennessee. This was before desegregation, and there was terrible racial bias.

                I remember sitting in the barber’s chair feeling small and insignificant. I was fourteen years-old, and one of the men waiting his turn looked at me and said, “You, boy. You wouldn’t want to go to school with them. Right?”

                I choked out some reply. In truth, I didn’t know. I had no particular feelings either way. But I did feel the weight of that simmering hatred percolating just beneath the surface at the time. 

                But more recently, just a few moments ago, I nibbled the skin just above the thumbnail and worried about what I am attempting to write. Since I was in my late teens, I have felt God calling me to write this so that I have spent most of my adult life struggling to grasp how to translate this powerful sense of God and God’s Time I have felt. Nearly always it has been there like a powerful, reverberating heart beating deep within me.

                I have decided to capitalize the first letter in the word—Time—because it is far more than what we humans usually refer to when we mention it. We often simply track the time of day, and are constantly focused on our attempts to accomplish the overwhelming challenges we daily face within the limited bits of time we have.

                But with God, there is Time, which is the powerful, beating flow of years across the vastness of all there is or has been or ever will be. And I sense an awareness of this in the Holy Bible. The ferocity and power of the reality of this presence is often wrapped in the sheer magnanimity of his presence in the Universe that he created.

                               

                So what I have felt reverberating within me is not different from what so many have felt and sought to describe for many thousands of years. But how does one put into words the depth and implications? No wonder I nibble my fingers and thumbs. Just the challenge of this, and the nervous realization that some might not understand that I am a product of the Church and an extension of all we attempt to convey of God’s presence and everlasting power when we attempt to convey the truth of the Bible year after year.

                I do feel, however, that our challenge as we head into the future is to find new ways of expressing these essential truths regarding God. In order to be relevant to an audience that is changing more rapidly than perhaps at any other time in history, we must somehow find ways to convey the ferocity, the awe, and the majesty of God and our relation to him. We must find new words to bring to life for them and for ourselves these same truths about an entity that will always be with us, unchanging, and yet challenging each new generation to do the work necessary to make him relevant and exciting for each new time.

                If there is anywhere we have failed as a species, as a culture of humans, it is here. We have not done the work necessary to translate these truths which are our inheritance through the experience of our forebearers—most notably through the example of those in the Holy Bible. Perhaps, though, this understanding can only come through a personal connection with God. After all, isn’t that ultimately what the Bible—especially the New Testament—is urging?

                Our main failing may be that we have not done enough to emphasize this personal relationship. I certainly find nothing much about the personal relationship within my Protestant tradition. We refer to it often as a wonderful possibility and as something to strive for. But as far as I can see, there is little or nothing about how this is achieved, other than to advise people to pray and read the Bible. As a culture, our modern arts and literature fall far short of what geniuses of the arts achieved hundreds of years ago. 

                My writing is an attempt to begin a conversation which takes us nearer to the personal relationship and what we may sense when we connect with God. I do not pretend to be some expert, other than to note that I have been focused for many decades on coming nearer to God through a personal relationship. Though any of us can be saved instantly through the Holy Spirit, developing an ever more immediate relationship with God takes time, focus, and practice. We never get to the end of where this can lead us. 

                My writing is, in the final analysis, an effort to describe God and God’s time as I have experienced it in the hopes that doing so may help us begin the process of making God relevant for a culture that appears to have lost any sense of God’s reality or of the certainty that we cannot survive without him.

The most crucial question: who are we, and what are we becoming?

                 Let’s begin with the question of who are we? For example, when I insist that we have never understood who we are much less who we are in relation to this entity we call God, what do I mean?

                That is a good question. And in some sense I feel as though I am back in Civil Procedure at the University of Tennessee College of Law. I often felt like an imposter, sitting there in one of the wooden desks, surrounded by others who were, for the most part, brighter than me in this area. Many of them had been raised in law cultures. Either their parents were attorneys or they already had minds just ready to latch onto legal concepts, as though they were sticky flypaper and the ideas just stuck and they were somehow adept at building legal arguments.

                I, on the other hand, struggled with these skills of legal analysis. At least I assume that I did, since my professors generally rated me very average on the tests. Most of the time, the grade for the entire semester rested on a single test. I’ve never done my best under such conditions. I would have been much better off if law school were more of a hands-on curriculum where I was actually performing legal tasks but beginning in a limited way with increased responsibilities as I gradually grew.

                But as to how the law school odyssey relates to my ideas about who we are in relation to God, the answer begins with what has always been for me an absolute certainty that anyone who believes can have a relationship with God. Furthermore, God will direct us. I applied to law school when I was forty entirely because I was convinced that God was leading me there. And I applied despite my feeling unprepared for the experience.

                And it is this sense of God’s presence, the intimacy and warmth of that presence that is another part of what I feel God has prepared me to describe. Since I was a young child, I was aware of it in the very air. How does one relate such things? And what does that have to do with who we are in relation to God and what we are becoming?

                Everything, really. It has so much to do with it and for so many reasons. The first one is so ominous and overpowering. It is this reality we speak of in church but never really develop. I was always anticipating more to be done with it, since the certainty of a relationship with this presence is huge. It is ominous and in a sense it is threatening to us. And the arrival of this presence reminds me of the silent, yet powerful building of a storm front which appears at first nearly imperceptibly on the horizon. At first it is nearly imperceptible, and yet it builds. Sometimes it is like that. It is how it seems to me as I am somewhere alone and I feel that presence begin to build.

                And yet the fact that it builds sometimes and is such a powerful thing does not imply that at other times the presence is not there. This presence we call God is there always, in every moment of every day. Sometimes it builds, though. It comes gently yet with an impending, pent up potential and I understand that it will build ominously like a weather front, a system that wraps me, surrounds me, infuses me with the warmth and sense of regeneration, hope, and inspiration that inspires. There were many times in my law school ordeal that this happened, and in the midst of such experience it is impossible to balk or give up.

                And when I suggest that there is much he has given me to say and explore, I suggest that it begins here with this reality and with all the ideas that percolate within the possibilities and the experience of this presence. The first among the many assertions I will make and attempt to develop lies here, in the predicament we are in. Yes, we are in a predicament. The human species is. We scarcely understand who we are and in this moment of our history we have lost any sense we may ever have had of who we are in relation to this One, this singular presence that has stalked us since our beginnings, though stalk might seem a strange word when used in relation to God. It is true in the sense that God has been relentless and patient with us. What we may not realize is that it is for a purpose, for it is what we are becoming that is so crucial. We are blind to it, and we are impertinent in our present attitude. Of course there have been many times through our tempestuous history when we have been such rascals. Such recalcitrant children who are arrogant brats prancing foolishly across the planet he has put here to be our home for the present.

                But yes, it is true that I claim to have lived my life to this point under his tutelage, being prepared to deliver these ideas about who we are and what it is we are becoming. This blog is me stretching, preparing the material which will become the first of a series of volumes in which I work through these ideas and describe the experience of learning to work with God. It hasn’t been easy and has required tremendous faith, as such challenges always do for those who seek to answer him and follow.

                I have no idea whether there will be many who are curious to read this. However, there is a tremendous sense of fulfillment in arriving at the time when I am ready to write down the ideas that have been restless and growing, thumping and jostling within me since I was a young man. As always, God has his timing. Often the most difficult thing we are challenged to do is to wait on him, to persevere through great difficulty and travail in faith and determination not to give up.

            A question we must answer: Why would a person of intellect and awareness want to submit to the will of another, even if that other is God?

              Sometimes I am relaxing, fiddling with the smartphone settings and tinkering with various instructions I am inputting to one device or another. These are some of the tasks that define us now. Who could have imagined this even a few decades ago? And who could have imagined that our children would have in their eager, delicate fingers the quick, decisive taps and swipes that bring smartphones to life and enable them to access information or perform feats that require the cooperation of all these many computers linked through the Internet?

I was watching on the five-inch screen of my smartphone the Disney movie Saving Mr. Banks the other day. It is about the making of Mary Poppins, focusing on how Walt Disney had to lure its author to California and persuade her to sign over the rights. And during the process, we see the creative process. Watching the movie, I remembered where I was during those years when Disney made films I would watch at the Mannering theater in  downtown Middlesboro, Kentucky, mesmerized by the lovely Haley Mills in Parent Trap, which was produced a decade or so before Mary Poppins.

                But the reason Saving Mr. Banks engrossed me was that it includes  an inside look at the Disney studios, what it was like for the creative guys who wrote the music and created the story boards, reading through the script as it evolved. I remember the hurting, yearning place inside me as I would careen down the sidewalk which paralleled  Boomway Hill in Middlesboro on roller skates, feeling the rough vibration rattle up through the long bones in my legs.

                I yearned to somehow be part of the Disney movie experience, and some of my most elaborate daydreams involved me there. I could not imagine it accurately because I didn’t know what the studios looked like, way out there in California. But I felt that yearning. And I suppose this yearning, this intensity of desire for something, is a common experience. Some of us are able to attain our dreams, and others not. Human history is filled with the excruciating pain of being denied. There are the ones who have been abused, crushed, their lives crippled or snuffed by cruel individuals, whether these be powerful rulers, governments, or simply societal rules. For others, the responsibilities and perplexities of life interfere with our attainment of dreams.

                But one question regarding our search for God involves what the Bible speaks of as God’s will for us. That is something that haunts me. It was one of my earliest concerns. I wanted to know what God had planned for me. Standing outside on the crooked sidewalk slab, the concrete slab pushed up by the roots of one of the giant Maples that dappled Dorchester Avenue with their friendly presence. Or perhaps I might more accurately say it was the sunlight that dappled, sifting through leaves and gray branches.

                The ambiance, the warm shadows and silty scents of the outside world in these fertile neighborhoods calmed me and were responsible for the sense of pleasure, of contentedness I often had. Just to be there, to walk outside in the morning and feel the chilly air, the softness of its touch and how it spread over all there was, and I would in the afternoon lean against one of the trees and wonder about the world, and what it might mean to walk in the stillness within the measure of this presence, filled with the warmth and touch of what it was to have the sense of him.

              Such an understanding of a world in which this presence is all and in which the only true meaning and satisfaction and fulfillment is within the experience of God is not easy to find. It is nearly always the product of hard experience, and many never find it. In our time, perhaps most never fully understand this, even when they spend much time in church trying to glean some connection with the words and rituals there, developed over centuries and millennia. We know if we are honest that many find no relevance in church and feel somehow bereft of the fiery germination of the spirit which is excited and eager to move out upon this adventure with the one we so awkwardly name God.

                This does return us to the fundamental question. Who are we in this life, this earthly world? And most particularly, who are we in relation to this presence? And what is it that we are becoming?

Such are the questions that have scratched at me, like a persistent creature scratching at the door, wanting in. And I have spent my life trying to coax it to sit upon my spirit and help me understand what all of this is about, and who we are, and where it is we are going.

Chapter Four

          It is another day, and it reminds me of a ritual.

            Yesterday, I was trying to figure that out. Is ritual the word I am searching for? Is that it? I am not sure, but it seems likely. I was searching for something which includes the idea that we cycle through seasons and events. Part of what seems always in the vicinity of human culture is our need for ritual. There are the seasons that trundle by in every year. And within this I am aware of them slowly moving. Or perhaps it is not them. They are not necessarily moving. It is simply my perception. We see them moving as though we are stationary and they come in this steady, predictable clockwork.

            There are calendars, and we turn the leaves, the pages of these attempts to account for time that passes. Sometimes we find some old calendar upstairs in the attic or caught and forgotten in a file. And just looking at the calendar there, a strange feeling washes over us, because in a moment of near clarity we see it more clearly. And it feels a bit odd to suddenly catch a whiff of this other time and see in a moment just a hint of what we are, trapped within our perceptions of what is.

            But we move through the year, and collectively all of us participate in this acknowledgment of the seasons, the significant parts of the year with events and holidays. And the news media dutifully put together stories which show the event as it happens in one part of the country or another. One of the big ones is New Year’s Day, when we –nearly every one of us--come together in some form of mass participation in the new year, with a steady rising toward midnight when the lighted ball will drop in Times Square and couples will kiss and there is the sense we have of something significant in all of this we can’t quite understand.

            For me, though, there is always nearby, lurking like an important shadow or truth, the imminent idea of who we are and where we are going. This is an idea we each of us are aware of, though we have not learned yet to acknowledge it or put it into words. I study the trunk of the tree that stands poised and still near me now as music swells around me from the speakers tucked discreetly into the doorframes of my vehicle, my car.  And I am parked near it, near this tree, which at the moment has leaves turned to oranges and yellows, so that yes, we know that it is autumn. And one thing it recalls is when I was much younger, settled in the classroom, one of dozens of fifth graders. I remember the smell, the scent, the aroma of these other kids, some of them unwashed and not realizing it. They smelled of stale, old sweat and skin and yet it was just part of the time, a part of the classroom experience we would accept.

            In that room, in the autumn, we would have our crayons and the mimeographed sheets of paper with purple lines. Have you smelled mimeographed sheets? So high and sweet, a little like ether but not so strong, though it would make my head feel light to take a deep breath of damp papers that were fresh from the mimeograph machine. And we would color the leaves in yellows, oranges, dark browns and speckled pigments and think of dusky evenings when the air turned cool and chill, and there were slow leaf fires that burned and released into the oncoming night the fragrance, low and sweetly smoky.

            And the little neighborhood animals sneaked around, nearly hiding, intent upon finding something nearby that they could track with some primal, heightened sense of smell in their muzzles, even in the night of what we believe is part of modern time, drawing upon things. These primal things mustered in the air and quivering in their chromosomes and DNA, hidden and yet suggestive of the invisible, powerful time that surrounds us that we seldom pause to think about or acknowledge. Just as this tree right there near, at the edge of this parking lot. There are some answers to who we are and what we have been, what we are becoming, in such subtle clues.

            And lurking nearby is this presence that is always there, stitched into the very molecules of the air we breathe. It is part of the fiber and cellular structure of that tree, even defining the ridges in its bark and the patterns, the pigments presented in the leaves and in their quiet, incredible patterns, or in the graceful tilt as each leans from its stem and trembles upon the invisible autumn breezes, inspired by a steady, nearly invisible shower of energy from the sunlight that spills into our world. It has lit each molecule in the air, crept across each follicle of hair on every living mammal, including us humans, or absorbed in cells of all creatures, of each organism, even molecules scurrying in their microscopic water world, sliding along the scales of fish there and settling in gaseous crevices somewhere down below.

            But this should remind us that there is much about the holy Bible that we still don’t notice or comprehend. This simple statement that is there, for example It is the statement that says, I am with you always. Perhaps it means more, far more than we have usually credited. When God releases these simple words into the world through the utterances of prophets and words recorded in the pages of that seminal book sitting over there on the mantel or on a shelf somewhere, perhaps these words imply much that we have largely ignored. And here I refer to the idea that God is literally spun into every fiber of every plant, creature, organism and even into every inanimate part of our world.

            Furthermore, when it is stated in Genesis--that first amazing biblical book—that God created the Universe and everything there, it is no wonder that the signature of this entity we refer to as God is stitched into every fiber of every atom, every particle, both the visible and the invisible. Everything here and beyond contains the signature of this entity. And we should understand that when God says, I am with you always, even to the end of the world, that is quite literally true.

            And it suggests that the ones among us who doubt the existence of God are in the ridiculous position of doubting his existence when in fact this entity we refer to as God is in every beat of the heart and even in each lung-full of the air we breathe. Earth, planets, all the Universe literally effervesce with the substance of this presence, so that we, the ones who inhabit this Earth with our rituals and our ignorance are in a spiritual Dark Ages nearly unprecedented in human history. Even the ones we think of as primitives in the ancient past acknowledged that there are hidden worlds we cannot see with physical eyes. And they were searching diligently for this something they knew is there.

            It is time we begin to awaken from our torpor, our terrible, long sleep, and begin again our halting trek toward understanding at long last who we are and what we were created to be. This is something we have not figured out in all our miserable time upon this Earth. Mostly we have thumbed our noses at God and existed in a predictable ritual of our own selfish insistence on what the world should be.

            But something is about to happen.

            God never allows us recalcitrant humans to sleep for long without some shock to knock us from the towers we build in our folly and stubborn insistence that we will do it all ourselves, separate from God. And yet we must learn repeatedly through our history that we simply cannot exist independently of the One who breathed into us and set us here upon this planet. Even something in this tree nearby understands, though we do not. And yet we are about to be jolted from this stupor we are in so that we can begin to gather ourselves for the trek toward becoming what it is we were created to be.

Chapter Three

There is a common bond we all share through this presence which is God. No matter what the time or where we are, we are linked, and it transcends any of our human concerns that we fret about and believe are of such imminent importance.


          Today, after a life journey that has equipped me to be at least to some extent a scientist and a particular kind of archaeologist, I would like to settle back and sift through these sensations, these feelings, this constant sense of something else, so near and just beyond our grasp. I am not a scientist by training, but it is in the spirit of scientific curiosity that I settle in now to examine these feelings, this awareness, and track them as nearly as I can to their source. Along the way I will suggest what all of this implies for who we are and what we are becoming, unbeknownst to ourselves. Surely we are in a spiritual Dark Ages and must now consider how this has happened and how we might reconnect with the excitement once evident in this elusive, frightening area that slices into the most intimate substance of what we have been and are becoming.

            Since my youth, I have felt this stirring within me. As I stood beside my Ford Fairlane on some of those nights long ago, standing there in the driveway, I would look up at the stars and feel this quiet descend upon me as though I were being visited by something, and I knew it was this presence and I knew there was something being stirred within me, that this spirit was sitting upon me and moving within me. One of the thoughts I was beginning to have is that we are creatures not unlike those poor hosts in Aliens--that science fiction movie starring Sigourney Weaver in which people became hosts for alien creatures gestating within them.

                 In many ways we feel a terror regarding our spiritual being. It may be that some portion of human reluctance to really grapple with God and allow this spirit that is God to take root within us and grow is that we are scared. After all, God is so far beyond our ability to fathom the incredible depths and implications of this Creator that he is in a sense alien. This is especially true since we have never really understood this presence, this entity. We are like stubborn adolescents pouting and rebelling.

            Is it not true, though, that we are hosts for this spirit that is God within us? We might even say that we are toddlers, infants, in our understanding. We are in a Dark Ages of understanding. Really. We are. And there is something that frightens us badly, something we feel bump, stir, in these places we have scarcely acknowledged within us. So as I stood beside my car and let this presence spin down and within me, I lifted my face toward the heavens, felt that familiar awe and yearning toward the constellations and all the secret, unknown future they imply. And I breathed, longing for a future I felt I was being called toward, when I would possibly begin to explore and communicate in words what we—every one of us—sense at some time or another.


          But what is it like to have an intimate relationship with this presence we so awkwardly call God? There are many ways to discuss it, this feeling. And I would have to concede that it is not a frightening experience. I would like it to be somehow dramatic, the way it is usually imagined in the cinema. We sit in neat rows, all of us becoming shadows, nearly like mannequins in that our focus is transferred from ourselves to the the experience of what has crept across the screen, a watercolor wash, liquid and full of shadow and dusky light when something ominous is evoked. It is augmented by tremendous sound thrummed from hidden speakers and we experience something larger than ourselves.

           In this context we seem to understand that the concept of this presence requires something that suggests the unknown, and fear lurks nearby, breathing in that deep, regular way that reminds us of our own mortality and scares us even more because it reminds us of the frail, vulnerable organisms we are, subject to debilitating disease or subject to some violence that may maim or kill. Barring some disease, our fragile biological forms are destined to shrivel, weaken, and ultimately to disintegrate. Come what may, death is inevitable.

          Perhaps, then, our association of this presence with the ominous and the dark is more about the fears we have, and the reality of a relationship with this presence is more about calm and the certainty that--regardless of our fears--we will be okay. A relationship with this presence ultimately removes fear of death. Or at the least it provides a new perspective that helps us see the world and our place in it from a new perspective.

          My ideas regarding this presence, the living God, have clung to me for decades. Begun long ago as one of those unconscious glimmers, it is something deeply interred within me, like a tickle. It is the understanding that we must find a way to ease forward and learn to consider more of what the Bible emphasizes concerning the living reality of this presence that is with us here in every moment, in our very breathing and interaction across this incredible planet, this Earth, which he has created for us to begin our first steps upon.

          I began to sense him as a young child, and when I grew into my twenties and thirties, I felt it powerfully as a need, an awareness that there was something I was supposed to find and develop, ideas concerning who we are in relation to this entity, this presence. I could not have expressed it then. It has taken many years, nearly four decades, for me to learn how to put into words this powerful interaction with the one who has birthed us here and who is preparing to bump us toward new challenges, now that we are nearly ready. Even now I feel inadequate to the task.

          If I had my way, I would  just ease back and enjoy what must surely be the final decades of my life. I am not a young man--sixty-five years old as I write this. I can only breathe and consider that I will definitely continue to grow older, and I would just as soon ease back and let the years drift by like beautiful winds, the pastel hues of the sky, the calm of a day's end when we experience the sensation of work well done or of a time when rest is well earned.

          Sometimes, as I sit in my chair and breathe, as I feel so content to just relax and ease into this other time, I wish I could be left to enjoy another dimension this presence has allowed me to understand and to live within. I'd like to ease back and let it surround me. Trouble is that God won't allow it. I have been prepared for this and now it is irrelevant to this presence that I am sixty-five and have advancing age ahead of me. I understand that I must convey what I have experienced and begin a conversation about who we are in relation to this presence, to what we are becoming, and to what is surely directly ahead as we contemplate events of what is now the twenty-first century.

       

Chapter Two

            It is like a stepping sideways into this other world that is there. And this entity we have named God is there, always. He is always with us, though often we do not see.

I have for many decades had this strong sense that there is another world near our own. I am bothered by the constant sense of this other world. And I’m not sure bothered is the best word. That word implies something negative. But perhaps it is more like being pestered. And sometimes it is not a negative thing to be pestered. No, it is sometimes simply an idea, a nagging idea that, if we live with it, embrace it, might bloom into something stupendous. So yes, it does make us uneasy to be pestered by this nagging sense of something –one of those things I can’t quite put my finger on.

            I experienced another curious pull early this morning as I finally arrived in Baileyton after a long shift at Titanic Museum Attraction in Pigeon Forge. I glimpsed to my left a large image of the moon. Well, it was more than an image. It was the very thing, this satellite that has always been there in the sky. Nearly every night it is there to see. Even in cloudy skies it is there, just beyond our grasp, And last night it drew that itch, that terrible longing within me.  All of us have felt this to some degree or another, though it is simply accepted without much thought by most. I suppose the idea, the way we have of dealing with it, is to accept it as some draw toward ephemeral things we sense when we take the time and long for. But we have learned largely to ignore because the culture teaches that such things are for dreamers and children. I mean, the unspoken message is that if we do more than pause occasionally to shake our heads in secret awe and longing—if we do more than that, we have tiptoed toward the slack-jawed, perhaps the eccentric. It depends on the degree of our being drawn and the constancy of our attention. But we have our children and in them we allow what human expression of awe and imagination to manifest for a while. During their formative years, we smile and nod, knowing it is a signature of the child, a swing toward imagination and exploration that is part of growing up through stages but will be naturally erased, gradually it will diminish in adulthood.

            But I suppose I am a slack-jawed fool.

            That does not mean that I have stayed in childhood. But it seems that those of us who insist on pursuing this presence and really, genuinely reaching toward it, well. That is one of many reasons we are seen as fools, isn’t it? We refuse to accept the objective, mature understanding achieved by those who are wise enough and mature enough to grimly go forward without what is suspected to be a need for companionship –many refer to this as a crutch. And thus we who pine for this presence and live in the midst of it, searching and pondering issues of faith and struggling to measure the unseen—we are privately, quietly held at arm’s length, the way someone might hold a noxious toad or a poisonous reptile.

            I do, though, confess this, that I am one of the ones, the strange ones who insist that there is something else and it is quite near. I do believe absolutely in this theme echoed in the Holy Bible. Again and again there is this litany, this phrase uttered by God. I am with you. It is a way of saying I am right there, very near. And yes, that is what I am attempting to describe. Perhaps I am attempting to describe evidence that surrounds us that God is here, except that I prefer to say this presence is with us, right here in every moment, surrounding us in the very air and lit in some subtle way, the wash of light itself and the effervescing, primal shape of light within the atmosphere, spinning and crawling with energy and life. We are here, recipients of all of this and I am convinced, bothered, pestered by the constant tiny scratches, like a cat quietly yet insistently scratching at the lintel of the door, asking to come in.

            Of course that suggests another image put forth by the Church. Perhaps it is simply another way of suggesting this very thought, that God is near, always, and pestering us to enter. The image put before us in church, based on the words of Jesus himself. Behold, I stand at the door and knock.

            And this is true. This presence, this entity that has stalked us since before we were even here in our present form, is always there and is for some reason we do not understand intensely scrabbling at the door. When I am pestered, in the midst of effervescing sunlight or transfixed by the image of the moon, full and so elusive in the night sky, I have no doubt that is the rub, the scratches, the tapping of this presence. And it is a difficult though exciting task to accept the challenge of learning to be aware of this presence and especially to follow, to allow it to edge within, to come near in every moment of each new day in time and imprint us. And it is my experience that, sooner or later, the challenges and implications of this presence and our relationship to it will scare us.

            There is an expression—to scare the socks off someone. If a bit contemporary and informal, it is nevertheless an accurate statement of what this presence will do. And yet it leads us to explosions which trample the habitual, limited thought and perspective we humans have hammered out over centuries and millennia. And this book, this first small volume in what I expect will be a series, this book begins to explore who we are from a new perspective, and especially begins to probe who we are in relation to this entity, and where it is we are headed.

Chapter One

In the darkness of the night, it is ravenous, and we are aware. On some level we know everything.

The birds come tenderly, with their little jerking motions and turn their heads to study us. And we believe they have no clue as to who we are or what is important in the world. In the darkness, when what we refer to as light is gone and we have lit the air with our own light, with our inventions there in the moments, it is necessary to ease back and let it come, much the same as when my dad taught me to relax in the water. I remember how difficult that was, knowing with this deep terror within me that the water might drown me. I had choked on it before, felt the awful spasms my body did trying to free itself.

            There are some things in the world. So many things that are in the world near us. And we have the night that comes tenderly. It really does. There is a tenderness there. And when you allow yourself to ease into it, yes. There it is, even in the softness of the cat’s fur when it comes with that wickedly slinky movement that has the breath, the subtle movement in the air. And isn’t it true that we ignore these gentle reminders? Is gentle the word? Something casually there, nearby. Right there in the liquid glimmer, the softness of color, the deep green of the summer foliage that has crept up so quietly from the earth again, having crept as it always does, sprung with power and determination from the earth into our time. It brings more scratches, more of the barest taps upon the fragrant, sensitive bones in our bodies and upon the intricacies of nerve and connections, the synapses within the devastatingly complex intricacies of what we have named our brains, which scare us. The raw, pungent slap of despair of that cold understanding of something savage, raw, and unsettling.

            And in the impertinent whining of a gnat or mosquito as it hovers near, drawn to our sweat, what my grandmother called perspiration because she said it was nicer to say that. She thought of the word sweat as crude and awkward, not very nice.

            In the silt scattered near the woodsy areas, in the wetness and the damp that collects in them, in the woods, as night has crept down and these subtle, nearly invisible breaths of air and mist have clung as unseen shadow, we work very hard to distance ourselves from it. We would flee all of it, each curved and quiet breath of cold grass blade and the slow effervescing interchange of oxygen and gasses seeping cold and weird upon the complexity of this insurgency, this tenacity of life that grips the earth with fibrous, stringy fingers evolving through the many years into roots capable of pulling rich nutrients from the soil.

            So what is my point?

            It has something to do with who we are and what we are becoming. And it seems that we must begin to get quiet and let go of our tenacious hold on the reality we have created for ourselves. When we speak of this presence, we have to come at it here in this sense, where we learn to let go our fierce grip. I know it sounds strange sometimes. And I have fears about it. I mean, I am here even now, looking up toward the top of this one tree. And I just have the sense that in the edges, the quiet presence of these things that surround us, we have answers to so many questions. And one of the grandest is about this presence we call God.

In the beginning, when it was mostly just this life on the planet, before the humans arrived, this same world was here. And it was not the empty place we might imagine. I believe, when I sit here and lean back, remembering the wash of the sea, the thrum and rumble of the sea, I can nearly sense it. I have this hunch, this push to explore this. For if we really would embrace this presence and begin to grow, we have to backtrack. It is not that we become somehow primitives, or ignorant. It is more that we learn again what we have forgotten, which is how to be still, and allow this stillness to wash over us.

In my experience of this entity, there were seldom cymbals crashing, the way they did when my grandmother, Nana, took me to one of the high school football games when I was maybe four and I was fascinated by the flat, bronze-colored disks that would make such a reverberating noise as what must have been a high school kid whacked them together, bringing each hand in a quick, graceful collision and releasing that thrashing, splashing eruption of brassy sound that escaped to roll cross the dampness of the autumn high school Friday night, and these high school students in their limp band uniforms became symbols of the primal pull within us that causes us to assemble in the night for contests played upon a field, and then—led by these beating, thumping drums, horns, and trumpets, we cheer and urge on the violence and performances upon the field.

            And we wonder who we are, supposing that we have come far upon the road toward sophistication. And yet we must somehow remember who it is we have been, and how even now at this far-flung moment in time, surrounded by our technology of which we are excited and proud—we must backtrack and find ourselves, explore ourselves, and concede that in many ways we have not come far at all. And we must learn anew to associate with this entity, this presence which has hovered over all the earth, protectively and patiently, since before we were here in our present form, waiting and still, anticipating the explosions that will propel us out into the universe prepared for us and waiting.

Preface

Since I was a child—a very young child—I have been aware of something that was there with me. It begins with a sense of quiet. This presence grips me, and it has the resonance of something primal.

            I remember it coming early in my life, when I was a young child, lying flat on my back, mostly naked, the expanse of my naked skin fascinating as I was aware of my arms, wrists, and supple skin as I lay there. I brought my leg up, my foot a shadow hovering just above me. Then I slowly drew it down, down as the tendons in my hips, very elastic at that age, stretched with a supple warmth and allowed me to bring my foot to within inches of my eyes, nose, and teeth. I then would nibble the callous on my big toe, not quite certain why I was doing that, just as I could never understand why I wandered in the scruffy woods at the edge of our yard and rubbed the bark of trees, nibbling little green shoots of plants. One time I sucked the green, curved stem of a yellow dandelion and was abruptly shocked by the wild bitterness of the sap that exploded its taste along my tongue.

            And amidst all of this, I felt a restless, deepening understanding of a presence which was surrounding me in every moment. When I was lying there on the wooden floor in my room in the soft, liquid shadows of early morning, I could feel something, and I wondered in one part of my mind, birds chirping in the trees just outside the open window and insects beginning to flutter against the wire screen that covered the window, and sweet, cool morning mountain air seeping in, heavy and spilling along the floor as though it, too, were alive and real. And in it all, whether it was the larvae I would find white and bloated under the flat rocks I felt compelled to prize up from the damp earth, or the wild moths with spiraled antennae poking from heads that I sometimes wickedly killed and ran over with the rubber wheels of tricycle or toy tractor, I was aware of this presence. And as a child, as I began to be aware of it, the way a person is slowly aware of something nearby, something seen unconsciously with peripheral vision, just at the edge, something we sense more than see, I became accustomed to it and was mildly curious.

             As I grew older, I began a long, slow journey which would ultimately bring me near, as though suddenly kneeling in the grass and looking up, would find myself so near. I could feel its warm breath flowing across my neck and shoulders, spilling into me and rubbing me vigorously inside, waking me up to possibilities. I was curious, and nearly always it is an experience of transcending time.

            Well, this first small volume is intended to begin a transformation that is long overdue even as it is an indictment of all, for we the impertinent ones of this era, are beyond outrageous in our relation to this entity, this presence which has stalked us since the beginning and does so even today. We are on the edge of a precipice from which there is no alternative but to jump, and this presence is preparing to push us off with the loving attention of a mother bird nudging her fledgling offspring when they are ready to fly. It is simply a necessary step, though fraught with danger and fear. We are its offspring, and the focus of a great anticipation in the universe.

I have always been plagued by this hunch, this inner knowledge that once there was more in the human experience of the world. Once upon a time, we knew more. There was more that we intuitively understood. We surfed with this presence, this entity. Once we did and now we have lost what we once most definitely had. But yes, from my earliest memories I was aware of something.

            I grew up in a world very different from the one we are in now. In that world, I was surrounded by people who were aware of this presence. Of course for me in those formative years, this focus was on the Church and Christianity. Through family, community, and even the nation, I was submerged in the Protestant church and its understanding of this entity we refer to as God.

            But in retrospect, glimpsing my life and my experience of this presence from the perspective of years, I believe my experience of this presence transcended what we allow is normal in today’s protestant experience of God. And yet I credit the Church and family and teachers with guiding me toward what eventually became a deep and abiding relationship with this presence. In the beginning, yes it was family, the Church, and teachers who guided me and spoke of this presence that, if we allowed, would transform our lives and guide us as it did so.

            But as I have travelled with this presence as guide, I sensed hidden aspects of all parts of the world, and I have been especially fascinated with the lingering suspicion, always near, that there is an entire world we simply do not see.

            The experience of this presence nearly always involves a sense of movement in time, or in what we would call time. It is as though the presence comes and lifts me and carries me along—a rangy tiger filled with quiet power. I sense that power and feel little prickles rising along my spine as it strides, its body lithe and comfortable, flowing with this impenetrable grace which itself transcends the present time.

            I realize this may seem strange, demented, and outrageous. I can only invite you to read. Let any who have the courage and minds mature, able to consider ideas even when they seem far outside the box. Read on at your peril, though, for the ideas here may shatter the delicate crystal barriers so carefully and deliberately put in place by our species, our culture, as we have attempted to wrest control ourselves, even flaunting this presence.

            And yet it is time we yield, taking a huge breath in anticipation of the breathtakingly wild fall that awaits us as we are nudged and then pushed. It is time that we begin to awaken.