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.