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.