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.