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.