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.