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.