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.

            A question we must answer: Why would a person of intellect and awareness want to submit to the will of another, even if that other is God?

              Sometimes I am relaxing, fiddling with the smartphone settings and tinkering with various instructions I am inputting to one device or another. These are some of the tasks that define us now. Who could have imagined this even a few decades ago? And who could have imagined that our children would have in their eager, delicate fingers the quick, decisive taps and swipes that bring smartphones to life and enable them to access information or perform feats that require the cooperation of all these many computers linked through the Internet?

I was watching on the five-inch screen of my smartphone the Disney movie Saving Mr. Banks the other day. It is about the making of Mary Poppins, focusing on how Walt Disney had to lure its author to California and persuade her to sign over the rights. And during the process, we see the creative process. Watching the movie, I remembered where I was during those years when Disney made films I would watch at the Mannering theater in  downtown Middlesboro, Kentucky, mesmerized by the lovely Haley Mills in Parent Trap, which was produced a decade or so before Mary Poppins.

                But the reason Saving Mr. Banks engrossed me was that it includes  an inside look at the Disney studios, what it was like for the creative guys who wrote the music and created the story boards, reading through the script as it evolved. I remember the hurting, yearning place inside me as I would careen down the sidewalk which paralleled  Boomway Hill in Middlesboro on roller skates, feeling the rough vibration rattle up through the long bones in my legs.

                I yearned to somehow be part of the Disney movie experience, and some of my most elaborate daydreams involved me there. I could not imagine it accurately because I didn’t know what the studios looked like, way out there in California. But I felt that yearning. And I suppose this yearning, this intensity of desire for something, is a common experience. Some of us are able to attain our dreams, and others not. Human history is filled with the excruciating pain of being denied. There are the ones who have been abused, crushed, their lives crippled or snuffed by cruel individuals, whether these be powerful rulers, governments, or simply societal rules. For others, the responsibilities and perplexities of life interfere with our attainment of dreams.

                But one question regarding our search for God involves what the Bible speaks of as God’s will for us. That is something that haunts me. It was one of my earliest concerns. I wanted to know what God had planned for me. Standing outside on the crooked sidewalk slab, the concrete slab pushed up by the roots of one of the giant Maples that dappled Dorchester Avenue with their friendly presence. Or perhaps I might more accurately say it was the sunlight that dappled, sifting through leaves and gray branches.

                The ambiance, the warm shadows and silty scents of the outside world in these fertile neighborhoods calmed me and were responsible for the sense of pleasure, of contentedness I often had. Just to be there, to walk outside in the morning and feel the chilly air, the softness of its touch and how it spread over all there was, and I would in the afternoon lean against one of the trees and wonder about the world, and what it might mean to walk in the stillness within the measure of this presence, filled with the warmth and touch of what it was to have the sense of him.

              Such an understanding of a world in which this presence is all and in which the only true meaning and satisfaction and fulfillment is within the experience of God is not easy to find. It is nearly always the product of hard experience, and many never find it. In our time, perhaps most never fully understand this, even when they spend much time in church trying to glean some connection with the words and rituals there, developed over centuries and millennia. We know if we are honest that many find no relevance in church and feel somehow bereft of the fiery germination of the spirit which is excited and eager to move out upon this adventure with the one we so awkwardly name God.

                This does return us to the fundamental question. Who are we in this life, this earthly world? And most particularly, who are we in relation to this presence? And what is it that we are becoming?

Such are the questions that have scratched at me, like a persistent creature scratching at the door, wanting in. And I have spent my life trying to coax it to sit upon my spirit and help me understand what all of this is about, and who we are, and where it is we are going.

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.