It's the God Thing #3

Hello again. I've been sniffling and snorting for the past two weeks, so haven't gotten down to writing more on my faith journey. But--mirabile dictu!--the cold is almost gone, and I am thinking again about the early parts of my journey, and God's journey through me.

I recently bought Barbara Brown Taylor's newest book, An Altar in the World, a Geography of Faith. She speaks of her relationship with nature and how, when she was young, she knew that "the whole world was God's house." Not just a church. Not just a temple. Not something built by mankind with glorious windows, hard seats, kneelers--perhaps--and a sacred space at the front where people supposedly knowledgeable about the sacred stood.

What she says confirms my experience as a child. I did not know the word "God," and would probably have found it rather confounding and confusing. But I did know this with every particle of breath and piece of bone that was in me: when I walked out to the huge white pine behind our house and climbed the trunk, scrooging out to the feathery end of a large branch, I could lie down, face pressed into the silken, scented needles. The wind would move the branch and me up and down, up and down, and all thought dropped away. I did not think. That is the crucial part. I simply experienced the life of the tree, the wind, and my warm limbs draped over the bark. No judgments. No comparisons. Just--being.

I think that this is the world inhabited by animals, plants, and trees. The "isness" of things, if you will--the spirit that runs beneath all things and through all things. I would call it love. My younger brother, a practicing Buddhist, might simply call it--being. Or presence. My friend Paula D'Arcy would probably name this an encounter with spirit. She quotes the poet, Basho, as saying such moments give us "a glimpse of the underglimmer."

And once you have felt that "underglimmer", that river flowing through you, you are never the same, and you will search out experiences which bring you into contact with spirit again and again and again. The ironic thing is that kids live in this, they dabble their feet in it countless moments of the day. I remember sliding down the slates on our barn roof (our property used to be a chicken farm in its earlier days) with my brothers, feeling the wind in my face, hurtling towards the edge of the roof and feeling--no fear. Not an ounce. Just exhilaration at the speed, the race, the trees looming up. I remember jumping off the roof of a lower barn into the piled snow beneath, plunging into the depth of the white cold as if I were diving into the center of the world. And I was. I just didn't know it. And I certainly did not think about it.

Remember in Mary Poppins the birth of the twins, and how they saved pieces of arrowroot biscuits to feed to the starling who came to visit them, perching on the windowsill of their nursery? They talk to the bird, who clearly speaks back to them. Then--one day--the twins' sounds become babbling, pre-words, and they no longer can understand what the starling is saying. Who weeps, hiding his tears from the sarcastic Mary Poppins.

I expect that is true for all of us. We have just forgotten. And we spend our lives searching for those moments when we can talk to birds again, hear the wind inside, and feel ourselves floating on the wind of the world. If we're lucky, we might wind up like St. Francis, preaching to the birds, because he knew that each bird was just as valuable as each human being. But perhaps "luck" is not the word one would apply to such a dedicated saint.

So, what is this all about? I just want to suggest, as Taylor does, that the divine is not confined to churches, temples, tents, or tabernacles. Spirit is here every single moment of each day, surrounding us like breath. If we are lucky, we break through the barriers we have erected to feel ourselves immersed in this breath--all thought gone, all desire abandoned. Simply one with the One. And when these moments occur--and they will certainly do so if we open our hearts and our eyes--we remember. It is something we have felt before, like remembering to ride a bicycle after years without practice. The practice of the presence of the divine comes back to us, and we balance without fear, free in the embrace of the world.

It's the God Thing day #2

So you'd think that having experienced the glory of God's light at age 9, I might have thought more about this, asked some questions, maybe even read a book. Of course, they did not have the "Children's Bible" available then, with those wondrous stick figures with the ping-pong ball eyes. I would have liked the illustration where Balam's ass skids to a halt, having seen the angel in the road; of course, Balam, being the ass that HE is, doesn't see the angel. Classic confrontation between mystery and blindness.
But, no--like Mary, I "treasured these things" in my heart, because I had no one to explain them to me. And that's not a complaint! My parents, bless them, taught me to see beauty; care for the worlds' unfortunate; get angry over injustice; and work for peace. They were Christians in practice, if not in belief.
To continue the story. Can sheer beauty bring us to God? Even if you are not using the "G" word? I think it can, in its way. I continued to grow, a frizzy-haired, wide-eyed snip of a girl, desperate to be liked and to be like other girls in our rural, New England town. This was a vain wish, given my parents' radical politics and my having a mother who wore jeans (in the 50's) and read Colette. I painted pictures inside, did linoleum cuts, read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books with my mom (shivering under the comforter as she read the dramatic "The Long Winter"), and learned about the power of words. Mom pointed out the drying thistles in our overgrown field, and how graceful were the weeds against the sky. I think the word "grace" in the longer word sank into the my inner soil. She even pointed out the beauty in a dead starling, which she kept in the freezer for several weeks so that she could properly draw it. I saw nothing odd in this, although I did not know anyone else who had a dead bird in the freezer.
Things were being laid down, like stout beams under a floor: "beauty is not always what you think. Dead weeds are as beautiful as living flowers. Art has to do with more than appearances."
One other supporting beam in seeing the world infused with beauty was the constant presence of music in our house. My dad had eclectic tastes which ranged from Jazz, to Baroque Music, to Beethoven's Quartets, Debussy, Ravel, Bartok's quartets, and more. I think I drew the line at Shostakovitch and still do. At any rate, walking through our house was like being accompanied by a cloud of little notes hovering about ones shoulders.
So I grew, contained and held up by the beauty of nature and music and the love of my family. It wasn't until I reached 7th grade that I again had what I would call a clear "otherworldly" experience, or a meeting with the Divine. In the days I attended Middle School, we still had Religious Education. (Gasp! Say it ain't so!) The Catholics would go to "their" place, somewhere down the road (I had no idea I would later convert to Catholicism), and we Protestants went to the huge white church with the steeple. A collection of rather talkative, twitchy adolescents proceeded to sit down with our new minister who talked to us about the Psalms (what were THEY?) and the Lord's Prayer. (Say, what?) I memorized the Our Father, and for reasons I have never clearly understood, I began to say it at night when I got into bed. Did I need extra comfort? Had some early sexual abuse and the shock of a gun accident at age 7 made me more open to Divine comfort? I don't know. What I do know is this, and I know it as strongly as I see my fingers typing these lines: When I prayed, I felt as if a warm blanket had settled over my body. My heart expanded and felt warm. All of my body, all of my limbs were enfolded with warmth. My heart slowed.
This prayer time was almost like a secret, something I never told anyone about, as if I were somehow sneaking my dad's whiskey into my room and taking nips. I prayed. And felt an answer. And was reassured in a way so deep that to this day I can feel myself back in that bed, with the words of the Our Father floating over me, and the Father himself holding me in his arms.
I lie. I do understand it now, the impulse for this prayer. Rohr, my favorite radical Franciscan priest, has said (and St. Paul says this as well) that when we pray, the Holy Spirit is already at work in us, moving through us, praying with "sighs too deep for words." In a strange way, prayer is almost God talking to Himself/Herself--through us.
A mystery. A wonder. I was learning about God through my experience: She was in music, in the dead weeds, in the dry apple trunks, and in an invisible blanket which covered me with love each night.