"Story About God"

Once upon a time is too small to start with.

God is too big to start with.

Shall I tell you to lie back and look at the stars?
To walk through a forest after rain?
To look into your neighbor’s smiling eyes?
No, those are all clichés.

Perhaps…

Once upon all time people lived lives. And it was a daunting thing to do.
And their souls stretched out to the very edge of their reach and felt delicately around the way that a child tongues a loose tooth, and they felt, well, something, there.
And when they were scared and tired they shouted please, please, please.
And when they felt bursting with joy they shouted thank you, thank you, thank you.
And sometimes they were just quiet.

And the reaching and the something and the pleases and thank yous… and the quiet… These were the stories about God.

Maybe they were God.

"The Way Things Are"

It’s a summer night.
The kind of night when the air feels like a soft, clean sheet billowing against your skin.

A little girl darts across the lawn, chasing glowing points of light,
here, then there, then here again.

On the porch her parents sit watching her.
In icy silence they sit and drink tea from sweating glasses.
They avoid each others' eyes.

The girl comes up the steps and says “ Look, I made a lamp!”
She shows them a jar full of twigs, leaves, and glowing bugs.

Later that night the little girl’s parents will decide to forgive each other.
One of them will crack a joke.

They’ll both laugh with relief,
while in the little girl's room, fireflies die, one by one.

Awe-some

As in, full of awe.

Today I was attending a lecture by Stuart Kauffman, one of the rare scientists who, even though he doesn't believe in God, finds the Sacred in his field and in the world. He spoke of evolution and biological emergence with such contagious wonder that I swear at one point he ceased to lecture and began to preach. Here's a sentence that struck me with it's pure sense of awe:

"All that's happened the last 5,000 years is that the sun's been shining, and yet here we are, having this conversation."

Here we are indeed. Wonder-full.

An Exchange in the Elevator

Co-worker: "I feel like a mushroom these days, living in the cold, damp, dark."

Me: "At least mushrooms thrive in those conditions."

Co-worker: "True, but it's not my preferred state of being."

Me: "So you are an unwilling mushroom."

Funny how we can thrive in places where we would rather not be. We are sometimes unwilling mushrooms, you and I.

Praying my Manners

Maybe it's because the book of the same name has sold so many millions of copies, but I have always found the phrase "everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten" pretty cliche. I also think it's sort of ludicrous. But this morning I found myself on the subway reading this Gregorian chant:

Come Holy Spirit,
Bend what is rigid in me,
Melt what is frozen.

And it resonated deeply with a corner of my soul that has been struggling and fighting and scrabbling and silently screaming lately. And I found myself silently repeating this prayer over and over again. And I found myself adding, with a tinge of desperation, "Please, Please, Please."

And when I stepped off the train the sun was bright for the first time in several days, and I remembered the homeless man who had turned around to me after church the day before when tears were streaming down my face and had smiled and taken my hand and held on to it for a moment. And I added to my silent prayer, "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

I don't always know to whom I am praying. Sometimes God, sometimes Spirit of Love, sometimes an unanswering universe. But there is a part of me that reaches out, that says those three polite words I've been taught all my life, but says them with need and passion and gratitude.

Please.

Thank you.

Amen.