Since I was a kid I’ve often had the sense of being accompanied, regarded, refreshed by some kind of compassion and sweetness. It wasn’t constant, but there was somehow often and consistently this surprising inbreaking, awareness of a welcome and sacred dimension entering the scene, lighting it from within, enhanced but perfectly clear in the middle of what it meant to be human: sometimes it comes with the changing light in the morning, the rhythm of breathing, the fact of our flesh, the sad and amazing, fragile and magnificent world seen face-to-face every moment, every day. These still seem to me plausible reasons to believe in a creation made, met and mingled within a conscious and continuing act of love.
Looking back I can remember digging in my parent’s garden when I was four or five, using a water hose to create a river under a rose bush, building a dam with one gesture of my palm, feeling the warm dirt and cold water as I rebuilt the world. I can remember learning to swim under water a few years later, diving into a pool and moving from the noises of people talking, children playing, music in the background, and finding a realm of cool silence, bright with bubbles and water, refracted sunlight, moving into new dimensions of motion flying down to deeper silence or up into the noise and breath and air again.
I remember the joy of riding a bike, pumping my legs and turning corners and exploring new neighborhoods when I was ten or twelve. I remember playing tennis, shifting weight and leaning to read the court like a songsheet, responding to the rhythm of the opponent, the court, the flight of the ball, the air and light and weather, arms and legs and sweat and joy. I remember dancing and dating and exploring other people’s bodies and my own with all the intricancies and exegencies of flesh and blood. I remember realising this dance was shared with all the world — everybody could do it, had done it, might do it again, soon, and wondering why we all didn’t.
Some of the memories, images and fancies for God are ephemeral, fanciful but still powerful; others held a serious stake in my heart for a time, made life painful for years.
When I was around 5 years old, a young Italian woman who had been one of my baby-sitters was going to get married in a large wedding at the local Catholic Church. My parents thought I was too young to go to the wedding ceremony so my grandmother stayed with me in the car across the street from the red brick church and I remember looking out the window at the building wondering what was happening inside. Maybe it came from something I'd seen somewhere else, maybe a scrap of conversation overheard, but I was sure the couple would be married, ”In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Goat.” After all these years I can still see the goat clearly; clean, white, with a necklace of colored bells and all the assembled company looking at the goat with the respect one gives a to visitor from a very foreign country who carries an important message not easily understood.
One other image from a few years later stayed in the shadows and only came to light the same during a meditation excercise while in seminary in my mid-thirties. Do you remember Judge Doom in the movie, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” Tall, dark, menacing, covered with clothing from tall hat to a long overcoat and heavy rubber gloves; the one who knew all the weak points of the law, all the codicils to hidden wills. The one who was out to dissolve the characters of Toon Town.
He cme to mind when I remembered the landlord of a house my family rented when I was 10 years old, who, when my parents had fallen behind on their rent, came to the house and knocked on the front door. I had missed school that day and when my mother had gone to work that day she told me not to answer the door if he came. So I stayed silently inside as he walked around the house to try the back door and looked into various windows. I thought, as the landlord, he had the right to do whatever he wanted, and I was terrified that he would open the door and come into the house and throw me out.
I moved between those two childhood images of the Almighty for a lot of my life. On one hand was God as the silent judge who holds the rules and standards, keeps secret fate up his sleeve, always watching and never to be trusted. On the other hand was the sacred one as bellwether, member of the flock as well as leader of the pack; the holy one as a delightfully omnivorous and polymorphous explorer of the antistructure; getting on top of anything, smart, interested and tenacious; not easily herded.
Looking back I have spent so much time vacillating: not being sure whether to trust the journey or look for the rulebook; to consider the lesson of the sunrise or look for the hidden agenda under the stated expectations. I know that a lot of this is the story of my family background, but it is also a recurrent and unconscience lens through which I see the larger scape of the universe.
Then in 1965 when I was nineteen, I went to a suburban Episcopal church service where people followed a simple ritual of confessing their sins, receiving forgiveness, listening to some lessons, praying for themselves and others and incorporating the human love of God into their lives. All this, with music, took less than 55 minutes and I was surprised to realise that it was part of the same sweetness I found with gardens and water and exploration and getting lost and found and sweat and sweetness and lovemaking. It was another view of life that was bigger than I knew and it left me wondering how many other ways there might be to enact and understand, incorporate and ideate this participatory dance with something which might be in, with, under everything that is, which might be love.
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