The Room Where it Happens
When I discovered so very long ago that I didn’t believe in God – it felt like a switch being flipped. The switch flipped, and the lights went on in some places, and the lights went off in others. Mostly, at that time, I was more aware of how the lights had gone off. Belief in God is satisfying. I describe the feeling of losing God in my first post as “standing alone and coatless in a featureless landscape, buffeted by a strong, cold wind.” (The Eleven-Year-Old Atheist) Ouch! Often when I have a big realization, it feels physical; the metaphor takes a shape that I can almost touch, see and feel. I am right in there trying to understand what can’t easily be named.
These days, the metaphors for my spiritual life and epiphanies are so different from that coatless child out in the wind. My mind, heart, and soul have come up with a whole series of spiritual images and spaces that express where natural religion has led me. Welcome to the room where it happens – my interior spiritual world.
A Tree Illuminated. My parents used to get six children up early every Saturday morning in the winter and load up a station wagon to go skiing on Mt Hood (yeah, I don’t know how they did it). My strategy was to get a seat by the door. I would lock the door, smoosh up my ski jacket as a pillow, and press hard against it for a snooze. I could see out the window, and I would watch the landscape in a half-daze. When conditions were right, I could see through the trees into Mt Hood National Forest and see vine maples lit up by the sun. They went by quickly. My eyes would catch them shining, and as we passed, there would be a moment when the window would fill with perfection and beauty. Tree after tree, lit by sunlight.
A Perfect Meadow. My first backpacking trip was on Mt Hood. One night we slept in a meadow up high on the mountain. That evening I walked through lush ferns to the creek. It was perfect in so many ways. The creek was burbling over the meadow. The cool evening air was liquid on my skin. The mountain was not in view, but you could feel it looming nearby. Insects and birds added sound to the creek and the wind. I get an inkling of this feeling on summer nights when I stand in front of an open window and feel the cool air coming in through the screen. I look out and see the mysterious dark.
The Holy Child I’ve already written about this child that sometimes pops up in my dreams (Perchance to Dream). My favorite instance of seeing the child was in a home movie of my husband when he was two or three years old. He had a new Christmas record player, and he was watching it with joyous intensity. The filmmaker (probably Joe, his father) stayed right on him in close-up. Michael was a study in curiosity and delight as he tried to figure out this machine (a totally inappropriate gift for his age, I must say). He had the most beautiful long eyelashes. I recommend finding something like that to look at if you are feeling angry with your spouse. You can’t stay mad at the holy child!
The Bulldozer in the Garden I once had a vision of a bulldozer in a garden. It came to me when I was wrestling with what I really thought was true about life. I could see a beautiful garden. In it, the soil was rich and alive. I could smell its humous smell. The soil and the smell were important in this vision. While I admired the garden's aliveness– its goodness– a bulldozer came crashing through with its blade down. It smashed right through the middle of the garden with grinding noise and speed. It took out everything in its path, including the soil, leaving a gash of naked dirt and rocks and a whiff of diesel in its wake. It was shocking.
The other images – the meadow, the tree, the child – are all so gentle they hardly need interpretation. They are basically just signposts saying, here is beauty, here is sacredness.
The bulldozer in the garden is another thing entirely. I had to mull that one over. I gradually felt it was teaching me about spiritual resiliency. The presence of evil doesn’t negate the garden, no matter how destructive it is. The garden is still there. But the garden must be tended and repaired.
That is our job.
We are here to tend the garden.
Do you have a spiritual vision or insight? Share it if you wish. I’d like to hear it. Below is a poem I wrote a few years ago about listening to the sacred.
Visions by Katie Larsell Visions aren't what they used to be, God doesn't walk with you in the garden. Eve's got a gig in Hollywood, and Adam lives alone and can't find work. But the spirit doesn’t care about changing times, it breaks through any way it can. It comes to me over radios spewing noise and then the bandwidth clears and the Universe speaks. Power-lines snake past in my dreams, The wires shake, pulse and beat, with a dancing, Cosmic, electric heat. Once I saw a garden in my mind, but in the lovely, leafy stillness there also came an earth-moving, scraping, killing machine. It’s not what you think. The dozer was telling me I have a choice in how I see. I want my visions to spring wet and green from creation like a Hallmark theme- And God saw that it was Good, or God saw that it was Beautiful. Instead they come as they will, using any nonsense grabbed from the mind’s junk drawer, To tell us we have the power, if only we would use it, if only we would see.