God sometimes speaks with a two-by-four. That’s helpful for me because I’m frequently dense enough to miss something more subtle. I need to be knocked upside the head from time to time.
Sometimes though, we just get glimpses and it is up to us to take notice. In his book, “Tales of Wonder,” Huston Smith adapts the term grace notes to describe these glimpses or moments:
“I must have been under six that early morning I stumbled out barefoot into our backyard. The moist dew under my feet felt fresh, exciting between my toes. Its freshness penetrated every atom of my body. The day was just dawning, the sun was coming out, cool and warmth intermingled, and I knew that everything would be just right. I use the musical term grace notes to describe such moments, when our perspective shifts and we suddenly glimpse perfection beyond words.”
Those moments can happen anytime, as long as we are paying attention. I see them with sunrises and sunsets; I catch them while reading or running. I feel them when finding spinning pinwheels planted in front of the church after a Pentecost worship service. Or in taking the time to notice and help a dragonfly who needed a hand.
It means we have to redirect our focus off of where we are going or what we are doing next and take time to be in the present. I don’t think we can hear God speaking in the future, but we’ve got a chance to hear him in the here and now.
In her book, “An Altar in the World,” Barbara Brown Taylor goes back to the story of Moses and the burning bush, through which God speaks to Moses. Brown Taylor points out that the burning bush was not right in front of Moses–he had to stop what he was doing and turn aside to go see it. If he hadn’t, if he’d stayed on his task of tending sheep, he would have missed it and wouldn’t be the Moses we read about.
“What made him Moses was his willingness to turn aside. Wherever else he was supposed to be going and whatever else he was supposed to be doing, he decided it could wait for a minute.”
And that made all the difference. I wonder if we would? Or if I would? I try. I am pretty good about seeing the sky start to turn a sublime color and dropping lunch making or laundry folding and heading out to investigate.
Or having lunch outside and listening, breathing, and centering. But I used to be better about finding and helping create those moments with my daughters. If you posit God as a loving parent, then our own chances to be creative, loving, listening parents/shepherds/counselors/friends (I don’t think that is relegated to being parents) to others should and do provide countless opportunities for us to experience something of the love of God, by putting it out into the world ourselves. I have to sit with that more. I have to be that more often.
Sometimes in the frustration of parenting teenagers, which absolutely needs to be done–in the midst of grades and attitude and apathy–I lose sight of, and don’t make the opportunities to fill their (and my own) hearts and minds and days with the kind of creative joy and love that I want to. I have heard, felt, and experienced love through Anna and Ava in ways I will never be able to show enough gratitude for. I need to live into that more.
Brown Taylor cites a character in Alice Walker’s book, “The Color Purple,” who says, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”
We’ve all got our color purple moments. Our grace notes. Our burning bushes. Our chances to notice and to be differently in the world. To make time.
Note to self: notice purple; don’t walk by burning bushes; cultivate the smiles, the questions, the adventures, that begin from the inside and launch their way into the world. That way maybe God doesn’t have to break out the two-by-four so often.
