Intersections

“Another name for God is surprise.”  (Brother David Steindl-Rast)

The dictionary defines “intersection” as a “crossroad,” an “overlapping,” a “common point” or “set of common elements.”

I anticipate many intersections on this journey—both figuratively and literally.

Each morning, I enjoy reading from several books. Today I was struck by the intersections.

I came across David Steindl-Rast’s observation in Mark Nepo’s Book of Awakening. Nepo goes on to characterize God as “the chance to know Oneness.” The term “oneness”—or variations such as “connection with all things”—is a way several of the people with whom I’ve already spoken have described the effect of their personal encounters with God.

Eckhart Tolle, in The Power of Now, suggests that God (“the Unmanifested”) can be found in silence and space. “The Unmanifested,” he writes, “is present in this world as silence. That is why it has been said that nothing in this world is so like God as silence. All you have to do is pay attention to it.” He continues: “…it also pervades the entire physical universe as space—from within and without. This is just as easy to miss as silence. Everybody pays attention to the things in space, but who pays attention to space itself?”

According to Rainer Maria Rilke, God is to be discovered in quiet and shadow. “Of all who move through the quiet houses,” he writes in his Book of Hours, a collection of love poems to God,

“you are the quietest. We become so accustomed to you, we no longer look up when your shadow falls over the book we are reading and makes it glow. For all things sing you: at times we just hear them more clearly.”

What to make of it all? Richard Rohr offers this, in Falling Upward:

“In the beginning you tend to think that God really cares about your exact posture, the exact day of the week for public prayer, the authorship and wordings of your prayers, and other such things. Once your life has become a constant communion, you know that all the techniques, formulas, sacraments, and practices were just a dress rehearsal for the real thing—life itself—which can actually become a constant intentional prayer. Your conscious and loving existence gives glory to God.”

The lessons for me at this morning’s intersection: Pay attention. Listen closely. Savor the quiet, the stillness. Be surprised…

(Lone Pine, CA)