Regarding the Coup (a short note to God)

Today, in my Secret Place, I drink You in through emerald ivy and hemlocks hanging still in the sun. Sitting here so satisfied, it strikes me that the confinement of adults and children— between work and school and supposed "leisure" activities that always occur indoors— has a sense of spiritual battle in it.

After all, if sitting with Your creation is a powerful way for us to experience You, then surely to keep us from it is a cool deceit, a spiritual coup meant to disable us.

As Krista Tippett says in Speaking of Faith, "We appreciate religious mystery and truth in words and as often, perhaps, beyond them: in the presence of beauty...in silence." She says we are "starved for silence".

Is that not disabling, to be starved of beauty and silence? "Silence embraced," she continues, "stuns with its presence, its pregnant reality..." (p.52)

It is true. This world, with its swinging hemlock branches and little squirrels' feet and moldering pine needles, fragrant, this silent world is pregnant with You. Waiting to give birth to something in us. And too often we let it be taken from us, without resistance.


Dogwood Against the Hemlocks picture, by L.L. Barkat.