| the bulletin board outside the church proclaimed
in letters that might be changed-out every week like the movie's
name on an old-time theatre marquee when the next hit
came to town or the weekly special at the Dairy Queen.
The admonition—or was it perhaps merely
a suggestion?—an invitation?—didn't fade
the way
the late-October leaves had faded the several miles
I drove the back roads from home to school, dry and brown
where just last week they glowed in afternoon light
vivid yellows and reds, a haze almost of brilliance
arcing the road, going out with the bang
we hope to make when the sum of our lives
is divided by death. Green pastures, still waters, golden
spires gleaming in a sky as blue as any that spanned
the Rockies in the Montana high country—all that we're
promised
if God loves us as we believe he must. In the country music
I listen to, the singers rehearse the joys of the hereafter,
exhorting those left behind to staunch their tears, the only
tears
they'll shed are tears of joy. If God loves us as we
believe
he must. What more proof do we need than the bright specks
shimmering in the empyrean? The amazing complexity of life
sprawling over land, the sea, filling the air? If God loves
us
—that's the central question. Eight years old,
I lay in bed
attempting to spread my mind around or across
the idea of infinity, eternity—that unending span of
time and space
stretching in every direction, beyond the wobbling
orbits of the planets I imagined from books on outer space,
the spiraling arms of galaxies spread ever thinner in the
thin
air of infinite expanse, eternal duration. Where in the midst
of this
did God take shape? A familiar, comforting hand on my arm,
a calming voice from the middle of the infinite
nothing that unfolded to and beyond the point of terror,
such a small mind in such awesome possibility—alone,
stranded,
cuddled beneath the sheets at the bottom of the bed.
I know those who claim to have spoken to God and heard him
speak in return. A personal relationship with the Lord.
On those occasions I've heard voices call my name
in an otherwise empty room, eerie—enough to send
shivers down the spine and stiffen my hair like a dog's
hackles at the scent of deer—I never suspected that
God
himself was calling me from reverie, anointing me with his
divine beckoning to engage in calm conversation in the semi-
dark room where I sat in the rocker, not quite brooding, but
not
actively pursuing contact with the hereafter. Which begs the
question
—not the first question, which I'll give them,
the mere
existence of God, a matter of faith not fact, not even close—
whether we can even know how the entity those who do
believe in God believe created and maintains the entire
sweep of the universe—species beyond count, galaxies
without number—more than Newton's celestial clockmaker,
adjusting a few cogs and gears in the otherwise perfectly
running delicate mechanism of the universe—loves, if
love
it can be said to be. Can the paramecium squiggling in my
small intestine love as I love? Can that wee organism
comprehend the fact of me within whom it lives, a cosmos
in miniature, much less understand—much less emulate—
the love I bear my wife, my sons, even my dogs as they romp
or curl beneath my feet in the evening? Maybe I need to,
as Lucinda Williams sings, "get right with God."
Hair-shirts
and self-scourging come to mind, or maybe go to the deep South
and dance around a ramshackle church to the music
of the spheres, scored in shape notes, draped in copperheads
and diamondbacks, hoping to hell the poison doesn't
work.
Jesus suggested closeting yourself in the dark and praying
quietly. Still, that microbe stands a better chance, being
proportionately closer in size and cognition to me than I
to that unimaginable divine, which I can only lessen by beginning
to believe that in the grand scheme of the universe, the myriad
stars squared across the vast horizon when I step outside
at night,
the life beneath my feet I cannot even begin to spread my
mind around,
that grand glory blazing briefly in the autumn leaves I leave
unnamed.
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