The first time I ever tried to tell another person out loud what I was trying to figure out about God, I conjured up an image of the north woods.
Okay here’s the image: The height of summer. You’ve spent the day out in the woods and in the lake and driving down that long open road. You’re sunkissed from a day spent outside and when you breathe in that beautiful northern air, its sweet like coffee cake at your grandma’s house. Cool, and crisp unlike the hot air down south, like you’re breathing in someone else’s warm breath Maybe God’s.
Anyway, the sun has set and the gold that just moments before penetrated through the trees and off the water and painted the sky pink and orange and purple, well that light’s giving way to the deep blue. The first evening stars are appearing in the sky, poking out through that great big blue one by one, like poking fingers breaking through something soft, like tissue paper.
You’ve spent the entire day with your family, and you’re all beat tired but still laughing and speaking and yelling in joy and singing. They make a fire and huddle all around it and the oldest member of your family tells stories and the youngest tries their hardest to remember every detail, to someday tell their youngest.
But you leave the fire. You leave the fire, and you walk along the pebbly sand (this isn’t the ocean after all. Something more raw, more real than that. This is the north.) along the shore and the cold wind is just starting to blow, you’re just starting to feel the absence of the sun’s warm rays. You shiver into your sweatshirt when all of a sudden, in the distance, you see the glint of another fire. You glance back at your own, leagues behind you now, but you can still just make it.
If you keep going to the fire ahead of you, you will stop seeing the fire behind you.
You go forward anyway, and when you approach the fire, God is there. Facing the ocean, God sits on a log with his hands folded almost in prayer, but who would God be praying to? He looks up to see you and invites you to sit next to him.
And God motions for you to sit next to God and so of course you do and for a long time the two of you are just silent. And then you start to talk to God and God asks you to tell your story, (even though God already knows all of it) and it all comes out. You tell God about your sisters and your grandmother, and how badly you wanted to make beautiful things and the ache in your heart you’d had since you were eleven, maybe twelve. And you’d tell God about your hometown and how hard all your friends made you laugh, and what it felt like to stand alone on a stage with the lights and everything, and your favorite books and the most beautiful places you’d ever seen. And you’d ask God questions too. You’d tell God that yeah, you knew good people went to heaven and bad people went to Hell, but where do you go if you tried really really really hard to be good, but it didn’t work out that way a lot of the time? And you’d ask God what God’s favorite color was, if it was even something humans could see? You’d ask how God thought of all the crazy stuff at the bottom of the ocean? And you’d ask if any sunsets were made specifically for you, if God ever painted the sky thinking “Oh, she’s gonna love this.” And then you’d ask God why there were people who did bad things and never face justice? You’d ask why they made the girls in your fifth grade class not like you. You’d ask why babies die before they’re born, Or why your best friend’s dad had to kill himself? And why God had to make so many things that you just couldn’t understand, could never understand? How God could make us live in a world with hurricanes and mass shooters and racism and AIDS and hatred and people who make fifth grade girls sit alone at the lunch table. And then you’d cry and scream and demand to know how God could make your uncle live alone and then kill his dog and still expect you to believe in things like mercy.
At the time I tried to hard to make someone understand what is was like to feel even just a glimpse of God, I had just read the book “Till We Have Faces” by C.S. Lewis. He writes “When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why [God does] not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should [God] hear the babble that we think we mean? How can [God] meet us face to face till we have faces?”
That night, with me and God and the stars sitting around a fire in Northern country God will tell me why all these things happened. Face to Face, God will sit with me and tell me everything. It will all become clear. And there, with me and God at the end of all things, it will make sense. And not before.
I don’t know what it is about the North woods that makes me think of God. All I know is that this is the place I would like very much for my soul to end up. I like to think that after it all, some wanderer that is not human and does not know suffering except as a thing something made up as a joke at a party and not even a particularly funny one, will come to God and ask where she can find the one they used to call Maura Margaret and God will direct them here and I’ll come up to meet them on my bike, through a trail lined with trees and I’ll say, let me show you where my soul resides.
*Most of this bit (I edited it slightly and added onto it) was originally written as an intro for a Kairos retreat talk about “Love In Action.” The part I’ve included was cut from the speech for being deemed “too difficult for tired high schoolers to understand on a Friday morning.” Go figure.
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