I wonder what happens when you ask God to speak. How does he answer? I’m always curious about other people’s experiences of God. It is not so much that I am concerned with learning the ‘right’ way to have these experiences. Rather, I think there are attributes of God we can learn only through knowing one another and sharing our spiritual experiences.
For me, spiritual experience often comes as an impression so strong, I’ve just got to write it down. Because that’s what I do. I write. And what God does? Well, I think he meets us where we are.
So, one recent morning, I sat on my porch in the first gray light with a notebook open on my lap. Waiting. Lonesome for a dialogue with the Spirit that has become so familiar, so sustaining to me. I closed my eyes, and that lonesomeness was itself like a prayer, a psalm, a plea.
I wrote down the impressions that followed. Did God speak? Did He not? Call it wishful thinking? Call it . . . faith?
I am with you always.
“Ok. Is that it, Lord?” I asked, hoping for more, though really, “I am with you always” is a pretty big deal and worthy of contemplation.
Divine Life goes on and on, continued my impression of the Spirit. Far beyond all of this packaging you see all around you. Still, you must do what brings you joy. It is all you have. You cannot embrace the whole of Divine Life. Only your spark of it.
It is yours to do as you do, to do it to the best of your ability, and to take joy in the authenticity of it. As the cardinal joys in his single, bright chirp—for that is his chirp. His song to sing. His person to be.
And do not be afraid to be! Plenty of legitimate concerns occupy the cardinal; cardinals face predators, competition for resources, the vagaries of weather . . . But the cardinal is not afraid of being a cardinal. The cardinal is not afraid it is not being cardinally enough. It is not afraid of being too cardinally. The cardinal is not afraid there is no place for its song among all the other sounds of nature. It is not afraid its song sounds too loud or too abrupt among all the other noises.
The cardinal is not concerned with telling the other birds what their songs should sound like or what kind of birds they should be. It is not concerned with grouping all the cardinals together and separating them from the rest of the birds.
It is not afraid of tomorrow.
Be in that way, my dear.
(Are you comfortable being?)
Just then, in the growing morning light, a female cardinal alighted on my garden arch, chirped brightly and flew away.
The Lyrical Realist 