"Tempest............................."

“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us; but if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean, or matrix, or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other and for our life here together. This is given; it is not learned.” ….”Annie Dillard, “Teaching a Stone to Talk”

I’m sitting in the parking lot of one of our local high-schools, munching on a couple of fig newtons and enjoying my morning cup of decaf. The sky is overcast, grey with a few drops of drizzle entertaining me on the roof of my car, nothing quite so serious that I couldn’t walk from here to the main entrance without getting wet. My class doesn’t start for yet another fifty minutes, the old man, as usual, arriving early due to not checking his schedule beforehand. In truth, though, I don’t mind, such space being almost sacred to me. It is quiet here, a soft voice spoken here and there in passing and distant sounds of life otherwise coming to me on a gentle breeze indeed the only assurance of my not sitting in some sort of vacuum. The above author writes in one of her essays, of holiness being a force, but one able to be resisted, noting that God had seemingly spoken to her on one occasion of His being there in her presence, just not as she had previously thought Him to be, she went on to say that she had anyhow turned and walked away. Out of fear? Perhaps. This is also the same woman, however, who once witnessed a total eclipse of the sun and, by her own testimony, became “one with the universe around her” as the shadow of the moon, 129 miles wide and at a speed of 1800 miles per hour, sucked her in and passed through her. She did scream at one point, but remained to walk away afterwards, thinking to herself that the experience, once survived, was merely something that she had, if not conquered, at least faced. That field, wherein out of the silence she had come in contact with the Creator, would later be “possessed by angels”; but, nonetheless, from glory, itself, she had “turned with a sigh of relief”. No; the psalmist reasons that there is no fear even in passing through the valley of the shadow of death, “for Thou art with me”; and I have found it to be so. His presence comes to us from within us and, if allowed, calms the sea around us. The question is only a matter of whether we will reach out and take His hand……