Two books... altars and machines as paths to God

“The day of my spiritual awakening I saw– and knew I saw– all things in God and God in all things.” Mechtild of Magdeburg

I love to read. I have loved reading since daddy taught me my first words from the newspaper. Reading National Geographic has been my window to worlds I will never visit and biographies have been introduction to people I will never meet. Devotional books of all kinds stretch my heart and mind towards God while murder mysteries are pure entertainment for me. My two current books are connected in a strange sort of way.
The first book, An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor, is subtitled a Geography of Faith. Like Brother Lawrence, she holds up the simple practices of daily living as opportunities to create altars, concrete discoveries of the sacred surrounding us in the mundane. This is one of those books I want to read slowly not at my usual breakneck speed. This book takes time to sink in and I want to practice each chapter before I move to the next one. I’m still on chapter one...The Practice of Waking Up to God... The Vision. The quote at the beginning of the chapter, the one at the beginning of this writing, hooked me and an unexpected sweet tender memory surfaced.
At nine years old, I had sat through two revivals a year for at least four years. I was wise in the way of preachers caught up in the fervor of soul saving as a calling. It was a form of entertainment and an opportunity to sit with friends, drawing and passing notes. As long as we were quiet, adults let us be and we observed the goings on with a detached amusement. These were the days before television, computer games and cell phones so we were reduced to finding fun everywhere we went, anyway we could. Multiple verses of “Just As I Am”, all eyes closed (not really because some of us peeked), we hummed along when we ran out of verses to sing, fervent prayers for those who raised their hands, and our prayers for somebody to walk the aisle so we could go outside and play, somebody please take Jesus as your personal Savior or at least re-dedicate your life so we can get on with our lives...
And then one day, as a little nine year old girl in a concrete block church in South Georgia, like Mechtild, I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things. My world shape shifted and I didn’t have words to tell what had happened. The only way I knew to honor this change was the way I had been taught, to claim Jesus as my way to God, and to join the church, being baptized by immersion.
Baptists in my time wanted children to be at the age of accountability and reason when they made that decision. Being people of the Book, they read the story of Jesus in the temple and chose the age of twelve as the appropriate time for children to begin their faith journey. Some exceptions were made, but they were exceptions not the norm in my church. My daddy held to that tenet and refused my plea to be allowed to join the church. So I waited and watched for three years, joining the church on the first Sunday after my twelfth birthday. The public affirmation of a private revelation honored my earlier awakening to God.
My current murder mystery, Blasphemy, by Douglas Preston, presents a wonderful puzzle and is a thriller about science and religion of all things. Philosophy, science, religion, politics, love story... what a mixture of opposites that are a piece of the whole. In this book, one man’s life history connects with another man’s quest to shake the world up. A fundamentalist television preacher, politicos, the President, various and sundry all too human scientists, Navajos, southwest desert, atheists and true believers, computers, quantum physics and God... This book challenges my usual mystical experiences of God with a scientific world view that is foreign to me, uncharted territory on the road map to God. Rationality, proofs and bottom lines, scientific process are the structure that lead to another mystical experience of sorts.
Fifty four years later I am still seeing God in my world in new ways. The immanence, the permanent pervasiveness of God in this world, still takes my breath away when I take time to see the vision, feel the presence. I know the awakening that began so long ago is still dawning in my soul as I live now at the end of my life, not its beginning. My earliest truth about God, the one I knew at age nine still holds fast for me today at sixty three. Whatever the means, however one gets there, God is still in all things and all things are in God. So I rest in the sure and certain knowledge that I am in God and God is in me. Thanks be to God for my life and God’s living in me.