Hearing The Whisper of Lessons

When I was a very small boy, on a summer Sunday afternoon, I was playing outside our little house.  As children do, I was sitting in the dirt, using the dirt to make pies and puddings….and mountains and lakes. I had a plastic margarine bowl full of water, and was sitting next to a large sewer cover next to our gravel driveway. The sewer cover was larger than a regular manhole cover. Its texture was smooth, and it had a handle set into the middle of it. I don’t recall ever seeing any workmen go in or out of the opening, but it seemed to be an important fixture at the edge of our yard, and I enjoyed sitting on it and playing on it. It was slightly elevated, and standing atop it, the sewer cover gave me what felt like a great height advantage, as though I were looking down on a valley from a mountaintop. Such are the powers of a child’s creative eyes.

On this particular afternoon, while absorbed in moving and manipulating the black delta dirt, I became aware of a presence with me. At first, I thought it might be my mother, come out of the back door to check on me. I looked around and saw no one. But I knew with the clearest certainty that someone was with me, watching me and perhaps communicating with me. I looked up at the sky through the waving leaves of the catalpa tree and the beech tree shading me, and I remember feeling some sort of a greeting, as though someone were saying “hello” to me. The sensation was a happy one, a feeling of joy and relief. I don’t recall whether I spoke aloud, but I do remember becoming absorbed in the sensation of being spoken to by someone.

At that moment, I went away somewhere, and I cannot tell where it was. I can recall feeling as if I were in some vast place, some limitless room or structure, and I can recall the sensation of peace that settled over me. As an adult, I have had this same sensation when standing in grand cathedrals, and also while sitting in silence under the reaching canopy of pine trees in Southern forests with their brown, spongy carpet of needles and the shafts of smoky sunlight arrowing down at sharp angles. I have no specific memory of anything else, except that at some point during this experience, I knew as certainly as I have ever known anything in my life that if I did not somehow will myself to return — right now — to my little body crouching in the warm dirt that I would never again return there. I knew inside myself that it was important for me to return to myself, but it was difficult; it was quite similar to the attempt to awaken one’s self from a dream. At some point, I became aware that I was sitting there in the yard, and that my little hand was atop the sewer cover and the metal surface was hot. I very clearly remember thinking, “Who am I now? Where did I come from? Where was I just now?”

In a few minutes, I sort of shook myself free of the sensation, and I resumed playing with my dirt and my water. I wanted to discuss this with my mother, but something prevented me from ever initiating that conversation. In the manner of children, I forgot this important event shortly, and didn’t think of it again until perhaps two or three years later, when I had a similar, though less powerful, episode of leaving myself. After that second incident, I approached the first adult I found, who was my aunt, my mother’s  youngest sister.

“Aunt Carolyn, do you ever feel like God is talking to you?”

She scowled and asked me what I was talking about.

I said something like, “I mean, do you sometimes know God is right here with you, talking to you, asking you things? And you want to say something to Him but you don’t know what to say? Like He’s with you all the time, just beside you all the time?”

Her reaction was not positive. Her scowl deepened, and she admonished me in the harshest tones to stop talking foolishness, and to never bother her with such crap again. Her words stung me and frightened me, and I took them to heart. I never talked about these incidents and sensations with anyone else in my family.

But I remember not long after the first incident, a day on which my mother was giving me a bath in the kitchen sink. A large casement window over the sink looked out onto our back garden, and Mother had cranked the wings of the window open so that a nice breeze was cooling me as she washed my little frame. Even writing these words this morning, it tickles me to think there was a time when I could sit cross-legged inside a kitchen sink.

We were talking while she bathed me, and Mother mentioned to me that someday I would be going off to school. “You won’t stay home with Mother when you start school,” she told me. “You’ll go off with your friends and learn all kinds of things.”

This news poured horror and sadness into the very center of me. I protested that I didn’t want to leave her, that I didn’t want to go to school, that I didn’t want any friends. She smiled at me and rinsed me, but she didn’t argue with me. I do remember for a large part of that afternoon, I felt lost and betrayed. Why would she send me away from her, especially after I had told her that I didn’t want to go? What lessons were so important that I couldn’t learn them there in the sun-washed kitchen?

We didn’t talk about my going to school anymore that day. But that winter, I remember lying on the floor next to the little gas stove in our living room, the source of heat for our house, and I remember staring for long stretches into the blue and orange flames, and I particularly remember the ceramic heating elements in the stove. If I opened the side door, where one would turn on the jet and insert a lit match to bring the stove to life, I could gaze down what looked like a long hallway with arched ceilings, like paintings of ancient cathedrals. The sight took me straightaway back to that Sunday’s sensation of being in a vast room, or structure. I spent many hours peering down that gas-lit hallway, comforted for reasons I didn’t understand, comforted by the buttresses of the fragile heating elements.

In recent days, I have  been thinking much about the experience in the yard, an experience I do believe was an encounter with God. I have also been thinking about my bath-time conversation with my mother. Perhaps these memories flit through my mind because I am more aware now that there will come a time when I have to leave this place I currently occupy. Is this life a school to which I had to come? Will I be reunited with my mother, who loved me so much? Is there Someone else who loves me Whom I will see again someday, someday when all the questions will be answered and the obscuring mists will be moved aside?

I do not know for certain. I know very, very few things for certain anymore. What I do know is that I am too old to sit in the dirt, and I am too stiff to stretch out next to a gas stove, even if I had one. I can only hope that in moments of silence, that Presence will come to me again. Even if no questions are asked nor answered, just to feel that Presence again.

This insight solves at least two mysteries of my life:

Why have I forever been drawn to silence and solitude?

Because I have been spoken to in such situations.

And why have Sunday afternoons forever been sad and difficult for me?

Because something within me is homesick for a place I cannot recall.

~ S.K. Orr