The Heart, Awake/Reprise

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God,

It will flame out like shining from shook foil."

Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur

April is dogwood season in the south. The woods around the lake are dotted with the wild ones whose flowering is much more modest than the cultivated varieties, but still very beautiful. Along the road to the house there are two so old their blooms begin as a soft beige color and only turn the milky white of the younger trees after they have been open for a while. Think about that.

Each spring when the dogwoods open I am reminded again of a wonderful experience I had with my youngest son when he was three. We were upstairs one afternoon. I was folding clothes as he slowly and methodically jumped on the bed. It was raining gently; that wonderful sweet kind of rain that only seems to come in the spring. Our backyard was full of dogwoods in full bloom and we were both taking in their beauty as we went about our meditative tasks. The room was washed in the fragrance of spring, the sound of the rain through the open window and the swoosh, swoosh, swoosh of the jumping bedclothes. In the midst of all this soft sound my little son suddenly stopped and said: "Mom, I smell God."

It was a precious moment. For the last several weeks we had been visiting my Dad who was in the last weeks of his life. He was being cared for at home and the blessing in his illness was that he was not in any discomfort. My son and I would stop by every day for a short visit, and as children will do, he had simply taken it all in stride. We would arrive, he would announce he was going to check on my Dad and then get a drink from the fridge and take off down the hall to see him. After assuring himself all was as it should be, he would then go on to other things while I visited.

In sharing our wonder over a child's ability to touch and express the numinous parts of living, a dear friend told me that whenever her grandson drew pictures of God, he would use a black marker on black paper. His explanation for doing so was 'God is there but you can't see him." Thinking over both these children's natural awareness of the divine is more profound to me than any philosophical treatise. Here, they seem to be saying. this is not complicated. God tumbles into the world with us in the bedclothes, rides the scent of spring rain and inky black markers on black paper. Wake up your heart and see.

Now, all these years later, this little boy has grown into a fine young man and it is my mother's turn to await the angels. I don't remember what I said in response to my young son's remark so long ago. I seem only to recall that we looked at each other with complete contentment. He went back to jumping and I, to folding clothes. But the memory of his trusting acknowledgment of the ongoing presence of God has lifted me up over and over and over. He reminded me of what I had forgotten: we are born with our hearts awake.