She sees it. It’s there, hanging in the mist, wanting to become a real thing. She swims in her thoughts, wanting to get there, sensing that this is the final answer—if there is a final answer. Only at times like these does wanting make it so. The haze clears as she nears, to reveal a stone church, once a place where people came for refuge, to worship and to pray. They sensed it to be a sacred altar where God, if there was one, might hear what they had to say even to themselves. Their prayer lay full-formed in their minds, wanting to be muscled into striving, into belief that such things are possible— into faith.
In the clarity of pre-dawn, she approaches the structure and wonders, Why is it so small? Why so spare and lacking in any claim to magnificence? She is not impressed. Perhaps, she thinks, this is but a fool’s errand and I need not enter in. I could leave, go back, give up, just go away and pretend I never even determined to haunt this old relic—but no. She keeps on. If there were outbuildings they are long gone and cleared away. All that’s left is this one sanctuary reaching from out of the mist and beckoning to her. She moves her feet, a studied pattern of will. She wants to go inside and meet what she finds there waiting just for her.
There must have been a steeple long ago, but all that’s left is a discontinuity of roofline where once rocks took on an upward urge and bravely pointed the way to spirit—or God. If there were a door she would open it, but it has long ago succumbed to the ravages of time and age. Only the memory of a door remains as the evidence of its past attachment, the holes left by long lost bolts and rustic cinctures. She reaches out to touch the tiny apertures. They are really there. Satisfied, she engages feet and steps inside. The dawn has not yet found its way inside this shaded vestibule. She stops to breathe and say a prayer of thanks for this quiet entrance into what was surely a place of prayer, where folk arrived in safety, from who knows what alarms. A deep breath and she draws herself in her entirety into the main vault of the surround. Only then does she look down.
There, under her feet, are a quadrillion tiny stones, gathered there to form the underlayment of what she might believe as real. They are formed as part of the natural order of things, shaped by grinding against all other stones in an ancient river of time. Every stone is perfect in its own intrinsic way, formed as it was out of its own primordial way of being. She bends down and scoops up a handful of the variegated gravel. Their colors brave the spectrum of universe and reflect every hue of light’s arc of possibility. Sparkles emanate from inside the hearts of clear gemstones, as occasional rays of white light are simply reflected out, and find purchase in her human retinal plane. They celebrate that first incarnation of God as physical matter, as solid mass and rock, as molten magma, cooled and coalesced into earth, bound by gravity’s longing, circling faithfully about what it forever loves. “These are the jewels of God’s own treasure,” she breathes, as she rolls them between her palms.
She takes a step and notices the cushion created by movement of slick shiny pebbles sliding over their very selves and providing a safe way of proceeding for feet to transverse the vastness of the nave. She smiles, thankful for understanding. Like most physical representations, these rocks are a metaphor for all the many ways of interpreting a god that was there, must surely be there, just had to be there. But how was he to be described? How understood? How worshiped, if indeed that was what he required? She doesn’t pray for an answer. That would be too simplistic. She closes her eyes and feels the gratitude of being a form of life on a complex and eloquent planetary expression of Ultimate Being.
morethanenoughtruth 