This poem has never left me:    

God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.

“Dancing on the edge

is the only place to be.” 

–Trisha Brown

– Annie Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole” in Teaching a Stone to Talk

“I had staked my life on the belief

that the next step would be revealed.”  

                       – Nora Gallagher

In a pencil cup on my desk is a blinker pen from the Stillspeaking store.  It joins a collection of kitsch, including the “Magnify Your Faith” binoculars or the handy “Wash Away Your Sins” bath and body sampler received as a gift.   

The logo on the pen reads, God is still speaking, 

 A button on the pen controls 3 light settings:  quick blink, slow blink, and solid light.  I’ve lost the plastic cover that immobilizes the button on the side of the pen, and the red light will flash if something in the pencil cup jostles against the pen and pushes the button.  Sometimes as I work at my desk, I’ll reach for the stapler, and see the red light beating a quick rhythm. 

I begin to wonder if the pen starts blinking on its own.  Maybe I’m missing something. 

I think of Moses.  Did his pen strobe with a quick blink before he jotted down the 10 Commandments?  Perhaps Paul saw a slow blink on his pen, like a beacon, and knew he couldn’t put off writing that letter to the Romans any longer.

Perhaps a woman wakes from a dream about a blinking light and records a story her grandmothers have told her, about a woman at a well.  God is still speaking, what have you heard?   Perhaps the prophet Hosea stares the unyielding red light on the pen, and sighs…his wife certainly won’t like this.  Never place a period where God has placed a comma.  

I sit at my desk and open mail, read mail, code invoices, draft reports, write bids, and reach for the phone to return a call.  I sneak a glance at the pencil cup to see if my pen is blinking.  I hope that somewhere in this punctuated world a pen is blinking.

Have some cake.

Photo of little Ruby by Kristina Provinsal of Visual Empathy.  Used by permission.

“I try to notice how the desert is put together, with the expectation that if I look hard enough the land will open up to me, spilling an endless stream of color, light, and living things in bright ecstasy.”    

  — Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise

No eye that sees could fail to remark you:

like any leaf the rain leaves fixed to and

flat against the barn’s gray shingle. But

what leaf, this time of year, is so pale…

                 –Carl Phillips, excerpted from “Luna Moth”

Beth Westmark posted this photo at her blog, and I thought it was stunning.  She gave me permission to post it, too.

September, Mueller State Park

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

 Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.

 The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.   

– John Muir

Gracie Allen said, Never place a period where God has placed a comma.   

 This quote inspired a “proclamation, identity, and communication” effort in the UCC (United Church of Christ), with the tagline  “God is still speaking,”   The comma was intentional. 

This appeared in messages, church bulletins, TV ads (or not), media, banners, websites.  The focus of the media blitz was to emphasize welcome and inclusion at UCC churches.  But I was stuck on that comma.

In a sermon, our pastor asked, “God is still speaking, What have you heard?”   

We were a little dazzled that God still had something to say.  That God had something to say to us.  We knew this, of course, but the big black comma brought it home.  If something came after the comma, we needed to listen and share and discuss what that was.  All of us. We needed to hear what God might be whispering to each person.

The comma logo became shorthand for this welcome listening.  A large black comma presided over the monthly newsletter.  Ushers at our church wore small white stoles with a black comma, and still do.  There were comma t-shirts and comma earrings. The Stillspeaking cycling team wore a comma on their jerseys.  People made themselves into human commas, the UCC version of Lake Woebegon’s living flag.   

I hoped we would not stop saying to each other, “God is still speaking,”   That we would not forget to explain.   Perhaps Sunday visitors  met by greeters wearing a mysterious comma (apostrophe? quote?) would have no idea what it was all about.  Perhaps the comma would become stale, and we would fall back into our old assumptions, sheltered from the wind. 

“God is still speaking,” would be our church’s focus for a year, for 3 years at the national UCC level.  I welcomed this.  I wanted to think about all 3 parts:  the stillspeaking, the comma, the what have I heard.   

The comma became like an irritant thrust into the flesh of a mollusk. It bothered me every time I saw it.  That’s not correct punctuation, my editing self would say.  The comma should have been a dash or semi-colon (a period being ruled out by Gracie). 

Something whispered, It’s meant to trouble you, Rules are sometimes meant to be broken.  Are you listening?   A pearl might form (or not), but the mollusk was mighty uncomfortable in the meantime.  

Confession:  I remain in this world burdened with an abiding concern for the comma.