Revelations

I heard a song today.

Not a new one–in fact, this song has been a favorite of mine for a few years now; it’s provided the soundtrack for many an arduous workout. This time, though, something was different.

I heard the same words and the same melody, but this time I realized I’d been missing something crucial just underneath the surface. The lyrics I’d taken for granted appeared in an entirely different light; suddenly the song was new to me, and I finally got it–the real meaning, I think, as it was meant to be understood.

Isn’t it funny how that happens? And it happens all the time–at least it does to me. It’s amazing how even in this routine, familiar, commonplace life, there’s still so much to be discovered, and rediscovered.

I think that’s how God works. His voice comes like a well-loved song and we don’t even know we’re hearing it, because it permeates all these everyday, extraordinary things.

Things like stars and cups of good coffee, and laughter, and that strange swelling feeling that fills your chest when you think of someone you love. And do we recognize those things for what they are? Or are they, to us, a song we’ve heard a hundred times, whose meaning we assume we’ve got nailed down by now?

And what happens when that thing–whatever it is–just clicks? When suddenly some insight appears out of nowhere, insight that reveals not a whole new sound but a whole new way of hearing it? What happens when the meaning of the mundane becomes profoundly razor-focused?

It’s there, I think, that we meet God. In that space His voice becomes clear, not because it hasn’t been there all along, but because some barrier has been dissolved. The scales fall from our eyes, and nothing is different, but everything appears fundamentally changed.

God speaks that way, through revelation, shooting encrypted messages over a telegraph. The code is here, etched into the cave walls of our souls. And when we find it as we do most hidden things–inexplicably, serendipitously–the message is all the proof we ever needed.

Going on a tangent

Another poem written for a friend (though this one didn’t ask for it). If you’re reading this and you’re human, it’s for you, too.

 

How to Tell a Friend What They’re Missing

Your smile is a gift to the universe.

Just what that smile is doing here, though–

now, that’s the question.

You ask it every day. Your mirror

is a shallow conversationalist. What does it tell you?

Who you are is not a picture.

No glass can comprehend your being.

And you wouldn’t expect it to, since,

after all, that knowledge escapes even you–

who lives behind the smile,

the space you occupy so small, two fists together,

yet so unknowable

like the space between two magnets

with the same charge.

You know what an echo sounds like

inside your head.

 

I can say all this about you

because I’ve heard it too, the dim flickering

of the question of existence. I can say, too,

that maybe there’s no answer

quite complex enough to satisfy it.

Maybe, instead, the answer is quite

a simple one. That you are here,

along with your smile,

because someone knew the world could use its luster.

You were His thought, who couldn’t help

but give you a heart and a question which,

once asked, would find an answer as simple

(unknowable)

as love.