A small collection of sounds is gathering in my memory, and each day I try to grasp them a bit tighter, making marks with crayons on paper, so their vibrations are not lost.  It helps a little, I guess, but the longing of loss may be our greatest common malady, and if we are to live presently, jumping from one now moment to the next, we may prepare ourselves for a life of disappearances.  There is very little, if anything, that can be held in the hands, or the heart, which will remain.

I have an idea that our longing to grip the remnants of our experience is a way we reach, if clumsily, for the divine.  Like buying something plastic out of the gumball machine, because there is this moment maybe, in the grocery store, when you find yourself staring at a box of corn Pops, vaguely recognizing some orchestral rendition of Your Love Is King on the overhead, and a man in a Cavaliers hat walks by talking about pork chops to a woman you imagine to be his woman, and the ocean and sky inexplicably open up and swallow your heart and mind, because why is god trying to talk to you at the Price Chopper in Troy, NY anyway?  And you want to put it away, and get yourself back together, there is a list to take care of, and you make your way through check out without too much upset.  But something happened back there in aisle 6, even if you don't know what, and so you put a quarter in the slot, and turn the crank, and this little bubble comes out with a prize in it, and its a tiny little crucifix on a black string, and nothing is making sense, but you know and you know that something else knows you know that there was a moment worth remembering, or getting back to later when it will be more clear and you can think better, and so you pocket the crucifix and walk back home.  This happened to me a few days ago.

For a long time I would not keep any 3-dimensional objects unless they came to me in this kind of way, and so my apartment back home is somewhat empty except for very tiny things which would probably fly away without the weight of their dense and tangled stories.  This got to be impractical, because it is hard to come by a shoe organizer with meaning and depth, and besides, how many boxes of very tiny things can a person keep on the Table of Very Special Things?  Nonetheless I've kept this collection of small souvenirs with me in the hopes that they will carry the essence of so many accumulated moments of presence or divine intervention or maybe fabricated and sentimental hogwash (depending on the context), with me.  The question I ask myself is: WHY?  While I can't be sure of the reason, I am still hinged to this idea that our moments of presence are moments of contact with something much greater than ourselves, and that we long for it so irresistibly we'll do all manner of crooked-minded things to keep it tight in our hot little hands.

There is a concept in Calvinism of Irresistible Grace, which, in summary, states that if God calls you, you answer.  I don't want to get into Calvinist issues of predestination or human choice at the moment, because I think this concept is more about divine power than philosophies of time and free will.  To me, it is simply a demonstration of the wildly magnetic pull we feel as human beings to this Great Something Else, that when we sense that something else, we simply must follow it, and we usually do.  Trouble is that we often go down wrong wrong roads in our attempts.  (See: gumball machine crucifix.)  I never tire of this old Zen story of the finger pointing at the moon.  The students ask, "Teacher, what is the moon?"  and the teacher replies by extending a finger up to the night sky. The students exclaim, "Ah!  The moon is a finger!" 

The art that we make here is a finger.  The crayon markings of the bell sounds are a finger.  The bells are a finger.  The sublime spookiness of the empty sanctuary at 3am is a finger.  My sweet and turbulent dreams of Chicago are a finger.  But what is the moon?

The moon is the heart of my longing, and I may spend 60 more years longing, because most days the fingers I find are so wonderful I want to chop them off and put them in tiny boxes on my Table of Very Special Things.  But today, I am holding on to the idea that I if am truly called to the moon, its okay to follow the pointers I see, picking up my souvenirs along the way, and one day I'll let them all go, and accept the irresistible call of grace.