BECAUSE OF THE BRIGHTNESS OF THAT LIGHT
I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me,
“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”
. . . Since I could not see because of the brightness of that light,
those who were with me took my hand and led me to Damascus. Acts 22: 7,11
Struck by a sickening blow to the gut,
slamming against the pitiless rock
I went down to the ground.
My body lay in the dust
My body folded upon itself in the dust.
My heart smeared with the dust.
And I lay still in the dust,
closed upon the dust,
like the wing of some great, dead bird.
I fell down
rolled down
splayed down
split, spread down
across the ground
like butter.
Like a serpent
I went down
crawling over the ground
on my belly.
I went down to the ground
where the salamanders and skinks
scurry over the cold stone walk.
I went down to the ground
where the sow bugs curl and the beetles hide.
I went down to the ground
and swam with turtle
out of the depths
up into the light
stretched my neck long
and turned my face
to the sun.
When I was lifted up from the ground,
day became night.
I staggered
my sin was always before me.
You wonder if it happened,
if I really saw what I say I saw,
heard what I tell I heard.
You wonder if I am mad
or fabricating.
See here,
see
the proof is in my groping blindness
my stunned, numbed, nauseous soul
stumbling in a foreign land.
There are ones who can testify
that I saw well enough before
that I did not wear this unveiled shocked look of the newly blind.
There are ones who can remember the zeal and pulse of desire in me.
My mind,
shattered into brittle splinters,
discrete thoughts
wholly
separate
with
no
known
connection
to
one
an
other
save my existence.
In darkness I paced that long night.
Near dawn some
thing like scales, like slivers,
husks,
a tough membrane-like scum
shucked from my eyes.
And I saw for the first time
the world
like a worn pouch turned inside out.
When sight returned
there remained as a translucent cataract
Christ.
Betwixt me and creation exists that dear face
and upon it I gaze unceasingly
and therein find All.
“It hurts you to kick against the goads,” he said.
Harold, awestruck and elated, told me that he had seen God. He said that God showed him hidden mysteries. No, he was not psychotic. He was simply full of Holiness bigger than his britches. Divinity burst through his immature psyche in sparks and streaks. He scared most people, impressed others, and annoyed his pastor.
People have varying responses to large draughts of God. Not everyone becomes insufferable. In Harold’s case he felt that nobody really understood and knew God the way he did. To him all the other laborers in the vineyard, slogging away without a glimpse of the master, appeared as witless dullards. And I have to admit some of them probably were. Instead of focusing on what is wrong with those around them, some people respond to the Spirit infusion with a burst of creativity, an outpouring of service, the expression of their gifts, or art of some kind. Then there are the hidden souls who only want to withdraw to sit in silence and solitude, where they feel alternately forgotten and useless, and enraptured and blissfully happy. 
On the afternoon of the day my friend died in a hospital bed in Iowa City, my daughter and I made cookies. In the Kansas kitchen overlooking the finch feeder, while seventeen finch gobbled two pounds of thistle seed (95 cents a pound at Allen Farm and Feed), we measured flour and brown sugar, butter and ginger, and mixed them in the yellow bowl. Patting out the dough on the cookie sheet, we stopped to taste. “Umm, very good!” she said.
A thousand shades of green hold me enthralled. The south wind teases up the glossy leaves, revealing their pale undersides. I find enough of God in a maple leaf to keep me occupied with wonder for a couple of centuries.
Simone Weil continues, “Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of neighbor, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. . . . The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth. Only he who is capable of attention can do this.”
I held out the tray of tiny plastic cups filled with juice, freshly poured, bubbles still floating on top. He delicately placed finger and thumb around his choice, and went to draw it out, but it was stuck and would not budge. He tightened his grip, pulled, and the thin plastic cup shattered in his fingers. Juice flew onto the suit jacket of the fellow next to him, the carpet before the altar, and my white robe and scapular with the appliquéd wheat and golden sun. How can such a tiny cup hold so much? we wondered.
ith her here, and, in her contact with God, find healing for her soul. Inside the hermitage my two daughters, ages four and six, are playing quietly. My guest and I sit still, leaning into the grace of the moment-listening to meadowlarks and watching willows bend in the breeze. After a while my children’s play grows noisier. Thumping, giggles, and something crashing to the floor intrude on the serenity. They are jumping on the bed. The more I try to focus on the silence and my guest, the louder the girls get. Finally I rise from my prayer stool and go inside. “Please be quiet,” I whisper. As I take Diana’s arm to lead her over to some books, she shouts in a screechy, ear-splitting whine, “Mom, stop! You are hurting my arm.”
The Praying Life 