I had an interesting experience a couple of months ago as I was driving home from a women’s crisis pregnancy shelter where I do a little volunteer work. The shelter is located in the middle of Virginia, centrally located so as to be able to help women from all corners of the state.

Randy and Evelyn James have invested their time, money, and most of all, their loving hearts into the creation and running of the Paul Stefan Home, a place where pregnant women came come and receive the help they need, not only to keep their babies, but to change their lives through educational programs and other services which will help them make better choices for their future.

It was late in the afternoon of what I can only describe as a glorious late Fall day in November. Because the weather was unusually warm, I was driving up Route 15 with my windows down, enjoying the crisp smell of leaves and the sight of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance, covered with Autumn splashes of red and gold. It is hard to describe what I experienced next, but I shall have a try at it.

A great sense of peace and well-being came over me as I immersed myself in the beauty of the day. Within this sense of well-being was a simple but profound joy – the joy of just being, and being part of this moment, this beauty, a realization of belonging to this moment as if I were painted into it as part of a cosmic Renoir or Monet. Releasing any and all thoughts of problems, concerns, or future events yet to be dealt with, I allowed myself to enter a fully as possible into the beauty of that day as an integral part of it. The day and all its riches were part of me. I belonged entirely to it and it belonged to me.  I struggle to describe here, for it is impossible to put to words the full richness of and sensation of such complete surrender to the moment and all the glories in it.

The best part of this experience was the sheer joy I felt at being allowed to be part of this moment. I think this is the longing which is in the heart of every person, to be intimately connected with something that is greater than ourselves, more beautiful than words can express, more wonderful that we can ever fully know here on this earth. To enter into the finite beauty of a Fall day comes close, yet it leaves the heart aching for more. There is more out there somewhere. We sense it with every pink and purple  sunset playing its golden rays across dark clouds receding in the west, our hearts silently crying out, “No, beauty, do not go away. Stay with me and let me drink of your glory a while longer.” We look up into an infinite cosmos of a million twinkling lights, a sweeping display above darkened ocean shores where the artificial light of the Industrial Revolution does not interfere with the ability of our eyes to see deep into reaches and worlds that are light years away.  Our souls yearn to reach out and touch those stars, to be one with that twinkling wave of light which sweeps from left to right before our longing eyes. The kiss of one who loves us more than life itself – not a simple peck on the cheek, but that deep kiss which tries to make two beings become a single one in their intense desire to united – speaks of a longing for a union of love and beauty which will never end.

This is the hunger we all feel when we are honest with ourselves. Even those who are the most filled with the goods of life – money, power, prestige among men – all the goods which we are told make life fulfilling, will feel that tug in their hearts at some moment when they are alone with the universe. We were made for so much more than this illusory life so quickly lived and then gone.

We were made for God and to unite with Him forever.

I think it appropriate to end this little reflection with a quote from Thomas Merton. One great regret in my life is that I never met Merton, although being a young man  at a time when he was alive.

“What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as “play” is perhaps what he Himself takes most seriously. At any rate, the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance. We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Basho we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash – at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness,” the emptiness and the purity of the vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair.  But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things; or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we can it to or not.

Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds, and join in the general dance.”

It was my moment of dance.