Where it all began

For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. (Romans 14:17)

Sunlight cut through every contrary thought and emotion, inviting chilled bodies and spirits from their cocoons to bask (finally) in the sacrament of springtime. So it is on this Saturday morning.

But spring’s belated resurrection is a tiny fraction of the consolation that warms me. Sound does that, the discordant chintz of a toy piano playing on an IPad—and a voice of love, choked with tears, from across the living room.

“Is that where it all began?” Dixie asks. The question needs no further context. Two minds fly as one to the orange shag in her parents’ long-ago living room and a tow-headed boy joyfully pounding out painful chords and tuneless melodies on a miniature piano of plastic and particle board.

How old? Just two, I think, at least in the mental picture we jointly hold and which holds us in fast silence at the holy mystery of it all. Who’d have thought the making of a master musician began on orange shag carpet?

But that other voice, the one that never stays quiet for long, quickly corrects. No, it didn’t begin there but a little earlier.

It began in the depths of non-time when Love’s Source chose that there should be beauty; and if beauty, then souls whose joy is sharing in its creation; and if them, then other souls who partake of its wonder, lifted above the banal to consolation and joy, illumination and insight by the manifold colors and textures flowing through human imaginations from Love’s infinite store where it all began; often showing up where you least expect.

It all began in the boundless sea of Love from which our best tears flow, like these on a sun-kissed Saturday morning, when the awakened heart again discovers what an unlikely and mysterious journey life is.

Every moment is somehow carried in the flow of a Love beyond knowing, trying its best to carry us home to where it all began.

David L Miller