The Silent, Tectonic Movement of God

Sometimes I’m awestruck by the silent, yet tectonic, way God moves in the soul.

Here’s one very small example. While extremely fruitful, the dialogue with my friend Bill, which I’ve mentioned in my last few blog entries, left me exhausted and tense. It was a familiar feeling: the recent wrangling in the Episcopal Church—and my internalizing of it over the course of the summer—had generated the same feelings. At the same time, the dearth of my writing efforts resulted in a vague malaise, as though I desperately needed exercise and hadn’t done any lately.

Not that I really knew any of this at the beginning of the week. At best, I had a vague apprehension of some of it.

And yet, without even noticing it at first, I lingered long over Morning Prayer each day this week. The Office has taken me about half again as long as it usually does. And I don’t think my neurosis about “getting it right” was the cause. Looking back, I think God was drawing me into a deeper experience of prayer, of him, to refresh my soul and get me back to writing.

Apparently it worked. Last night my ill-at-ease feeling came to a head, and I realized I needed to write. This is my third blog entry for the morning. Clearly, I needed this—but I needed the deeper prayer first, to reconnect me to the source. And the source himself led me there.