My notes from this afternoon.
In a country town fifty-seven miles south of Lexington, Kentucky, a woman found a cross lying in the dirt, just beside a patch of lilies in their springtime bloom. The woman knelt to look at the cross; she held it in between her fingers and felt the wood, which had been smoothed by time.
There might not have been anything remarkable about the incident, except that the woman had been praying in the church for many days, petitioning for a sign that the stirrings of her heart were leading her to solid ground–to something not buffeted by the velleities of the town’s politics, or fashions, or weather. This was a simple plea, borne of a desire to grasp that which demands to be felt in the soul. That is to say, it was the act of a woman living only in the hope that whatever mystery congealed and grew in her heart was the truth of existence as such. There could be no arguing this point, as those who have been acquainted with a similar sensation–with an urgent insistence on confirming that belief on which everything, everything, hinges–can only agree, remembering their own pain and yearning.
Does this seem abstruse or impossible to make sense of? Doubtless, the words I have found to relate this incident are sloppy, only half-suited to their purpose. But they will do. For the chief thing is this: when in possession of a truth which is greater than the sum of its parts, the soul must burst into being in the conviction of this truth, and its utter essentialness to life as we know it–or else the soul will be silenced into a state of non-being, a non-life spent suffering the pain of being denied that which is believed, in the deepest parts, to be true.
But enough of these abstractions. For the woman, the cross, found so suddenly and so simply in the dirt, brought a moment of joy which none but herself could have understood. For her, the cross was a powerful assent to the conviction that had been pounding in her chest these many days–a sign of her holiness in the midst of something ugly, common, and unkind. If you wanted to ask the woman why she was so affected by the sight of the cross, she would not have been able to say. But that is only because the soul, when it wants to talk of the things it holds dearest, loses the power to imagine that words are somehow sufficient, or even relevant, anymore.
The way of the soul is to simply lose itself in the knowledge of that which it desires, and to leave the rest to unfold as it will. If you have doubts about what I have said, you must only ask yourself–“What is the meaning of my life?”–and observe the ponderous silence that follows as your whole being is engrossed in the contemplation of indefinable things.