Lent Day 23: A Senseless Reflection on an Alternate Reality

Hello, Coffee Talkers,

I want to share something that happened today, but it won't really make sense. But I think I should try to share it anyway. So here goes.

I was driving my girls to their religious education classes today at the Our Lady of the Desert Family Center/Parish Hall/Whatever That Building Is Called (until it is named in honor of Kevin Olin, which I hope will happen soon). Anyway, we were pulling into the parking lot for the hall.

And as I was driving across the parking lot, I saw a man from the church with whom I have been acquainted for a few years. He was standing in the parking lot next to his car, speaking to another person whom I do not know. Probably another parent dropping off their child for religious ed.

This is when it happened. It. The it I can't really describe in words. And 'it' wasn't really a thing or an event, but a moment, an awareness perhaps? In that moment, I saw the man I know, and for a moment I did not know him. I had a sense that what I saw was, in some way, not real. Not that it was an illusion, but that there was something else, some other reality, far more real than what I was seeing or was aware of.

Trying to describe it or put words to it cheapens the experience, but human language is all I have to try to convey it. The words I use fall so short because they seem to convey something familiar. But what happened in that momentary flash was entirely unfamiliar. It was not even a moment that I can define or fully process. When I try to, I can only relate it to things that I have seemed to know. I couldn't define it as God, or Heaven, or Universe, or anything at all. This was inherently different, wholly other, entirely unknown.

Perhaps, like REM, I've said too much; I haven't said enough.

And then, after it, I had a memory of a dream I had many years ago. Not like a Martin Luther King, Jr. kind of dream, but the sleeping kind. (In those days, I had many dreams, the sleeping kind, that would come to fruition in some strange way during waking hours. I don't know why.) In the dream, I was in Colorado. I was visiting friends (whom I did not know, yet they were friends). And it was nighttime. We sat outside, in a grassy area, a courtyard near an apartment building, perhaps. And then the courtyard became a field. And the sky. I sat in a lawn chair, and something happened with the sky. I was the only one who detected the change. It was a change that, while it was entirely beyond description or comprehension, completely altered my understanding of time and space.

Alright, that's enough trying to describe things which cannot be communicated with the excessive use of italicization for one evening.

As always, thanks for stopping by, and be assured of my prayers.

Peace and all good,
Leslie