Theophanies

My relationship with God as well as my faith in God is a scattered one. As a child I regularly talked to God-sometimes mentally and sometimes verbally. I was more of a talker; he was more of a listener. Still, my faith and my connection to God was strong. I knew little of religion or prayer, but I felt God in every fiber of my being. As I grew older, my talks with God grew fewer and far between. 

Around 19 years old, I found myself at the first real cross-roads in my life. I was living in a small coastal town...I was still a child but also a mother...I was recently heartbroken and desperate for guidance. I believed I had lost all spiritual intuition regarding my own life and felt clueless on how to proceed and where to go. I began visiting the beach regularly for meditation and also to plead to God for "a sign." Every day, I would only be met with the wind in my face and sound of seagulls and ocean waves. Every day I would return home feeling that my prayers had either been drowned by the sea or carried away in the wind before reaching God's ears. I felt no reciprocation or reassurance from him and I was losing faith. I went out to the beach for one final attempt...I grew quite hysterical in my "prayers" because I was feeling particularly helpless, clueless, and desperate and I knew it would be my last time asking God to send me a sign on what direction to take my life. Again, I met with emptiness. I had my feet in the sand, on a small dune covered in beach grass. I turned away to go home, when suddenly a voice boomed at me within my own head so loud and clear that it startled me and made me tense. The voice had a tone of annoyance in it and said simply, "Fine! You want a sign? Come back to this exact spot tomorrow and you will have your sign." I returned home with a strange sense of delirium and brushed off my experience as such. The next day, I took my daughter out for a walk. I had completely forgotten about my "moment with God" the night before. I had planned to avoid the beach and stroll towards downtown instead. However, the sound of sirens rushing West captured my curiosity and we walked toward to the beach instead to see what was going on. As soon as the beach came in to view, I saw that there were fire trucks and firefighters putting out a tiny fire in the beach grass....at the same spot I had been standing the night before! My heartbeat quickened and butterflies flew in my stomach as I realized it. God had been listening to me after all. I spent a lot of time trying to decide what God's "sign" was supposed to mean. Was there a special meaning that should have been obvious to me? Was he making a joke? My questions were never answered and I still felt as clueless about my life and my future as I did before that moment, but my faith in God was at least restored again, (even if only temporarily). 

Over a decade later, I was enrolled at the university and was taking a course on The Bible as Literature. I was not a particularly religious person; quite the opposite actually. The thought of taking a bible class nauseated me and worried me. I could hear the voices from elementary school coming back to haunt me...all my classmates taunting me with, "You're going to go to HELL because you don't believe in JESUS." ( I was raised in a Jewish household.) But, I enrolled anyway because I needed the credits and it was the only course in the category I needed that was still open and fit with the rest of my schedule. It turned out to be one of my favorite and most memorable courses at the university. I even deliberately registered for another course taught by the same professor. Both courses helped spark some long overdue inflection on my spirituality and my place in the world. For one of the courses, the professor required us to keep a journal that we turned in. In my journal, I wrote about my fire on the beach experience. At the next class, the topic was "theophanies" and the professor commented that God did not only reveal himself in biblical times, that there are indeed still "burning bushes" today. I couldn't help but notice the professor's glance in my direction as he said this. I etched the moment in my memory and go back to it each time I feel the branches in my soul start to rustle and creep toward the light shining through the cracks in the door...the door that's always closed, but if approached at the right time, epiphanies and stirrings of  understanding can be found like rays of light seeping through the cracks.