Walking the dog on a mid-summer's night

I slip out into the night for the mundane walking our daughter’s dog who is visiting for a few weeks.  As routine and uneventful as it is, an evening’s liturgy has been established, largely wordless.  All I have to do to begin the dance is pick up her ragged braided leash, and she awakens even from her deepest doggy sleep and races joyfully to the door.  No big deal to me, but a great adventure to her. 

 

The probably-unnecessary leash is slipped over her head, the heavy iron door opened, three steps out, two stair treads down to the sidewalk.  The heavy humid blanket of a mid-summer’s night hangs like a thick southern curtain blocking out any breathable air, the deep heat of the sultry afternoon still radiating from the concrete.  A mere momentary affliction.  Two minutes, maybe three, and I will be back inside where the air conditioner moans endlessly.

Nothing appears but darkness outside, but inside my head, my list of what still needs to be done stands like an impatient buzzing crowd encompassing me, pieces of conversations stuck in ragged incomplete bits in my thoughts, that which has worked its way to the surface, and what has not yet been, like a deep loss I step carefully through.

I am just walking a dog, that is all, but I am not alone, surrounded by things not left behind, nor forgotten, some packed in boxes and taped closed, dare they come spilling out at an inconvenient moment.

The tectonic plates of the universe always seem to shift unexpectedly in the ordinary, that split second when something completely new infiltrates through the cracks, not just an open door to another room, but revealing a different universe already set up and humming, inviting me in.

I wait for the dog on the edge of the dark field.  Come on, come on, come on.  She pulls at her leash, meanders and sniffs, her paws making little crunching sounds in the dead august grass.  This is such a waste of time, I think out loud.

And then, I look up.

The vastness of the stars surprises me, waiting there all along.  Suddenly, I no longer hear the words for all the thunder, these important things I was pondering, abruptly nothing at all in the immensity of glory.  I am now swimming in the heavens, not in what I had been doing but created for, my smallness swallowed up by tiny pinpoints of light all around me, distracting, disorienting, waylost in the brilliant unfolding of awe and order emerging out of chaos.

The deafening reverence of sight is simultaneously translated into sound and touch and meaning, a new language taking shape in a thousand new dimensions.  I cannot breathe, no longer stifled by the restraints of humidity but shocked by eternity without limits at all.

I am no longer standing on asphalt on the edge of a field overgrown with weeds, but on holy ground.  The magnificence of the stars blocks my steps back to the ordinary. I am unable to disregard anymore the intense intimacy seamlessly woven into the universe, nor explain away the wonder.

And when I come back through the door, my husband glances up from his book and asks, “Out walking the dog?”

I only nod and smile at what I had been missing. "You wouldn't believe."

He determines the number of the stars,

and He gives to all of them

                          their names.

                                Psalm 147. 4

Even in the mystery,

    there is nothing random,

    nothing “just happens.”

Even in the darkness

   or thunderous silence,

    we are all divinely appointed,

                strategically placed,

beyond the walls of comprehension,

    called by name

                                 beloved.