FOR MOST OF THE CENTURY: AND GOD TALKED BACK (PART 14)

Jean Bell Mosley's new autobiography, "For Most of the Century," is only available in serialized form in the Southeast Missourian. Return each week for her continuing story.

Loughboro school days now seem so far away, yet so near and dear. Each day brought something new to my mind. I read about "The Spider and the Fly," "The Leak in the Dike," "The Song of Hiawatha," "Pandora's Box." Oh, how I could relate to Browning's line. from "Pippa Passes," "... The hillside's dew-pearled ... The lark's on the wing ... The snail's on the thorn ... God's in his heaven. ..."

My lark was the meadowlark which, with seemingly dozens of others, ran out their silvery cheer over the wide meadows as I passed through. There was dew and thorn trees. As for God, Browning said God was in His heaven. To me that sounded as if He resided in a fixed place, way off. My little brother had gone to heaven, so they said, and I never saw him again. I would have liked God nearer. Although I knew from early teaching at home and Sunday School that God couldn't be seen, I would have liked to think He was walking through the meadows with me, up old woods roads, down along the spring branch, much like an imaginary playmate I'd had when Lou wasn't around. I talked to her, waited for her to come through gates behind me before closing them, pushed her in the empty swing. I would have liked to talk to God as familiarly as I did to her or Lou and to hear, feel or see some words as He would talk back to me.

Some have a real jolting spiritual experience such as St. Paul on the road to Damascus, C.S. Lewis on his way to the zoo, John Wesley at a small meeting at Aldersgate. Mine was as soft as an autumn breeze, as gentle as a falling leaf and took me several years to get the full import of it. Some would say, cynically, that it was wishful thinking, creating something that was not and is not there. They would be wrong.

My conversations with God seemed one-way. Simple Now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep prayers were said as soon as we could master the words. I had, one glorious spring day, even before I had begun going to school, climbed to the barn loft, crawled over that low, protective wall and dropped down to a lower loft. From there I looked, through some missing boards, over the countryside. The nearby wild plum thicket was in bloom, sending its spicy fragrance into the loft. Chickens were cackling. Trees in the adjoining orchard were in bloom. In the meadow I saw our cows, heard their bells ringing and for some reason I wanted to talk with God. So I did, in this manner: "God bless Mama. God bless Daddy. God bless Lillian and Lucille. God bless Grandpa and Grandma." I then ventured into unlearned petitions, "God bless our horses, cows and chickens." It was the only way I knew to pray. A voice from below said, "I hear you up there saying your prayers." It scared me. I thought that if God ever spoke to me in audible words, it would be from above. When I realized it was Lou, I was somehow embarrassed.

But later on, when I was about ten years old, this happened: I was walking home from school. I cannot now remember why I was alone. It was October and October at its best: blue skies, crickets' songs, and poplar trees shimmying in slow motion, losing scraps of their clothing.

Rays from the lowering sun were full in my face, warm and autumn tender. The world seemed to have a heartbeat and I had found its rhythm. It pulsated with a beauty and a joy. All things around me seemed to say, "Well, hello!" It was as if heretofore things, although lovely and wonderful, had been slightly off center and now they, or I had suddenly slid into place. There was a sweet foreverness about it, a quality I now, years later, can put into words and call, divine contentment.

I had not yet read Thoreau's passage, "This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore." However, when I did so, my mind went swiftly back to that afternoon and I whispered to myself. "Yes, that's the way it was for me too. But there was more."

When I read the Psalm: "He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul," I am back walking that woodsy path again. I remember the liquid murmuring of the nearby river, the sweet-sad odor of dying grasses, and all the other things that had curiously stormed my senses, especially that indefinable something more.

I sat on a tree stump by the side of the path that afternoon, not to critically examine these new feelings -- at ten one hardly does that -- but rather just to let them flow over and through me. It was new and different. I had walked this path hundreds of times, but never had I felt so full of such beautiful emotions. The main one, as I am now able to describe it, was that for the first time I felt that the river, the colorful trees, the crickets, the asters, the weeds, the tree stump, all things, including me, especially me, were a warm and comfortable whole, each a part of the other, a part of the world's heartbeat.

I had not yet read Jacob's exclamation, "Surely the Lord is in this place." In following years when I did so, I smiled at the additional meaning it had for me.

Read the conclusion of jean Bell Mosley's essay "And God Talked Back" next week.

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.