For all of my twittering, facebooking, g-mailing, blogging and blackberrying, and so forth, the truth is that I most often find myself in sacred space, in the presence of God Himself, when I dare to put that all away, step away from my techno-centered routines, and simply be.  At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, I most often see God when I stop texting and start looking around at the world God made with the eyes God blessed me with, tasting the air on my tongue and taking in the world around me rather than confining my experience of the world to that which appears on a small, digital screen.

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Most recently, it has been the reality of the summer—a warm breeze picking through the branches and leaves of the live oaks, the whirring of bugs and beetles high above me, the taste of honeysuckle and thyme in the air—that has brought me back to myself.  There isn’t much cell phone service worth using on the streets near my parent’s northern California home, so I have been forced to set down my phone and amuse myself with my surroundings instead, packing away the email, facebook, or catch-up calls that are so often a feature of my more urban hiking adventures in Philadelphia.  As I walk down the dusty trail that lines highway 130, my ears prick to the gentle rustle of oleander and wild turkey, and I find myself reeling with the recognition that I am a part of something bigger than myself, that the signs of life around me are small reminders of something deeper and grander than anything I could imagine, something that could so easily go unnoticed and then suddenly bowl me over in a instant of blazing clarity.

When John Calvin wrote of the glory of and specialness of creation, I heard what he was saying.  And I recognized myself in his remark that we too often fail to see the beauty that is before us.  Every once in a while, however, a thin space, as the Celts called it, opens before our eyes, and the truth of the world and God’s presence in it is clear to us.  As Calvin would put it, we find that in God we are given spectacles to see the sacred quality of all things, which hide in plain sight before me.

So what are the things that stun me back to the recognition of the Sacred?  There is no pattern that I can discern, no perfect formula for figuring it out.  While I am often bowled over by that which is natural, I also find that God can strip me of my ignorance of the sacred around me in the most mundane or even complicated of circumstances.  I see it in the pattern of a quilt made by my own hands and a well-written poem, or even in the midst of the fray as much as the beauty of a mountain range.  And I could argue that it takes practice to see the sacred with more clarity, and yet even that isn’t always the case.  I have learned that the world will surprise my fuzzy eyes into focus as shockingly when I am looking for the sacred as it will when I am doing everything but.

Ultimately, these moments of recognition are both a mystery and a gift, for like God they are beyond my ability to grasp them, and filled with grace and wisdom.  They surpass knowledge and understanding and are filled with Truth.  They bring me closer to God, to myself, and to my fellow inhabitants on this great, sacred sphere that we call home.  For that, I am thankful.