The Great Mystery

There is something mysterious here; something I can sense or feel somehow when I slow down or stop my busy-ness on a bright cool and warm autumn day. When I pay attention, there is something wonderful that I want to absorb or be absorbed into. I want to share it with my children--I want them to know this wonderful, unknowable mystery. I know the mystery has to do with God, and is somehow God. I require my children to attend church, in part, for this reason--I know the Mystery of God is talked about there--maybe they will catch It, or He will catch them. The Mystery, however is somehow evasive, though perfectly attainable. It transcends the church. There are those who sit in the midst of It knowingly, and those who sleep in It unknowingly, and I have been and am both.
When a black and white striped insect lands clumsily on my shirt, as just now, with its constantly alternating up and down striped antennae, there is the Mystery! When I hear my toolshed door squeaking lazily in response to flowing air, which also whispers in the big live oak while the squirrel barks constantly in the woods nearby and the chickadee flutters and chirps overhead: In each of them individually and in all of them collectively--there is the Mystery!  And It is in me.
[A Cloudless Sulphur surveyed the yard, bright yellow sun reflecting off his wings, then disappeared over the housetop.]
Oh God, I long to absorb and be absorbed in the Mystery! I long to overcome dualism--the experience of being pulled away from the awareness of the Mystery, into the "mundane" world of routine. I pray that I might carry the sense of the mysterious --an awareness of its omnipresence--into all the phases and movements of my life; to accept the bleaker, sleeping states as a necessary element of the Mystery, giving It color and definition. I long to stop longing and to die in the Mystery. I long to rise above the fretful hurry of trying to get "this" done before it's time to do "that". What is "this" and "that" if not opportunities to fly on the wings of the Mystery--yea, the very Mystery Itself? When I am fully aware of the Mystery, then I am at one--I have atonement. Please Lord, make me willing to suffer, and to find peace in suffering, as in rest.