Zoom Chat Conundrum

...a chat box on a Zoom call dotted with strangers was no place for such a divine memory to live.

Not the kind of “Zoomies” Maddy had in mind.

While participating in a training on how to merge Christian faith and advocacy work in the midst of the climate crisis we were asked to pause for a brief moment and identify a place in nature where we experience God. For some reason the question stumped me. I am an avid nature seeker, recreating and writing and sleeping outside often. My life has been blessed with a diverse range of nature experiences, each of which involved communion with the Creator. Yet I could not answer the question. 

Out of all of the places I’ve been blessed to explore and relish, not a single one crept to the keyboard for me to enter into the Zoom’s chat function. Eventually I participated, as the answers from the others flooded in, and I typed out: northern new mexico mountains. 

This isn’t a lie. But it didn’t seem right, either. I had hoped for a more mystical response. Probing my experiences with God in nature left me disoriented when “that one sacred place” never rose to the surface. For a brief moment I experienced a spike of shame, I was a failed nature mystic. Howard Thurman had his Oak tree, but I had a blank stare. 

After completing the training I set out to probe my psyche for an answer to the answer I was unable to identify. The problem, I surmised, was twofold: One, it was the assumption each of us had that place. And two, that we had in fact, experienced God, as they say. I have had experiences with God. The kind you can remember and enter into the chat of a Zoom call. The profound, memorable, stamped-on-your-soul type of experiences. I’ve had them on numerous occasions in the great outdoors. Most recently, and maybe most often, they take place in a river bed. But I think the thing my spirit took exception to in the moment of the surprise question was that a chat box on a Zoom call dotted with strangers was no place for such a divine memory to live. 

Meditating on my reluctance, or perhaps inability, to pull forth a specific place, which would have been linked to a specific time, would have been to divulge a secret of spiritual significance. I believe it was Thomas Merton who spoke of the unique power in protective spiritual secrecy. Perhaps I’d stored that advice within the moat protecting the inward island of my soul. Encounters with the Creator adrift within, safe, insulated, bobbing along for no one to see but me. Or perhaps I made the concept up and Merton proposes more unrestrained sharing. 

Identifying the secret inward island which houses the encounters of my nature mystic self, a self I struggle to hug tight, is filled with many rooms, each room furnished blue, the art of different rivers splashing the walls, hanging on display. It occurred to me, reflecting, that in the moment the question was posed my past experiences must have been iced over. Only I knew what was flowing beneath the cold, but it was invisible. The numbness kept expanding. 

Sitting here now, after the fact, a vision of a poem rose on the ripples that I could not see, but I could feel the Presence. And then the words of William Stafford whispered,

… We know

the current is there, hidden; and there

are comings and goings from miles away

that hold the stillness exactly before us. 

What the river says, that is what I say. 

Now I know, during this training, I wish I had typed out “What the river says, that is what I say” and maybe someone would have known this could also mean the northern new mexico mountains, my secret safe with them.