Kneading Bread

Things have at work have been a little rough the past few weeks, not because of anything overtly bad happening, just that I have been very busy and it has been taking a little bit of an emotional toll. I am not one gifted in bizarre realpolitik of the of the large enterprise that I find myself a member of and times like the past few weeks make me more and more frustrated with the internal hierarchies I realize are all around me. That being said, I received a wonderful little moment of divine comfort, today’s sunrise.

I normally take a 6 AM train to New York every couple of months for business, but because of an event I am attending I left at 5 AM, this gave me the chance to watch the entire sunrise. I deliberately sit on the eastward side in order to see it and today’s early departure allowed me to observe it in a more complete fashion.

First hints of blue on a black field, followed by a more defined cloud cover, gradually getting towards a blush with hints of green, yellow and blue, going to deep crimson, receding to a more defined red band with yellow edges and a blue-tinged sky, finally the sun broke the horizon spilling orange light across the edges of the sky that gradually dissipated the tinges of carmine and gold that hid.

Moments when you feel the presence of God are many times fleeting and ephemeral in our minds. I think this has always been the case, the old testament Jews would see miracles and yet forget and the early first century Christians would many times do the same. Sometimes you witness something incontrovertible in your soul, as the apostles did in the resurrection of Jesus, and it seems that that is more and more uncommon these two thousand years later.

More often I fear that I am am like Noah, in that God has saved me from a mighty disaster and within a few short pages of my life you will find me drunk and naked, passed out and exposing myself. I think part of this stems from the fact that we are so self-centered in our thinking, this makes it easier to file away our interaction with the divine. A sense of selfish-preservation kicks in, our pride will not allow our lives to be impinged upon. If we fail to recognize our pride and tear it down we will find ourselves in an ungrateful position in relationship to our creator. It takes an effort, like a curator of a museum or a librarian, to file away our experiences with God into a place where they can be easily recalled by our future selves. The preservation of artifacts from antiquity does not happen without effort, likewise, the preservation of moments, such as today’s sunrise, do not happen without effort either.