Such is the world that God did create: A world so lovely and so peaceful that when you see it once again you will cry with joy and forget your sadness in an instant. There will be no long remembering of regrets, no feeling badly for all the years in which you saw this not. There will merely be a glad “Aha!” as what was long forgotten is returned to you. You will but smile at the childish games you played, and have no more regrets than you would have for your childhood. Your innocence will stand out clearly here, and never again will you doubt that the world that God created belongs to you and you to it. All your vast wanderings will be seen for what they are. All that you desired will be revealed as only two desires, the desire to love and the desire to be loved. Why wait to see that these desires are all that call you to the strange behavior you display? C:9.47-48

I came out to the cabin today knowing I wanted to contemplate innocence. It was sparked somewhat by the “Miracles and More” on-line event I wrote of last week, and this is because I saw innocence on Jayem’s face when he spoke of his interactions with Jesus…and on mine too. It is a fumbling sort of innocence, there in the way we laughed. Both of us did pretty much the same thing when it came to describing talking to Jesus. No matter how obstinate we can be, (which we hint at) our faces, our gestures, our words, reveal our innocence before Him….

I’m saying this because Jayem and Marianne Williamson closed out the Miracles and More week and, being able to watch Jayem, to see his face “head on” while he was speaking of Jesus to another human being (not filming a video, or teaching a class)—I could see it. I saw the innocence like a revelation.

It’s 7 a.m. (okay, two minutes to) and I’m so glad this came to me. Watching Marianne was an experience too. She looked so tired and almost ill. Then when she got talking, she was like a juggernaut. She rattled out so many words in the space of 45 minutes! She was good, wise, and warm, and for a brief minute it deflated me. That, and the host not being able to bring herself to say the name of A Course of Love at the end of the program.  Ah well. Forgiven. Lost in the fascination of seeing that innocence. That looking back in wonder.

Asked questions directly about the encounter with Jesus, this dumbfoundedness, this “how do I say it” feeling, this pause. And there in the pause the look: innocence.

We are innocent in the face of God—so strangely and precisely like children. We—stamp our feet. We “get into it” so that we’ll complain to Jesus like a friend and then are humbled by his response…over and over again. But we’re exalted too, as if the humbling and exalting go together. Dang if it isn’t like the way it is with children, and how when you’re a kid—okay, at any age—when you hear what you need to hear, you love the giver of the words and yourself in one burst of the knowing of love, a sort of “washing over you” knowing that gives you comfort and lifts your troubles without taking them from you.

We laugh at ourselves. We titter.

This morning by a trick of the eye the insides of the cabin are cast onto the outside of the cabin so that there in the window is the tree—and the colorful shawl pinned over the window behind the desk. (I wish I could merge these two photos into one, for that is how it appeared.) There, in the reflection, the shawl is draped, intertwined in the tree’s branches. There—the white of the antique lamp, the paper weight. The shelf beyond the desk is also there, but hardly any of its structure, so that it looks as if the book facing out, Love of The Grace Trilogy, and beyond that a partial silhouette of Virginia Wolfe’s face, are floating. And closer in A Course of Love, sitting weightily atop an open and flattened copy of The Give Self. The works of my life represented “out there” save for Creation of the New, which is here but sitting beneath the table lamp out of view.

I keep wondering if I had a camera if I could capture the reflection like I have many times captured the shadows of the outer world as they fall into the cabin – the whole limb of a tree waving against the wall or the desk or both. But those are shadows. This is a re-creation.

Honestly, I can hardly get over the clearness of this representation that has appeared before my eyes in such great detail. Now the desk if fading away at its edges so that there is only a corner of the desk, and the tree limbs have infiltrated. They no longer fall across it but take the whole middle out of it. There is a desk with a young tree growing out of its insides and a little farther over, the curved arms of the desk chair.

I am completely out of view, hiding at the edge of the table where the sun stays out of my eyes. I keep glancing around the corner, watching the changing scene. Now in prominence is a wood cylinder with round wooden coasters never used. Now the framed photo of me at Gethsemane under the gate saying “God Alone.” Now they hover, the desk completely gone from view.

The seeing of yourself and another is like this too. And it arises as an innocence of seeing that reveals a blending of the inner and the outer, the human and the divine.