"...listening to You I get the music..."

"See me,
feel me,
touch me,
heal me"

This line from the rock opera "Tommy" helped me swim up from dreaming this morning.  It felt like there was a mini Woodstock version of their historic 1969 performance under my pillow. More of the song's lyrics popped me up and out from under the covers...ready to discover what today had to offer:

"Listening to you I get the music.
Gazing at you I get the heat.
Following you I climb the mountain.
I get excitement at your feet!
Right behind you I see the millions.
On you I see the glory.
From you I get opinions.
From you I get the story."

This is where I'm staying today.  Following God's voice -- the Christ in my consciousness, sitting at His feet…where all the excitement of experiencing spiritual healing, transformation, awakening is happening…from here I can catch the waves of joy and ride them all the way into shore over and over again.. 

There are millions…billions…no, an infinite host of hearts to join with in singing a silent hymn of praise…when we are listening for His version of the story.  His is the only opinion that matters to me: "And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good….thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them."

This morning it was like I had a set of spiritual earbuds in my ears, and a God-loaded iPod in my heart.  Listening to Him I am getting the music.  Sometimes the music is a pumping, driving beat…a surging, soaring song of joy and praise…a backbeat of "I am that I AM" as constant as an African drum song.  Other times the rhythm is as soft as brush strokes on a tympani.  Only the most silent heart, keening for its message, hears the song of stillness…"nevertheless, nevertheless…" beneath each gentle shush, shush, shush.  But it's always there. 

I remember some years ago I was perplexed by the use of the word "fear" in the Bible in both a negative and positive context.  There were references to "fear no evil" and to "fear the Lord".  The questioning persisted like the voice of a cricket under the stairs. As I sat with this conundrum one afternoon it occurred to me that the early wordsmiths were not creators, they were only men and women trying to describe what they were experiencing.  The word "fear" was their attempt at attaching a linguistic symbol to a feeling or experience so that they could describe it later to someone else. 

Mary Baker Eddy states in her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection:  

"After my discovery of Christian Science, most of the knowledge I had gleaned from schoolbooks vanished like a dream.

   Learning was so illumined, that grammar was eclipsed. Etymology was divine history, voicing the idea of God in man's origin and signification."

Well, I thought, "she is my Leader, I think I'll follow her on this road too."  And so I began to reason, "Since God is the only Cause and Creator, every idea, every word, must have a divine origin."  And in looking for that divine origin and signification I could start with the etymology, the root, of the word symbols that early linguists had used to describe those experiences and feelings.   I went to a very large old dictionary in the library where I was studying and praying that day and in the etymological definition for the seventh version of the word listed there was this definition: "focus: to be so transfixed on something that you can't think about anything else".  This made such sense to me.  Of course I could fear the Lord.  I could so focus on God that I couldn't be aware of anything else.

This was the divine history of this word, concept or idea.  This was the God-based version of those feelings that I could reclaim as divine. 

So…today I am sitting at the feet of Him...walking wtih my Father's hand in mine.  Gazing into the face of a Love so deep that I can feel the heat…the warmth of His affection for His creation…including me, and mine…and all.

This is my song today,
Kate