I sat briefly in the soft rain shower

I sat briefly in the soft rain shower on my rear patio.  The glass top on the table was soon pimpled with beads of rain like condensation on a glass of iced tea.  Surely, I thought, I am as wet as that.  So, I moved to the front before I got uncomfortable.  I sat on the edge of the brick flower bed where there was a little shelter.  The rain got serious.  I had just transplanted grass plugs to the large brown spot in the front yard.  I was happy to see them in the shower.  I’d dug them up from the curb where they were escaping into the street. Transplanting grass like that does not always work.  The rain would help.

As the rain became more visible, I could see it slanting in the wind.  The blue bird on the low branch of the tulip poplar tree was frowning. Soon, she soared off for better cover.  The redbird on my crepe myrtle hopped over into the neighbor’s hedge of plum yews, to wait out the shower that was percussing on my roof.  Just in front of my dirty white tennis shoes the gutter was spilling a waterfall where my daughter accidentally did a “chin-up” while trying to rescue her cat from our roof.  

I was still damp from my seat in the back yard.  The breeze cooled and refreshed.  I felt a bit meditative and listened to the humming in my ears.  I tried to discern if the noise was the blood pulsing in my head or was I hearing the insects and patter of the rain vibrating through the neighborhood.  It was a put-you-to-sleep sound.  A sound that recedes to nothing when someone talks or a radio roars by in a passing car or that maddening song that has downloaded in your memory returns.  I imagine it  is a sound a monk could make use of.  It could replace a mantra or the meditative word contemplatives use in their attempts to find silence.

I thought of the sweet, sublime and yet,seemingly disposable, joy of my moment.  However, my friend Gano has taught me to savor them.  He has taught me that in them are God’s fingerprints.  In them is God’s quiet.  In them is God’s breath.  His presence.

Gano is in prison.  Part of the unintended consequences of his punishment is that he is denied the privilege of sitting and listening to the rain.  He will never be allowed to find a seat in the rain or under a shelter just a foot from the storm.  He cannot sit anywhere unless there is a knot or crowd of grumpy, oppressed men.  He cannot care for plants or be near flowers.  There are no flowers in Florida’s prison compounds.  The absence of pets causes many inmates to collect spiders.

Gano tells me the years of cruel denial and punishment has motivated him to find his heart.  And so, he has discovered an unseen and rarely explored country.  The great interior.  Inner silence.  A home where the Spirit of God is comfortable.  He tells me he hears God’s voice.  Not a chatty voice of one passing the time but a voice that surfs on hope and builds in peace.  God said to him, “You must learn to live in the eternal now.”  

I thought of Gano until the cold of the concrete block wall seeped into my back.  By then the sun was shining about where I figured the Publix was, about ¾ of a mile to the east.  The eternal now, I thought, surely it can be learned without a prison experience.  The silence and the now, as Gano says, are not just empty spaces but libraries that await discovery.  I would get up and climb into the attic to see if the roof was still leaking where I attempted my repairs a while back.  I hoped the blue bird would return.  I have seen him twice today.  

I will seek this silence.  I will seek the eternal now.  I am determined to be happy in Christ.


Louis Templeman