As I said last time, Greg and I are trying and make it through our own little perfect storm. And so I continue to try to capture the things that have helped. The second one is something I read in a book in high school, about what an ethnographer learned from African pygmies. I can’t say exactly  why it keeps coming back to me, other than that it has to do with how you call out to God (or, in their case, the gods.)

It comes from a passage in a book called “The Forest People (**)” The book details Colin Turnbull’s study of the Mbuti pygmies of Africa in the late ’50s, and the section I’m thinking of goes something like this: There was a season of bad weather and other disasters, and the whole village was affected. The food was in short supply, and other things had gone wrong. And the people came together and did a different ritual than Turnbull had seen before. He assumed that they would call on their gods with grief and loud wailing, but their ritual didn’t seem like that at all, and he couldn’t understand. One of the pygmies explained to him, “We know our gods are always good to the forest people, so we know that if things are wrong, it’s because they have fallen asleep. We call now to wake them up. That’s all we need to do.”

There is something of real faith in that, something that I have never forgotten. But we don’t believe that God sleeps. So what is it that sleeps and needs waking? Me. I need waking. And not all of me, but part of me.

It’s the part alluded to in the book “Out of the Depths Have I Cried.(**)” Speaking of these dark periods in our lives, the authors said:

Through increased consciousness, we are attempting to develop a relationship with our depths as a way of touching what is shining through them as a transparency of Divinity, that is, the light of another being and life. ,,, Thus, what we seek is not an ‘experience,’ but God Himself. What is important is not an emotional, psychological, physical or otherwise experience, but that our receptivity may be increased.

But I’ll have more from this book the next time around. It has more to offer.