Special requests

The minute you start having any kind of faith, it's amazing how creative your praying can get. Once you believe that God is involved in your life on an hourly basis, and that you can have an immediate experience of His presence, and that He is not after all at roughly the distance from you of the M87 galaxy, praying becomes no chore at all.

I made a special request of the Lord recently. (Never would have done that in the past.) It happened on a day that I was overcome with a sensation of intense beauty. To be overcome with beauty is to know a moment of transcendence, and to have that is to desire it again.

I asked the Lord if he would grant me to taste beauty every day, even just a fleeting glimpse of it. (He knew what I meant: I was requesting not only to be presented with objective beauty, but also the subjective apparatus-to be given the capacity to be overwhelmed.)

Then I went on my way and did not always remember my petition. But the Lord remembered, and daily he has been coming through with delight. One day it was a flurry of swallows that crossed my path with their distinctive swooping and darting flight pattern and their glistening white underbellies.

Another day it was a sunset that took my breath away. And another day, my daughter called me upstairs urgently to see the bruised purples and tangerine celestial farewell from a second-story window-something uncharacteristic of her.

Day before yesterday I was riding through the snow in my friend's SUV and she turned on "Scarborough Fair" by Simon & Garfunkel that played through her wonderful sound system. (My car is a clunker with Neanderthal speakers.). It was heaven.

Each time this happened, I suddenly remembered that I had asked the Lord, and so I recognized that these were no random cosmic acts but intimate winks from my Father, the giver of perfect gifts, with Whom there is no shadow of turning.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.