I open my eyes to a glaring sun nestling into the horizon. Streaks of red, orange and gold break through a vast, darkening blue sky. Cooled grass unfurls from beneath my legs, stretching downward, producing people of all sizes and shapes and colors. Somewhere nearby, unseen, a river presses through a deep canyon. I imagine the weight, the power. I know it only as a force.
Rising up from each blade of grass and the dense, rich earth: music. An ethereal refrain envelops my body, unchaining me from the ground. I rise to greet the evening’s light, and the gold and the warmth overcome my face, my lips, my eyes. What is this new fire?
Ashes, ashes, we all fall…
It is irresistible. My hands reach for heaven, longing to graze just a fragment of this overflow into my world. I close my eyes again and bask in its warmth as a breeze whispers across my shoulders and outstretched arms.
A song breaks in. It has come to me from beyond blue or purple or black, even beyond the glittering lights far above, rippling across the hillside and into the canyon where the water churns and tumbles over and upon itself, eating away stone and edge and sand.
My lips move effortlessly, intertwined with the cadence, finding their place in an unearthly chorus.
As quickly as it captured me, the fire slips just out of my grasp, settling somewhere nearby. I stand close enough to be warmed by its presence, wrapped in ribbons of light. A gift for the divine.
Open your eyes.
The people.
Only I am unseated, am unable to be seated.
Oppressive shadow rises up from within the canyon, throwing itself over the crowd like a heavy, unfamiliar blanket. The melody that gripped my soul is disturbed. Notes on the hillside – dissonant, divisive, merciless – clash with the choir of all created things.
He’s somewhere behind me. I know he hears. And I must speak.
“I don’t understand.” My frantic eyes bounce from one distraction to the next. Accusations. Grumblings. Voices and activities – needless things. All needless things next to the fire. “Why am I the only one singing?”
I am desperate. I feel his gaze upon my back, heavy with sadness and in control. Grieved and victorious. Raging water and consuming fire.
Somehow, my anxious heart finds his and is comforted.
Another breeze crosses over my back and shoulders, pulling my hair in front of my eyes, obscuring all but the brightest rays of the sun. I’d been waiting my whole life to hear one voice, and had never known.
And he spoke to me.
“Brittany, don’t you worry about what everyone else is doing. You just keep singing.”
cluttered closet theology 