Sep 29, 2012

"Oh," I said.


I've tried to stay away from imagining specific answers to my prayers, but I think it's safe to imagine what the effect would be.  I explained that in a prevous post, but I also have a recent and vivid example of the kind of sudden insight I'd expect from a revelation.  It has to do with something I found recently that looked a lot like this graphic:


After my father died, we had to sort out his house.  Eighty-one years of his memories were tucked into corners,  closets, drawers, and boxes. It was overwhelming to try to make sense of it all, even though we knew the basic framework of Dad’s story and his life.

My father was a scientist, and so I wasn’t surprised to come across across a stack of glossy papers that appeared to be chemical test results of some kind.  Bleeding out horizontally from the vertical middle of the page were two symmetrical gray stains of slightly different shades, kind of like a Rorschach test. I was tempted to throw them out as garbage, but I set them aside.

When I came back to them later that day, my brother was with me, and I asked him if he knew what these were.  “They’re pictures of the old cabin!” he said enthusiastically, telling me that our grandfather used to own a family cabin on one of the lakes near Dad’s home town. 

Then my brother took the pages from my hand, turning them sideways to view them. Viewed sideways, those vertical chemical stains transformed into faded black-and-white images of a lakeshore.  The old pictures were taken from across the water, and the water’s reflection created the symmetrical “stain.”

“Oh,” I said. 

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