For John O.

There is a pregnant pause, an unintended pause, an awkward pause, a futile pause. But the most sublime pause is the pure pause of one who consciously and fully gives into someone, something, some place, or some act.

The pure pause is meditation on steroids. When thinking slows and then stops, when breathing finds its rhythms in the air, when being weaves filaments of sound and sight and smell around you, this is the pure pause.

Those who know the pure pause know porch swings and tree stands. You might find them at the end of a dock, legs crossed, at sunrise or dusk. Or sitting at a desk, pen in hand, in the presence of time’s most glorious ideas. Those who know the pure pause know the signs of its impending arrival and, when it washes over them, they momentarily melt.

In a nature column, British poet Alice Oswald writes:

If you bend a branch until it’s horizontal, the sap will slow to a stopping point: a comma or a colon, made of leaves grown into one another and over one another and hardened. Out of this pause comes a flower, which unfolds itself in spirals, as if the leaf form, unable to keep to its line, had begun to pivot.

This is the pure and perfect pause. Comma or colon, it stops us, bursts into bloom, and then unfolds itself in spirals. When we grow weary of doing, when we find it impossible to keep to our lines, we pivot in pure pause.

In the middle of a moonlit night, a just-fed baby in my arms, I have rocked myself into such commas. And my cats have occasionally purred me into such colons. Still, I struggle to punctuate my life and crave the commas and colons that appear to come so easily to others.

For I know that God waits for us inside the pure pause, His still small voice no longer still nor small here. In this pause is the center of wisdom and the eye of eternity.

And in this pure pause, one may find a house of prayer.

These I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.                                                                   Isaiah 56:7