Out running an errand to the next village just at dusk at the end of a rainy late-summer day. There's that odd moment when the light grows too dim for colour vision, and all the normal greens turn into a sort of sludgy khaki or dark olive--all but a single hayfield, gone a soft fading gold. The trees, losing all detail, turned monumentally dark against a pewter sky. When the road took me between two banks of cedar, they had transmogrified from the normal swamp to the sort of tangle wherein lie nightmares. Faint patches of ground fog lay over the cornfields and across the road. You could see with the last of the light the sky lowering, lumpy with clouds--only a faint smear of apricot and umber over to the northwest, where sunset had been. And everything felt so still, suspended, silent, hardly breathing, all but for a single streak of lightening, far enough away to be silent, over to the north-east.

My face felt clammy. The air was so thick with moisture that it felt hard to get a decent breath, as though the water vapour had sucked up all the available oxygen, leaving none for breathing purposes. Maybe that's why my mind seemed to be working through molasses. A good thing, that my car knew this highway like I know my upstairs front hall, and that my driving skills are good and deeply embedded; otherwise, I could be in trouble.

There have been times when life itself felt like this: airless, clammy, waiting for something that seemed more foreboding than friendly, not fully dark but dismal and most unclear. You'd prefer a good storm, even if sheets of driving rain forced you off the road to wait it out. A storm has energy to it; it clears the air; it's stimulating, not draining. I always get a charge out of a good storm--free fireworks!

Periods of anxious waiting, on the other hand, can be almost more hellish than periods of pain. At least in pain, you usually have something to keep busy with--managing the pain, if nothing else. But in these times of stillness and half-dark and heavy air, all you feel you can do is to struggle to breathe and not panic.

I don't know: maybe some people never go through periods of anxiety and depression, the spirit's equivalent of lowering weather. But I think it's probably pretty close to universal. Ill health, bad news, a death in the family, some dreaded prospect, something that brings the bad past back, some hitch in your brain's chemical exchanges, and there you are, for what may seem like the indefinite future. I find what's worst is the way I become more and more sensitized to negative stuff. When your skin's clammy, a loving touch takes on too much friction; it becomes annoying, you want to brush the caring hand away--but you still need the love it carries. Oy!

The thing that struck me, though, as I came back into town was this: that God is every bit as fully present in this landscape as God is in broad day or the freshness of dawn or the beauty of a calm evening. The problem is primarily with my senses, not with God. My body can't comfortably handle this combination of temperature and humidity. The colour-perceiving cones in my retina shut up shop when the light intensity drops below a critical level. The sense of foreboding is in my own imagination, coming from my own heart's darkness, not from the cedar swamp. The swamp's just going its own normal innocently swampish business. I'm reading in the horror movies stuff.

Which doesn't make my symptoms and perceptions wrong, something I should pay no attention to. Merely, I have to weave in a reality check or two, an understanding of what's inside-me and what's outside-me. And I should exercise a certain healthy patience with both the weather and myself, realizing that muggy weather always does go away and trusting that "joy comes in the morning".

As I came into town, the last shreds of evening faded and the clouds parted briefly to reveal the thinnest thread of a crescent moon--a curve of bright gold wire, with a star or two dotted near it. And there were the houses, their windows lit warm and bright where people went about their lives, doing dishes, putting babies to bed, settling down in front of the TV. The streetlights had haloes around them, a soft glow that looked almost solid enough to touch. There is always normal out there somewhere, even if we seem to be wandering in the dark, with God quietly beside us.

But don't doubt for a moment that God is quietly present. For as the psalmist says,

If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,"
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.

Too true.

(For Nancy and Neil)