Feeling Those God Vibrations

Yesterday I used a term “God vibes” to try to describe the resonance that we experience as a kind of rightness, and kind of authenticity in ourselves, those times when we arrive at a place in ourselves that feels like our home.

Like a lot of people who grew up in the 60’s, I’ve almost always had a guitar. When I was in High School, my mom drove me to Sears where I bought my first one, fully equipped with six strings, a shoulder strap, a demonstration record (one of those 14” black round things that you played on a phonograph) and a pitch pipe with the notes of each of its six strings. When the strings are first put on the guitar they continue to go “out of tune”, their note going lower and lower as they stretch for the first few days. So I learned that the pitch pipe was my friend. The darned guitar sounded bad enough with my struggling attempts, but when it was out of tune, it was even worse. I practiced in the basement, as far from my poor mother as I could. Those first few days required me to tune those strings again and again. I’d blow the pipe of the string I was tuning, and then tighten that string until it matched the sound that the pipe was making. When it matched, I could kind of feel it in my ears; at a certain point the dissonance, the irritating wrongness between the pitch pipe and the string would disappear, and this kind of relief, this warmth and purity would replace it, soothingly.
The pitch pipe held the true note of the string in its unchanging reed. And we, in our deepest center, hold the true note of our humanity, written there by our Designer. I can remember struggling with this tuning procedure, listening hard for that wrongness to soften into rightness, for the dissonance to flatten out into that sweet, soft resonance, like when someone’s face softens, all tension dissolves. Remember the exercise with the thumbs in "On Wings of Desire?" If not, (click here for link) try it now.  It's the Ahhhh.
We have three ways of feeling these God Vibes, all of the ways that we use on this journey. Fasting as a reminder of our relationship lets us know we are not alone as we walk this path. Entering the Stories draws us in, invites us not only into the story, but into our own hearts, where we find the source of this resonance, this rightness in the feelings we experience there. Our nightly Examen recalls the times of sweetest resonance and harshest dissonance in our day and draws us to feel our natural preference for resonance, for our rightness. And awareness of others sounds in us our true note, evoking our humanity, awakening in us the human response of compassion.


 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.