God in Texas

I remember walking down the road toward the cotton fields in Abbot when I was six or seven years old, and finding a piece of quartz. I didn't know it was a mineral. I thought it was a rock, a curious shiny purple stone. The more I looked at it in the morning sunlight, the deeper I saw the shapes and colors and intricate intensity in the quartz. It felt very warm in my hand. I glanced down at the ground and saw tiny bits of rock shining up at me from the dirt, and I had a flash of illumination. This piece of quartz was not a separate thing from the shiny bits, or from anything else. Everything was one thing held together by some power.

In school and in church they tried to knock this awareness out of me by teaching other ways of viewing the world, but I never lost it entirely. . . .

I recently saw an interview with one of the hostages who had escaped his kidnappers in Lebanon after a few months of being blindfolded and chained alone in a room. He told the interviewer that during the first week of confinement, he started talking to himself. Then suddenly he realized he wasn't talking only to himself - he was talking to God. "It's true," he said. "I can talk to God, and it's real. Those guys in the Old Testament who said they talked to God, they really did it. I never believed any of this stuff before. I thought anybody who said they talked to God was crazy. But in that room I found out I was talking to God, and God was answering me through my intuition - not a Charlton Heston voice booming through the roof. God was talking to me through my inner being. You can talk to God, too. Try it, you can do it."

The interviewer switched the subject, clearly a little nervous, but you could tell from the look on the ex-hostage's face that he was a changed person. It had taken an extreme circumstance to get his full attention, but when he began to hear his inner voice responding to his cries and his anger, he learned to talk to God.

You can learn to do it.

Sit on top of a mountain in the Hill Country at sunset, looking off at the mountains and ridges poking up as far as you can see to the west, and pretty soon your inner self begins to see the smoke signals put up by the ancient Indians on the distant ridges, one after the other, and you will reach an inner peace that becomes a conversation with God. This is called meditation, and it is a much easier way to reach God than being handcuffed in a bare room in Beirut. But you don't need either a peaceful, meditative situation or a hostile, threatening situation to talk to God. I talk to God all the time.

-Willie Nelson