There is a story in my family about my mother's first cousin C.J. Trentham. C.J. Loved to hunt raccoons. It is an all night affair. You start at dusk and finish up at dawn. C.J. raised dogs to hunt with. I think they were blue tick hounds and black and tan hounds. Hunting dogs. Dogs that would tree their prey and not kill it. Dogs that would hold raccoons at at bay and then started baying themselves until the hunters came. This would go on all night through miles and miles of woods. Then at dawn everyone, dogs and men, would load up and go home.
The story goes that one time they were loading up the truck and one of the dogs was missing. My cousin said something like "That's just old Blue. He'll be back in a day or two." Then C.J. took off his jacket and laid it on the far side of the ditch. And sure enough in a couple of days old Blue was there laying on the jacket, waiting to be picked up.
It is not a very good story. Unless you let C.J. stand for God, religion stand for the jacket, and let me stand for old Blue. Then it makes perfect sense. I am a lot like that old dog. I get lost, confused, I ran hard all night, and I just want to go home. I look for the jacket. Something that smells like God. That something is religion. It smells like God to me. It is what was left behind for us to find. For us to wait for the return or answers to our questions or however this thing called life shakes out.
I have found God or parts of Truth in almost every spiritual path I have studied. There are many jackets laying around. I am a Unitarian-Universalist. I believe that there one God and that we all wind up in heaven. Or at home or in nirvana or however you want to couch it. I also believe that we are all one.
So while you ponder what I have written, I'll go back to that jacket. God's around here some place. I can smell it.
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