A Sistine Chapel of My Own :: Personal Narrative Religion Essays

A Sistine Chapel of My Own I was almost God, that day. I was outside from the world, looking down upon it, or out at it, from a disparate place, a place not of it. The world looked peaceful, what I could look of it, double-dealing in that respect in the summer sun, but I saw it as one might see a distant galaxy by means of a telescope. A world was in that location, a complex world, perhaps a busy world, possibly withal a world that could turn gagabut I was not of it. I was detached, beyond it, above itan fire observer. The year was 1935, and I was eleven, a boy growing up on a South Dakota farm. This epiphany had an unpretentious settingour outhouse, which was set back into most trees about a hundred feet northwest of the house. I was sitting there in the mordantened interior when I noticed a get hole through the door in front of my face. By pose my eye up close, I could squint through the hole and see outside. The exposure itself was unremarkablethe nearby trees, our h ouse, a large white coordinate with a hip roof, the garden, the hog yard and the road in the distance. solely I was, strangely, not a part of it. It gave me a feeling of fervourof awe. I was away, in some distant place. A higher place. I have tried to explain this experience to myself, but never with hump success. What I was looking at was something I saw every day, and something I could have seen better if I had just opened the door and stepped outside. The scene was as ordinary as anything could be, it would seem bleak to any innovative viewer, just a typical summer day on an severe South Dakota farm in the Dust Bowl era. The feeling didnt even particularly relate to the scene itself the view in another caution would have served as well, I think. But the nail hole was infixed to the experience, as was the room, and being alone there. Being alone in that small, dark space allowed me to separate myself from the world. Perhaps no one knew I was there perhaps no one even knew t here was such a person as me perhaps I really wasnt even a person of the ordinary worldmy usual awareness of self seemed to hang or disappear in there.