Suddenly a voice which is evidently hunting for me breaks in: “Is this Mr. ——?” “Yes.” “Hold the wire, please.” I am led on with increasing interest and confidence. Somebody somewhere miles away in this invisible world of electrical connections is seeking for me. I forget the multitudinous problems that were besieging me when the telephone first rang, and I listen with suppressed breath and strained muscles. All I get, however, is an immense confusion. There is no coherence or order to anything that reaches me. Faint and far away in some still remoter center than at first I hear clicks and buzzes, vague unmeaning noises, and the dull thud of shifting plugs that connect the lines. Once more a kindly voice breaks in on the confusion, a voice seeking after me from some distant city: “Is this Mr. ——?” “Yes.” “Wait a minute.”
I do wait a minute as patiently as I can. I dimly feel that we are plunging out into yet remoter space, and that I am being connected up with the person who all the time has been seeking me. A low hum of the far-away wire is all I get to repay me for the long wait. I grow impatient. I shout “Hello!” “Is anybody there?” “Do you want me?” Not a word comes back, only endless, empty murmurs of people who have found one another and are talking so far off that the sense is lost in the mere broth of sounds. This dull world inside the telephone seems to be a mad world of noise and confusion but no substance, no real correspondence. I am on the verge of giving the whole business up and of returning to my interrupted tasks, which at least were rational.
Suddenly a voice breaks in, this time a voice I know and recognize. The person who had been seeking me all the time, across these spaces and over this network of interlaced wires, calls me by name, speaks words of insight and intelligence, and gives me a message which moves me deeply and raises the whole tone of my spirit. When finally I “hang up” and return to the things in hand, I have renewed my strength and can work with clearer head and faster pace. The pause has been like a pause in a piece of music. It has been full of significance, and it has helped toward a higher level.
Something like this telephone experience happens in another and very different sphere—a sphere where there are no wires. In the hush and silence, when the conditions are right for it, it often seems as though some one were trying to communicate with us, seeking for actual correspondence with us. We turn from the din and turmoil of busy efforts and listen for the voice. We listen intently and we hear—our own heart beating. We feel the strain of our muscles across the chest. We push back a little deeper and try again. We feel the tension of the skin over the forehead and we note that we are pulling the eyeballs up and inward for more concentrated meditation. All the muscles of the scalp are drawn and we notice them perhaps for the first time. Strange little bits of thought flit across the threshold of the mind. We catch glimpses of dim ideas knocking at the windows for admission to the inner domain where we live. Then, all of a sudden, we succeed in pushing further back. We forget our strained muscles and are unconscious of the corporeal bulk of ourselves. We get in past the flitting thoughts and the procession of ideas contending for entrance. The track seems open for the Someone who is seeking us no less certainly than we are seeking him. If we do not hear our name called, and do not hear distinctly a message in well-known words, we do at least feel that we have found a real Presence and have received fresh vital energy from the creative center of life itself, so that we come back to action, after our pause, restored, refreshed, and “charged” with new force to live by.