by Celia Hales
“Let’s go pick up rocks!” I said to my grandmother when she arrived from Ayden for the day.
“Are you sure, Celia?” I can imagine she asked, a whimsical and loving smile on her face. Grandmama was my playmate.
“Yes!” I exclaimed, sure that she would take me.
And she did.
This scene replayed itself until we move away from that white-framed, two-story, rented house behind the church. We moved when I was seven. Grandmama and I started picking up rocks together from as far back as I can remember.
We would head out to the church parking lot. It seemed huge to me, and it was covered with rocks. Most were white. Those were the ones that I wanted.
I reached down and picked up a possibility. I craned my neck to look into my grandmother’s face as I handed her the rock to decide if it was perfect enough. Clean white rocks, smooth white rocks, were the choicest.
“No, Sweetheart,” she said. “This one is too dirty.” She handed it back to me. I threw it down on the ground. I was quickly off to make another choice.
For a long time we played this game. Maybe my grandmother enjoyed it as much as I did. From an adventure in the parking lot, I would emerge with one or two white rocks that were choice enough to go in my collection.
Once back home, I ran to my bedroom and stored my rocks in the top left-hand drawer of my dresser.
They are still in my childhood bedroom.
—
It was 1972, and I was 25 years old. I had a strong bent toward mysticism, and I had been reading Evelyn Underhill’s book entitled simply Mysticism, as well as just about everything else that the library at Stratford College, where I taught, had on the subject.
I also read the Bible, especially the New Testament. Eventually I came to the Book of Revelation.
One night my eyes lighted up at the passage, “To him that overcometh will I give. . .a white stone” (Revelation 2:17, KJV).
A white stone. White rocks. To him that overcometh!
My mystic turn of mind went into full attention.
Was this why I had been entranced with white rocks as a child?
—
My husband Paul and I traveled to Italy in 1995. We stopped by the Adriatic Sea at a spot called Portonovo Bay, which means “New Gate.” On our first afternoon at the Bay, we headed for the seashore.
We climbed a land barrier and looked out at the panorama before us.
Nestled under a dark blue sky and stretched out for miles in front of the sea were white stones on a beach, surely millions of them, heaped up with no spaces between them and no sand at all.
The sight took my breath away. I felt a sudden expansion of mind and spirit–and, yes, soul. These were the perfect white stones, smooth and oval, that I had searched in vain to find.
The mystic in me was filled with wonder, and, at that time and place, finally satisfied.
Paul and I spent the entire afternoon on the seashore. He looked for artifacts while I looked for my favorite specimens of white stones. I retrieved four for the day’s work.
Back home in St. Paul, Minnesota, my husband heaved my full suitcase up the stairs of our house.
“What do you have in here?” he asked plaintively. “Rocks?”
“Yes,” I said.
He didn’t believe me.
After I unpacked my suitcase, I showed him my treasures. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. His wife had brought back rocks in a suitcase from Europe.
—
I still have those same rocks in a storage unit on Highway 6 in Oxford, Mississippi. We pay $82 a month for that storage unit. Paul says that we pay $82 to store rocks.
—
Now I reflect from time to time on that experience.
A Course in Miracles says, “Heaven itself is reached with empty hands and open minds. . .” (W-pI.133.13:1). I feel a sudden expansion of mind and spirit when I realize the truth of these words. These words epitomize for me the experience at Portonova Bay.
It had taken me awhile–30 years–since finding A Course in Miracles to discover much more ACIM has held out for me. And this day of finding multitudinous white stones on a seashore was a turning point, a miracle. My sense of wonder and miracles was complete.
Of course, I am still, yet another 16 years after 1995, on the pathway. But that day in Italy, standing at the “New Gate” of Portonovo Bay, I felt the wonder of being blessed.
It seemed a harbinger of greater things to come, and I was at the portal of those greater things. I knew in my deepest being the promises of A Course in Miracles.
