Refractions

God knows something and shares that knowledge through Isaiah: There will be a peaceable realm where the infant is safe with the adder, the lamb with the wolf, the kid with the leopard, the cow with the bear, where the lion’s a herbivore, with the whole unlikely menagerie led by a child.  It’s easy to make a connection between the peaceable realm and a child who, as an adult, will make that realm the heart of his own purpose and proclamation. It’s also easy to see in it a prediction that favours “our” part of the story as denouement, that predicts “our” Messiah. I wonder if we might rather catch, in the peaceable realm, a sense of how “the knowledge of the Lord” functions as a subversion of certainties – including religious certainties – throughout the Hebrew and Apostolic scriptures. “They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord.”   Having lived all my adult life in a church fighting – hurting and destroy...

       The beautiful future: You can’t get there from here As we set our first foot into the Advent landscape, we hear Isaiah utter God’s promise of the beautiful future, the future in which “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” In the promised future, “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” But when we look around, that beautiful future is not what we see. We see violence and idolatry, hot wars and cold peace, and abuse of our planet host. Frayed nerves and soft bodies and what the late John Prine called “a crooked piece of time”.  We find ourselves, that is to say, standing inside the story, standing beside Isaiah, who utters the promise of the beautiful future even as he begins a sustained account of the anger of God over the idolatry, greed, dishonesty, injustice and violence of Jerusalem, and of the approaching fury that God will level against “all that is proud a...

Where do you start, with the shadow or the sun? Is one better, or do they need each other like YHWH and the Adversary locked in something like love, something like hate,  but like nothing so cold a thing  as indifference? Is there a whole story without loss, without betrayal that follows desire, that tracks what makes you alive, what makes me alive, though far from perfect or right? Do we really believe that the frantic hunger of humans can so distort the dream of God that it fails?   Please say, “No.” So as we wait for what they call “the fullness of time”, we ask, Can we trust? Can you trust me? Can I trust you? and perhaps, to break  (or make)  the deal  (or the heart), Can you trust you,  and can I trust me? So. The question that haunts our hearts.

How did you trust the life of one just born, and let that be what makes you end with hope? How did you know the moment,  how did you recognize this advent as strong enough to bear the weight  of your own failing, falling life? Were you visited by light, enough light for a whole world, and did it come from those two eyes, seeing you so brightly against the gloom of age? Is what you saw so clearly,  through dim eyes and temple smoke the not-so-distant moment when this baby’s arms will carry you home?

Do you ever, on the first day of September, as you walk into the wind,  warm from exertion, feel the freshness of the breeze bathe you with cool? Do you turn left at the corner, feel  the warmth of sun on your back and notice the light has changed, is somehow thinner –   do you think to yourself, “Ahhh, I’d forgotten that”? Do you mostly forget  what winter days feel like until yours are the first footsteps in the snow in the park, and you see what early light can do with all that whiteness and the long shadows of trees? And does the smell of mud blossoming out of melting snow,  still, somehow, surprise you, though you’ve known it every year since who knows when? – and does thin ice  on shallow puddles seem like grace  as you break it with your boot heel? Do you smell ozone one summer afternoon after rain has settled the dust  on the street of a prairie town,  a scent forgotten, now remembered, now familiar? Do you still, sometimes, pull...

What is the point of this journey, with its tiresome food  and its wearying wilderness sameness, (I have a map of Egypt in my wallet) with its thirst and nostalgia (I see you have one too),  its uncertain horizon,   its lacking of any sense of where or when?  Where did the time go? It rode in our packs and our pockets, through the sea, under the mountain, across the desert a vagrant doxology  from “in the beginning” to “world without end”,  until it arrived at this very nanosecond we call now. This time being threshold –  all there is, infinitely thin and containing all worlds. There is no hook I can sling  to recapture yesterday, or to grapple my way back to it. There is no line I can cast  to reel in the future, no tightrope of time I can cross to tomorrow. Suspended between voids on this threshold of now that I never cross. We say this is our story (I say this is my story): Inundating and subsiding water,  an ark, falling from qu...

  Where is the robust Story? Where is the robust Story, strong enough  to bear the weight of bodies and of souls, to touch millennia of wounds and scars softly, with healing, and to feel billions of muscles strain towards life? Where are the benedictions that we crave  when blessings seem in short supply? Will we, like Jacob, smelling like the hunters we are not and wearing the skins of deception,  steal from an unseeing one  the blessing for which we thirst? Or will we live our un-narrated lives, and say, as Esau says, “I have enough”, set out for the margin, known from that moment on   not as ourselves but as our children? Where is the story that will catch us as we plummet from the brink,  pushed off the page  by our own bare adequacy, by our having enough and no more? Will we wrestle  with a Stranger in our dream, and seize our blessing and receive our limp? Will we fall and rise again like Joseph, trafficked by his brothers –  ...