Shape and Substance

meditations on faith and church

Category: Uncategorized

April 20, 2025

Shape and Substance No. 21

Easter morning, before dawn

John 20:1-18

When Night Is Over

An Easter Meditation

How do you know when the night is over and dawn is coming?

John begins his story of the resurrection with these words: “On the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came, early, while it was still dark….”

The Magdalene comes in darkness, in the liminal moments between night and morning, between the old and the new, between Sabbath and the first day of the week. She approaches the tomb. She must choose her moment wisely, lest she violate Sabbath law by embalming the body too early, before the Sabbath is over. I wonder: does she breathe a small, silent prayer for sunrise, for the clarity of legal daylight?

How do you know when the night is over and the new day is dawning?

There is an old Jewish legend about a rabbi who asked his students this question: How do you know when the night of the Sabbath is over and the first day of the week has begun?

It is when you can distinguish between your house and the house of your neighbor, said one student.

No, said another, It is when you can distinguish in the field between a cow and a horse.

Not so, said a third. It is when you can distinguish between the colors of the flowers in the garden.

No, said the rabbi, you are all wrong. All your answers divide the one into the many. But the Holy One, blessed be he, is one, and out of the many makes one. When you can look into the face of the stranger and know that one to be your brother or your sister, when you look into the face of the enemy and see the face of the Holy One, then you will know that the night is over and the new day has begun.

John says that the day of resurrection begins in darkness. Night has fallen on the cross, now relieved of its mournful burden, and gloom has shrouded the whole of the day after—the second day, the day of death and darkness. And now, the Magdalene comes to the tomb to clean and spice the body, preparing the dead for death’s long dark journey. The sun has not risen, the day has not begun. There is no dawn in the east, no ray of light coursing like a mythic chariot across the sky. No trumpets sound, no timpani crash, no choirs sing hallelujahs. There is only darkness… and emptiness.

When she comes to the tomb, the Magdalene sees the stone rolled away, the tomb empty. John says, “She ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid him.’” Darkness, and emptiness.

Isaac Luria, the great 16th c. Jewish mystic, taught that creation begins in darkness and emptiness, with an act of divine self-evacuation. Before the beginning, there is only God, and God is Light Without End. But for anything that is not God to be, the Light must make a darkness. God must first make a space into which the not-God can come into being, a place for all that is created and material and enfleshed. And so, Luria taught, the first act of creation is not the divine breath exhaling the first command, Let there be light. It is rather God inhaling, gathering the divine light into God’s self, contracting, as it were, to make an empty place—a place of darkness—where God is not and all else can be. Tzimtzum, Luria called it, a Hebrew word that means “contraction,” a word that evokes a woman in labor, clenched muscles and sweat on the brow and wrenching pain in the belly—the prelude to birth. Tzimtzum isthe mother’s indrawn breath, held tight behind gritted teeth, as she pushes new life into the world. The first act of creation, said Luria, is not when God exhales the first command for light and land and love, but when God inhales into darkness and makes an empty place, where God gives birth to all that life comes to be. Tzimtzum is the womb of creation.

The Magdalene comes to the tomb, thinking it is the place of death and dying, the ending place, from which there is no new beginning. She comes to pay homage to the victory of death, the dark victory death always wins. She expects to find a place full of death.

But she finds instead the empty place, the place of nothing, the place where there is no longer death but where there is not yet life. It is the liminal space that is no longer darkness and not yet dawn, no longer despair and not yet hope.  The empty tomb is where all that was has died and all that will be is has yet to come to birth. It is the habitation of the Possible. The empty tomb is the empty womb, where God contracts, and a new creation holds its breath, waiting for a world to be born.

She sees, but the Magdalene does not understand. Neither does Simon Peter understand, nor the unnamed beloved. They see the grave clothes, the head wrappings—they even “believe,” as John says—but they do not understand the meaning of this moment. I suppose the same is true for us, standing here in this liminal darkness, having wept the bitter tears of death only to see the place of death emptied of its power. We see. We believe, in whatever ways we can. But believing does not always make room for understanding.

The Magdalene does not understand, maybe does not even believe, but she stays, standing there in the doorway of emptiness, weeping, peering into the darkness of a now-dead past, unable to conceive of the future about to be born. And then, says John, she sees…

…The gardener, or the one who, in the dim light of the not-yet-dawn seems to be the gardener. He is a stranger. She sees him and begs his help, one stranger reaching out to another in the dark night of the soul, yearning for connection, for relationship, for hope. And out of the darkness he speaks to her, exhaling her name: Mary. Hearing the sound of her name, breathed in love, the sound that has made her hold her breath from dusty days on Galilean roads to the death-scarred agony of the place of the skull… hearing that sound she understands: God has exhaled. God has given birth to a new creation. “Rabbouni!” she cries, and the stranger is stranger no more. She looks into his face and sees there the very face of God. Night is over, and dawn has come.

Here is a poem by Mary Karr, entitled “Descending Theology: The Resurrection”:

From the far star points of his pinned extremities, 
cold inched in—black ice and squid ink— 
till the hung flesh was empty. 
Lonely in that void even for pain, 
he missed his splintered feet, 
the human stare buried in his face. 
He ached for two hands made of meat 
he could reach to the end of. 
In the corpse’s core, the stone fist 
of his heart began to bang 
on the stiff chest’s door, and breath spilled 
back into that battered shape. Now 

it’s your limbs he comes to fill, as warm water 
shatters at birth, rivering every way.

—Mary Karr, Sinners Welcome, Harper Collins, 2006.

It’s your limbs he comes to fill. It’s your birth swept out of the dark womb of death and awash in the shattering amniotic fluid of new life. It’s your life he comes to fill, delivered new-born and squalling into a brand-new world. It’s your baptism, remembered, well-watered, renewed, “rivering every way.” This is the birthday of the new creation. Christ is risen, and we will see his face in the gardeners of the morning. God has exhaled. The night is over. Look, the dawn is coming.

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April 19, 2025

Shape and Substance No. 20

20 April 2025

t’s Holy Saturday, the Day Between, the day after the worst has happened and the day before it is possible to expect the best. It is a day we Prostestants don’t know what to do with, and so we mostly ignore it.

That’s a mistake, I think. There is much this day of darkness and hopelessness, of loss and dead ends would teach us—about the limits on human pride and arrogance, the failure of human self-aggrandizement, and the fact that hopelessness may well be the purest form of hope.

Here is a poem, written a few years ago, that I used in my Paschal Vigil collection, The Hole in the Heart of God (Resource Publications, 2020). It is my humble suggestion that death may well have something to teach us who cling so fiercely to life.

The Second Day

Do not yet roll the stone away
nor hurry toward tomorrow’s dawn;
let us dwell in death today.

Other voices have their say
outside this sabbatic tomb.
Do not yet roll the stone away

nor come to gloat, embalm, or pray,
lament, or raise the victor’s song—
no, let us dwell in death today.

Build no castles made of clay,
draw up no plans for sacred rooms.
Do not yet roll the stone away

and prematurely birth the day
when knowledge preens and error looms.
Let us dwell in death today:

the Possible in its unknown way 
will use the dark to make us strong.
Do not yet roll the stone away,
but let us dwell in death today.

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April 18, 2025

Shape and Substance, No. 19

On this most somber of days in the liturgical year, I will step aside and yield this space to the late William Placher. Near the end of his book, The Triune God: Essays in Post-Liberal Theology (Westminster John Knox, 2007), he speculates a bit about the moment of the crucifixion of Jesus and the latter’s cry from the cross (actually a quote from the Aramaic version of Psalm 22:1), Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani (“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”). Placher writes:

We trust that the distance between Jesus crying out in abandonment on the cross and the one he had always before called his Father mirrors some sort of distance within God—though we cannot imagine what terms like “distance within God” can mean. A kind of space lies within the triune God—a space potentially inclusive of the space of sinners and doubters—and yet this space is no desert but a spiritual garden mutual love and glorification. In the incarnation, the three show that there is always within God a space large enough for the whole world and even all its sin: the Word’s distance from the one he calls Father is so great that no one falls outside it, and the Spirit fills all that space with love. The Spirit maintains, Balthasar says, the space that Christ opens up “at our disposal, as a new, open space.” The Spirit fills the “space… between the Begotten and the Unbegotten,” Gregory of Nazianzus wrote. As Moltmann puts it, “In the even between the sundering Father and the forsaken Son, God becomes so ‘vast’ in the Spirit of self-offering that there is room and life for the whole world, the living and the dead (Placher, The Triune God: Essays in Postliberal Theology, pp.155-156).

May you find the emptiness opened this day (and, indeed, every day) for you.

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April 12, 2025

Shape and Substance, No. 18

Tomorrow is Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. Here is a hymn I wrote for Advent/Holy Week/ Triduum that seeks to see the entire sweep of the gospel narrative under the rubric of silence. The tune is NOËL NOUVELET, a French melody familiar to most of us either the Christmas Carol, “SIng We Now of Christmas” or as an Easter hymn, “Now the Green Blade Rises.” I would recommend using a slower tempo than either of those settings if you choose to sing the hymn below.

You can see the entire text without the framing technical material if you click the priner icon in the upper right corner. You have my permission to print and use this hymn if you so desire.

All the best,

Paul

Silence Falls copy 2Download
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March 9, 2025

Shape and Substance No. 17

“The Good Samaritan,” by Jacopo Bossano (1515-1592)

The View from the Ditch

The morning’s text was Luke 10:25-37, Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (not, you will note, the RCL Gospel text for the first Sunday of Lent, which is traditionally the Lukan temptation narrative; the preacher had other aims in mind). It is a story those schooled in the life of the Church have heard hundreds of times. There is a lawyer (translate: Pharisee) who seeks to demonstrate his legal and perhaps rhetorical superiority to Jesus and who engages him in the familiar game of question and answer: What must I do to be saved?

Leaving aside for a moment my reservations about the terms “saved” and “salvation,” let us look at the exchange. In response to the lawyerly question, Jesus asks a question of his own: You know the law; what does it say? The lawyer responds with the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4) and the commandment to love the neighbor as the self (Leviticus 19:18), two passages that elsewhere Jesus has himself identified as the core “on which depend all the Torah and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:40). Jesus does no less here, congratulating the lawyer on his knowledge of Torah. But the lawyer, “wishing to justify himself” (more later on that word “justify’), asks a follow-up: Who is my neighbor?

In response to which Jesus, in classic rabbinical fashion, tells a story about a badly beaten man, some robbers, a priest, a Levite, a Samaritan, and the dark and dangerous road that clings to the precipitous walls of the Wadi Qelt as it winds up from Jericho and Jerusalem. You know the tale of the priest and Levite who see but pass by, and the Samaritan—a reviled figure in early Jewish literature—who stops to help. Once he has told the story, Jesus turns back to the lawyer and asks, “who was neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” The lawyer, either willingly or begrudgingly (the text doesn’t tell us), admits: The one who showed mercy. “Go and do likewise,” says Jesus.

And thus is launched a thousand guilt trips among modern motorists, seeing someone stranded on the roadside or seeking free food or money, and choosing to pass by out of concern for personal safety (modern robbers ambush travelers, too) or haste (we’re all going somewhere), or the conviction that money given to bedraggled street beggars is money most likely wasted.

Let me give credit to this wonderful preacher: she avoided all that, even as she acknowledged it. She focused on the lawyer’s attempt to limit the scope of his compassion, his implicit desire to draw the line between neighbor to whom he has an obligation and stranger to whom he does not. She noted that Jesus, by choosing to make the hated Samaritan the exemplar of compassion, effectively says that even those outside the community may offer kindness and healing to those to who should have no expectation of it. “There are no strangers,” she concluded. And she’s right. She went on to remind us that the calling of the church is to treat all as neighbor and none as stranger. In mild and balanced language she took a swipe or two at policies and attitudes, both personal and governmental, that would alienate and “other” those who would claim a place among us. It was a lovely job, and well done, the sort of preaching of which Presbyterians are capable when they put their minds to it.

But it seems to me that there is another layer to the story, one that gets beneath the admonition to hospitality and healing. Or, to be more precise, one that turns the tables on our sense of whose calling it is to offer hospitality and healing.

Let’s start with the lawyer’s desire to “justify” himself. Dikaiosune is the root word in Greek, a word that has a breathtaking breadth of meaning. The cloud of usage hovers around notions of righteousness and vindication, of uprightness and moral rectitude. It roughly translates the Hebrew tzedakah, righteousness. That in turn has a derivative form, tzadik, which refers to an upright and Torah-abiding person. The lawyer wants to be seen as a Tzadik; indeed, who wouldn’t? But he wants to know what the requirements are, how far he has to go to earn the degree and all the rights and benefits thereunto appertaining.

The English translation “justify” seems a bit off to me, suggesting that the lawyer feels the need to give some sort of explanatory accounting of his behavior. But as far as we know in this story, the lawyer hasn’t done anything requiring accounting, and what he has done Jesus finds laudatory. I find myself wondering if there is another sense of the word “justify” that’s more helpful here. “Justification” is also a printer’s term, used to indicate the relationship between the beginnings or ends of words in the lines of a column of print. Justifying a print column is bringing the words into correct spatial relationship with each other. Does the lawyer want to know what he has to do to bring himself and others into proper relationship? Funny you should ask.

The lawyer’s self-justifying question is “Who is my neighbor?” That’s the question that prompts Jesus’ tale. And when Jesus is done telling the tale, he asks his own question: “Who is neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” At the risk of presumptuousness, let me rephrase Jesus’ question, “Who is the beaten man’s neighbor?” Maybe what I’m getting at can be seen if I write the questions in parallel:

Who is      /       my        / neighbor?

Who is  / the beaten man’s   /         neighbor?

There’s an old trick of biblical hermeneutics: who are you in this story? If you pose that question to the lawyer, the answer’s pretty clear. The lawyer is not the Samaritan who gets the opportunity to demonstrate his socio-religious convention-busting compassion. The lawyer’s role in this story is as the nameless man, beaten and naked and left for dead, without help or hope of comfort. If you want to know who your neighbor is, Jesus seems to be suggesting, it’s not the one you find with his metaphorical ox in the metaphorical ditch whom you decide out of the magnanimity of your Christian heart to help. It’s the one who comes to offer you compassion, you who are half dead and fully alone, unable to do anything for yourself except await the approach of death. Your neighbor is the one who comes to you from utterly beyond you, having no obligation to you and no reason to stop to offer succor. That he does so anyway is nothing short of miraculous.

            Sounds a bit like grace, doesn’t it?

 So am I suggesting that the story of the Good Samaritan relieves us of the responsibility to reach beyond our definitions of neighbor (translation: those who look, act, speak, and think like us) and offer compassion to others? Not at all. That would be swimming upstream against two millennia of Lukan interpretation, and I’m not that strong. Besides, even if it’s not the point of the story, it’s a good thing to be compassionate—if you can tolerate the risk that compassion always implies.

But I am suggesting that the real point of this story is not the moral admonition to adopt the spiritual costume of highway hero. It is to understand that “salvation” (if that term has any meaning) is about the realization that there is nothing within our power that will “save” us, and thus we are dependent on forces and realities completely beyond our control if we are to be “saved.”

I suspect the lawyer walked away from Jesus on the lookout for someone—maybe even a Samaritan in need?—to whom he could choose to offer compassion and thereby burnish his salvific bona fides. He was, as he understood it, going and doing likewise. If so, I think he missed the point. And if we limit the intent of this parable to an imperative to help the bedraggled beside the road, so do we. That sort of thinking only encourages the idea that we have a choice about mercy. But that’s not what Jesus seems to me to be saying. Jesus’ point is that mercy in its most important sense is never what we choose to offer others. It’s what we receive from others, and ultimately from the infinitely loving One in whom all mercies meet.

In another context, Jesus once counseled his followers to take the log out of their own eyes before they tried to remove the mote in another’s. Good advice, that. Maybe with de-logged eyes, we can get a better perspective on our position. Here’s a hint: it’s not the view from horseback on the road. It’s the view from the ditch.

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February 25, 2025

Shape and Substance No.16

Rapture

… 	Rapture joins the world
and irony divides, and unaware of either
the osprey desperately undresses every bone
and then unbuttons both the eyes.
—Jennifer Grotz, “Landscape with Osprey and Salmon”

I don’t believe in the Rapture, but if I did,
(What does it mean to “believe?”) I would require
a Raptor of sufficient size, with fire
behind its eyes and talons furled and hid

biding its time in some aerie high above
the stürm und drang of my petty part
(because such fortunes do not touch its heart
nor curry sympathies that smell like love)

until with pinions spread and hackles splayed
it falls upon me, merciless, with pure
intent to kill and eat and to all else inured,
until with bones denuded, flesh a-flayed

I am at last consumed, transmogrified,
and nothing left that I might call my own
and given to the raptor’s brood to feed
a future’s hunger yet unsatisfied
but fledging, soon to fly from home,
an accidental grace, a holy need.

—Paul Hooker, 2024 (unpublished)

            Whether or not poet Jennifer Grotz intended to inspire such imagery (I suspect not), her poem “Landscape with Osprey and Salmon” landed on my eyes at a moment when I was (and am) struggling with the remnants of my religious life. I am not and have never been a fundamentalist or evangelical Christian; my bent is toward the progressive side of theology. But even that has worn threadbare in recent years, a beloved garment donned too many times without regard to the ultimate intolerance of its seams or the wear patterns in the crotch. Her image of the osprey—a raptor par excellence—“desperately” tearing apart its piscine victim seemed perfectly situated to invite exploration of another view of the metaphysical. It is not, I would caution, intended as a final or conclusive statement, but rather an angle of vision, a clearing seen between the trees while passing above or through them.

            I live in a culture on the verge of drowning in evangelical foolishness, propped up (for the moment) on the waterwings of overinflated individualism. Its adherents think that at the appointed moment some divine avian will swoop down and catch them up, delivering them to heavenly bliss in a realm far above the quotidian struggles they are certain are hampering their joy. I think they have the imagery wrong. I imagine a rapture considerably less comfortable and comforting.

            Mark Jarman, in his poem “Soften the Blow, Imagined God, and Give,” writes: “Still I believe a part of me is bent/to make your grace look like an accident…” What, exactly, is an “accidental grace?” I find myself increasingly inclined to think that everything I might call a “grace” from a “God” who overarches my existence with some benign omniscience is in fact an accident born of the conjugal gathering of place and time and perspective. If I understand Jarman, he is trying to see deeper into the apparently random pattern of “punishment” and “pressure” (his words) in his life, which “might be meant/ to kill me in the end or help me live.”

I wonder if I am coming at it from the opposite direction. I have heard all my life the Pauline predestinarian refrain that “all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28), a dictum that sees grace as anything but accidental. And yet I am increasingly suspicious that we assign far too much benevolent succor to the heart of the Holy. What if the Rapture (to the extent that such a metaphor can be trusted) is not nearly so much about deliverance as dissolution? What if the good toward which all things supposedly work is not a good for us or me or you but some larger aim under which all other more proximate goods are subsumed and in which they are finally consumed? What if the need served by some purported eschatological denouement is not any need of ours, but a need felt deep within the Holy itself? What, to be less prolix, if it is finally not about us at all?

            A word about the prosody of this poem. Those who know the structure of the sonnet will immediately recognize that this is a stanza too long to fit the standard Italian sonnet form, and that the rhyme scheme departs from the norm. The sonnet, for centuries a fixed form in either English (Shakespearean) or Italian (Petrarchan) modes, is lately coming in for some renovation. Rhyme schemes are being abandoned, rhythmic patterns overloaded. My reconstruction here is a bit more modest. I’m not so much redrawing the blueprint as expanding the house, converting the back porch into a third bedroom by adding a stanza to the octave so that it is no longer truly an octave but a 12-line statement of the theme before turning in the verso to a different way of reading the moment. I do this for the same reason anyone adds on the back of a house: to create new rooms where thoughts only yet aborning might have a place to play.

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January 20, 2025

Shape and Substance, No. 15

Maybe it's the sour mood I'm this inauguration day. Maybe it's the nagging presence of the black dog. Maybe it's the cold and cabin fever. But here's a poem I've been pecking at for a while.


A Poor Place for Gods

‘Soon,’ said the crackling voice of the flame, coming from behind him, ‘they will fall. Soon they will fall and the star people will meet the earth people. There will be heroes among them, and men who will slay monsters and bring knowledge, but none of them will be gods. This is a poor place for gods.’
Neil Gaiman,  American Gods, 2001.

This is a poor place for gods.
You wouldn’t know it from the way we pray 
and swear 
and warble praise choruses ad nauseam 
to Something we have never seen or heard 
or known
save in the chancels of our imaginations.
Take a peek at the treasures we lay up 
for ourselves:
small deities pressed in the family Bible
alongside the azalea plucked from the 13th hole
at Augusta National,
demigods riding dolphins in the surf 
as we watch from our beachfront condos,
centaurs chatting 
over stale-brewed coffee, long gone cold,
at last week’s Life Group Meeting.

This is a poor place for gods. 
Americans don’t believe in gods 
(unless they come down to us on golden escalators).
We believe in
in fanciful yesterdays and fantastical tomorrows 
(though not in workaday todays).
In border security and security systems. 
In LifeLibertyandthePursuitofHappiness
(though not if Happiness runs too fast). 
In video porn. The NFL. And QAnon. 
In Somebody Else’s Fault.

This is a poor place for gods.
Gods demand sacrifice and obedience,
two skills 
we never managed to acquire
except on battlefields and in delivery rooms,
and then 
only in service of the proximate.
Never the Ultimate. We dare not contemplate 
the Ultimate.
That would mean there is a limit
to what we can manufacture, take by conquest, 
or simply buy 
even if the dollar is losing ground to the yen. 
Americans are our own Divinities.

This is a poor place for Gods.
Still there is, famously, a bustle in the hedgerow
a stirring wind, 
a shaft of sunlight, a never-ebbing tide,
the faintest rumble from just over the hill.
One would think 
that Something is afoot here. Still,
there must be (mustn’t there?) a meteorological explanation
for the meteor
slashing the night sky like a saber 
crashing headlong into the whimpering world
and exploding,
eviscerating our exceptionalism
and making way for another Way of Life.

We worry about sea level rise. But really,
weren’t we promised fire not flood next time? 

[I hesitate to cite Gaiman, given the recent allegations of sexual assaults against multiple women (see Lila Shapiro, “There Is No Safe Word,” in New York Magazine, January 2025). That said, Gaiman’s alleged reprehensible behavior seems to me to illumine the ironic truth lurking in his phrase: “none of them”—and none of us—“will be gods.”]
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January 12, 2025

Shape and Substance, No. 14

Are You Being Saved?

Pat came home from a Bible study this afternoon smiling that smile she smiles when she knows she’s going to rattle my cage. They were studying Romans and, she said, her grin broadening almost imperceptibly, they got into a discussion of predestination and free will. She knows this is like waving a matador’s cape in front of a bull. I can’t resist.

I tried, really, I did. I asked questions, you know, like you’re supposed to do to demonstrate that you’re not jumping to the conclusion you’ve already jumped to. “What did you conclude?”

Well, she said, several of the women (all of whom except Pat are of the conservative evangelical persuasion) object to the notion of predestination altogether. They believe in free will, and in the power to/necessity of choosing to believe in Jesus as a prerequisite for salvation. “Then what,” I asked, “do they do with Romans 8:28” (you know: “In all things, God works for good” etc.)?

Well, they apparently feel that this only applies if you already believe in Jesus and are saved.  “But that,” she offered, “was not what I said.” She had me now, and she knew it.

“And what did you say?”

“I said that we have free will to make our own choices, but God in God’s sovereign freedom uses all those choices, no matter what they are, to accomplish God’s will.” Pat, after living with me for 35 years, is a fair country Reformed theologian.

Here we reach the first problem. After a lifetime of trying to live out the Reformed theology John Leith taught me in the early 1970s at Union Seminary, I have given up. I probably still cling, perhaps unconsciously, to some remnants of that Augustinian-Calvinist-Barthian edifice, but I have to confess that it’s mostly in ruins around my theological feet. 

“Well,” I ventured cautiously (although not nearly cautiously enough), “I think you still have a problem. Instead of preserving free will, you have obliterated it. If God’s permits our choices but uses them in crafting the divine will, whether we choose as God chooses or not, then our choices don’t have any ultimate meaning. You pretty much trump free will with the ace of Pauline predestinarianism.”

“Then what would you have said?” She was grinning openly now, since she knew she had lured me in and hooked me as deftly as if she had drifted a Chubby Chernobyl downstream to a holding trout.

I should add that she does this frequently—presents some theological gordian knot in the full knowledge that I can’t resist declaiming upon it from the rarified heights of my vaunted theological training. She knows that I am a sucker for the sound of my own voice and, worse, will never pass up an opportunity to air out my latest foray into heresy. I think she gets a kick out of watching me skating on intellectual thin ice: there is always the potential I might fall through and give her the show she is dying to see: a mansplainer extraordinaire sinking under the weight of his own arrogance.

Of course, that’s exactly what I did.

But now that the conversation is over and I’m brooding over the inadequacy of my explanations, it all has me wondering whether there might be a way out of this dilemma. It might involve thinking differently than we normally do; indeed, thinking in a way that, ultimately, we cannot think. It involves thinking like the Eternal.

Here’s what I mean. We are finite creatures, and a part of our finitude is our enmeshment in the framework of time. We are time-full, in the sense that all our thinking and acting and being takes place within the scale of linear, episodic development. This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. Add causality to that, and you get this happened, which then caused this to happen, which then brought about this. We think that we make choices, and those choices cause consequences, and we then make other choices to deal with the consequences of our first choices. And so on. Free will is the expression of this time-full-ness as regards our living before the reality we call “God.” I make this choice—to believe or not to believe, to “accept Jesus as my savior” or not—and the consequences of that choice are (a) a presumed place in some scheme of salvation that stretches beyond my death, (b) a comfort in the present that I have a certain knowledge of my enduring security, and (c) usually, my participation in community with others of similar faith commitment in both celebration of our securities and (hopefully) service to others in the name of the Securer, Jesus Christ. In the minds of many, it is also possible for me to undo my security and lose both my comfort and my communal place if I cease to believe, if I “backslide” into faithlessness and moral turpitude. But regardless which way I am traveling on this soteriological Jacob’s ladder, the movement is just that: movement. Which implies linear temporal development. Time-full-ness.

It seems to me, however, that the Holy is not time-full. The Holy is the Eternal, in Greek aiónios, which comes over into Latin as aeternus and means “un-timed” or “not subject to time.” Because the Holy is not bound by time separated as it is into distinct moments, within the Holy all time is one time, which is to say it is no time, or time-less. To the Holy, all human choices and sequences and narratives and developments are all simultaneously present in the Eternal Moment. There is no lineal development; within the Holy, all moments and all choices and all times and all places are the same action, time, or place, which is to say the eternal. It’s not that “God knows what you will do,” and uses it, whether you want it or no, to accomplish what God intends. It is rather that in the Eternal, you have chosen and will choose and are choosing all at the same time, and without distinction or movement or change. It looks and feels and seems like—and indeed, is—movement and change to us, here in our time-full linearity. To the Eternal it is the one all-encompassing present. It is not that the “God” is working out our salvation for us; it is that in the Eternal, not-saved and saved are all the same, all one in the One within whom there are no distinctions or differences.

Which then leads me to wonder (and here is the heretical part, so roll up your rosaries and batten down your Scofield Chain-Reference Bible) whether there is any ultimate meaning in the word, “salvation.” Whether “being saved” is, for all intents and purposes not merely a “done deal” but a non-deal. Or, to be more precise, whether what we call salvation has meaning only to us, entrapped as we are in our time-full-ness, as a symbolic mark of what seems to us a change in life in relation to others and to that which we imagine as “God.” It is not meaningful to the Eternal, to the One, in whom all things and all times and all conditions are one and within whom there is no change. We are already saved and not-saved, have always been saved and not-saved. Within the One, there are no distinctions, and hence no development.

The Neo-Platonists understood this better than we do, I think. Coming out of the tradition of Greek philosophy, where the quest was for the One radically simple Thing that underlies all things, they understood “God”—or, as Plotinus named it, the One—to be radically Simple. That is to say, the One is one because within the one there cannot be two. Within the Eternal there cannot be a yesterday, today, and tomorrow because there is only the Eternal. Within the Holy, there is no unholiness (and therefore no “good” or “evil”) because there is no dichotomy between holy and not-holy. There is only the radical Singularity of the One. There is not even Being, because Being implies non-being. There is only the One. And within the One, all things are one thing, and the one thing is the One.

So, am I saved? Yes, and no, and who cares? Here in my time-full-ness, I can worry about it, or not, and it matters neither fig nor farthing. In the Eternal Moment, as Qoheleth says, “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecc. 1:9). Salvation belongs to the category of the time-full, not the time-less Eternal.

Do I have free will? Yes, and no, and who cares? Here in my time-full-ness, it seems to me, and indeed it is, that I make choices that have consequences. But my choices and their consequences, as well as my states of mind and being both before the choices and after the consequences are not distinct movements and actions and conditions, but all one reality. Hitler and Pol Pot and the Donald may seem evil to me (or, at the least, banal) and their actions heinous (or, perhaps, merely ludicrous). But their words and actions are all one in the One, in whom Good and Evil, while mattersome to us, are one. Free will belongs to the category of multiple actions-and-consequences, not the radical Simplicity of the One.

One of the hallmarks of Reformed theology has been its emphasis on election, God’s calling of people into special relationships of service and salvation. But if salvation has no more meaning than I think, then is not “election” drained of its significance? And if either none of us or all of us are “saved,” does this not also mean that either no one or everyone is “elect?” Which, it seems to me, rather lets the air out of the argument that anyone—me, you, Presbyterians (however frozen in our chosenness), Israel either ancient or modern, the United States—has any special relationship with the Holy. I said in some written piece of mine somewhere that election was God’s biggest mistake. That’s wrong. The mistake—presuming that special status in relation to the One is possible, let alone desirable—is our mistake. The Holy has nothing to do with it.

There is a great deal more to say by way of conclusions to be drawn—to wit: who was Jesus and what is the significance of the crucifixion, if not to save us? What is the trinity, if the One is indivisible? What is the “Christian hope” if temporal linearity is not basic to the divine nature?—all fodder for other hoped-for conversations. But perhaps I am in deep enough dookey as it is and would do well to shut up now. My sole comfort lies in the fact that I am an old man who no longer has ecclesiastical, pastoral, or educational responsibilities. What I think doesn’t really matter anymore, which is a daily source of relief. If you’ve managed to hang with this all the way to the end and feel so inclined, I am grateful to you, and I would love to hear what you think, either by return email or comment on the blogsite.

All the best.

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January 6, 2025

Shape and Substance No. 13


20 C+M+B 25

The Magi Recall The Star
Matthew 2

Epiphanies always have consequences.
Apocalypses always require assembly.

A star. A distant pin-prick—maybe
	light from an ancient orb gone supernova?—
portends the end of something, and the birth
	of something new. But what? Or who?
Why should this punctuation in the dark
	become the instigation for the journey?

The journey. Set your foot to paths uncharted
	impelled to some uncertain destination,
ask inconvenient questions of those whose power
	disinclines them to acknowledge answers,
barter time from old, bloodthirsty fools
	who sit on queasy thrones and dread the star. 

The star. It moves, yet night to night the same 
	point of light in the aching windswept darkness,
the cold black emptiness of space.
	Like you, it makes its own strange journey,
setting sail to catch the breath of God.
	It finds its destination in those eyes.

Those eyes. The child sees you, and calls your name—
	a name you had forgot, or did not know
you knew, a name whose riches, undeserved,
	will cost you everything you have, and more.
He looks at you, and in his eyes you see
	the rising and the setting of your hopes.

Your hopes. Leave them behind, these selves you carry 
	the journey long, like treasures of the heart;
return, then, empty-handed, knowing nothing
	but the light behind the dark eyes of the child.
Be haunted by that light. It does not fade
	even as the star returns to darkness. 

Darkness falls. You are night-blind, and groping. 
Go home a different way, if home at all. 

+

	Encounters with the Holy change everything. They reverse the polarities of existence. They cost you everything, and even everything is not enough. They drain you of yourself and replace you with another Self you did not ask for and do not understand. They require you to die in order to live. “Yet not I who live,” writes Paul, who met the Holy on the Damascus Road, “but Christ who lives in me.” 
	Jesus, says Mark, met a demon-possessed man near Gerasa in the Transjordan. When Jesus exorcised them, the demons “begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country.” Why do demons want to stay home? Do they crave domesticity, fear the uncertainty of wandering and wildness?  Are the comforts of home antithetical to the coming of the Holy? And is that why those possessed by the Holy so often find themselves pilgrims and wanderers? From Cain to Abraham to the magi to Jesus to the desert fathers, they fling themselves out into ferocious landscapes to seek the Holy in places where life and death are inconsequential matters. Does the Holy drain away who you are so Something or Someone else can fill you instead, possess and mold you, make of you something you never intended to be? Does “home” cease to be home anymore, so that going home is but another journey into a far country? 1


1 This poem of mine, along with the accompanying commentary printed here, first appeared in Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Fall 2022. I subsequently included it, in edited form, in my volume, The Longing: Poems (Eugene OR: Resource Publications, 2024).


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January 1, 2025

Shape and Substance, No.12

Year’s End

By Richard Wilbur

Now winter downs the dying of the year,   
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show   
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,   
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin   
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell   
And held in ice as dancers in a spell   
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;   
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,   
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns   
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone   
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown   
Composedly have made their long sojourns,   
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise   
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze   
The random hands, the loose unready eyes   
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.   
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause   
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

Copyright Credit: Richard Wilbur, “Year’s End” from Collected Poems 1943-2004. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Cited from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43052/years-end-56d221b9e6bd8.

Every New Year's Day, I find myself drawn again to this poem. Richard Wilbur is, I think, my favorite American Poet (although there are several candidates for that honor). His poem "Year's End" is somber, dark—hardly the sort of sentiment appropriate for a celebration like New Year's Day. One commenter I read spoke of the poem as Wilbur's meditation on death. I can see how he got there. I also think that's not inappropriate for the day in general. After all, New Year's Day is all about the passage of time, its inexorable march toward death and decay, whether the things decaying be leaves or wooly mammoths or little dogs preserved in pyroclastic Vesuvian ash. But it's not death that draws my attention here.

Rather, it's Wilbur's phrases in the final stanza that summon my response. "We fray into the future," he says, and that image always seems the right one to describe our disorganized, disheveled, discombobulated slide into tomorrow. Moreover, the future we fray into is "rarely wrought/ save in tapestries of afterthought." For all our thinking about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, it's by and large thinking devoid of any real plan other than fancy and fantasy. And when at last the real future arrives, we are once again confronted with our unpreparedness. We can but pray for "more time, more time."

The truth, of course, is that we cannot see the future except as it is a projection of the trends of the recent past or the lessons of accumulated experience. Even if we could, I suspect, the novelty would wear off quickly and we'd yearn for a return to the days of shooting from the hip. Long term planning is not written into our genes. 

And that, I think, is what makes this poem resonate with me. Wilbur knows a truth about the way we live: that the possibilities of the new will always be "wrangling" with the frozen past, and we will always struggle to break free of the icebound torpor of our behavior. Whether it's a belated (indeed, non-existent) response to global warming or a return to a fantasized national greatness, or just an inability to live out resolutions to eat less and walk more, we live our lives facing backward, dwelling in an imagined past that never existed and denying the reality of a future looming ahead. Until the ice forms or the bog rises or the ash covers us, and we are slowly buried in the snow.
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