Shape and Substance

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? And why?
What difference should this faint illumination
            make to those in shadow on 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 dark absorbs the star. 
 
Darkness falls. You are night-blind, and groping. 
Go home a different way, if home at all.     

Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming from tender stem hath sprung!
— Traditional German Carol
 
Were there roses before there were thorns?
Or did thorns give rise to roses?
 
Rilke said, 
Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang…. *

And Stevens, 
“Death is the mother of beauty….”
 
I say 
blood and beauty are identical twins
born of love, and laid in a manger.
And to love is to live 
and to live is to die
and to die is to love. 
 
I have held a rose.
I have been pierced by thorns.
 
Truth has not one nature
but two.
 
 
_____________
* “For beauty is nothing other than the beginning of terror.”

Note: This poem is set as a hymn to the author’s tune, “Wrigley.”. 

O God of the shepherds in night-fallen pastures,
God of the angels suspended in flight,
God of the moon-dark, the maiden’s frail gesture,
O God of the man-child who cries in the night:
 
Illumine the night with the angels’ cold glory;
linger with us when the host turns away
and flees into heaven, and whisper the story
we ponder with wonder as night turns to day.
 
Your glory is fierce, and it tests our conviction
to follow the path to the manger and inn,
a glory that ends in a dark crucifixion
for any who muster the heart to begin.
 
So bind up our courage and lead us through darkness
from sheepfold and stable to table and tomb,
from manger and mother to glory incarnate,
Light of the world in the dark of the womb.

Suppose it was not an angel,
but dust-mites floating in a shaft of light,
an idle breeze billowing the curtain,
whispering the wild and wordless wonder 
of the ages. 
 
Suppose it was not a message 
from a god no one has ever claimed to see 
and from whom only madmen claim to hear
such promises as these to strain the limits
of belief,
 
but only a poor girl’s fantasy
who had no sense of natural causation
and no better explanation near to hand
than godly violation of the sanctum
of her womb.
 
Tell me, could you blame her
for telling such a tale and, tale once told,
believing it with all the heart she had,
relying on the growing evidence
of her belly?
 
And if she believed it,
kept it in her heart, then why not we?
Why not the world—can it not always use
a god or two who yield up life in service
of the holy?
 
Here am I, she said,
a statement less of certainty than hope.
And wondering if we could say as much,
we follow at a distance on the road
to Bethlehem.

Spare us the pasty euphemisms: “He has passed,”
or “crossed to the other side,” as though a sheep
slipped through some metaphysic fence for greener grass.

Spare us the pious “He’s with God.” No god may keep
what was not a god’s to take, and will not be.
Where gods demur to sow, they cannot claim to reap.

Spare us the overwrought, the puff-stuffed eulogy.
Deeds, like fireflies, offer but the briefest gleaming;
their light a glimmer in the dark before they flee.

Spare us, as well, the erudite discourse on meaning,
untangling some arcane apocalyptic thread
from the raveled skein, the knotted yarn of dreaming.

Brave the clean-shaved danger of the word: Dead.
Beyond the looming end, these phrases incomplete,
these words, if living now, shall faint upon this bed.

Then raise a glass in toast to love, however fleet.
Sing rousing songs of courage, though the night draws close,
Then go your way to live, to love, to sin, to sleep.

Some say the dark bestows a blessing upon those
who sleep the trackless hours of night. They wake
new-shaped, first fruits of new creation. Is it so?

Let it be so. For all must sleep, if not all wake.

A sermon preached in observation of the 160th anniversary of the founding of First Presbyterian Church in Fernandina Beach, FL, 18 November 2018.

Jer. 7:1-15 and Mark 11:12-25

It is a daunting thing to step into the pulpit of an old church, and even more daunting to step into such a pulpit on an auspicious occasion like this. Expectations are high, and I suspect more than a few of you are anticipating a pat on the back for a congregational life well-lived to date and a rosy-eyed vision of days yet to come. And you deserve it. God knows, this has been a faithful place for long-numbered years. It has endured storms both meteor-ological and metaphorical, and found a way to offer meaningful ministry to the center of this community since before this community was a community. It has been well-led and well-fed, well-intentioned and well-mentioned for most of its storied existence. You deserve a pat on the back.

Your problem is that pat-on-the-back preaching is not my homiletical strength. If you came hoping for that, you may be disappointed.

To tell the truth, pat-on-the-back preaching is not exactly biblical, either, and so I feel some justification. Take for example the passages from Jeremiah and Mark we read a few moments ago. Jeremiah and Jesus stand up to preach in the outer courts of the temple—the same location, albeit different temples five hundred years apart—but if anyone passing by on either day expected to hear words of congratulations on a job well done, they were, well, disappointed. Rather, Jeremiah and Jesus took a different approach to their messages.

Jeremiah’s context is a moment of extremity. Babylonian armies under Nebuchadnezzar were massing outside the city gates for an assault on Jerusalem, while inside the city two political parties vied for control. One saw surrender to the Babylonians as the only way to preserve the city and interpreted the city’s crisis as God’s judgment on the people’s errant ways. The other pointed to the Temple atop Mt. Zion as evidence that, as long as the Temple stood God would stand with the city, and encouraged resistance to the invaders. In the midst of this desperate political struggle, Jeremiah stood up to preach.

The first words from his lips were all anyone needed to know where the prophet stood. “Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord!’” Amend your ways, cried the prophet, or this temple will be of no more permanence and security than the ancient Israelite shrine at Shiloh, once a center of Israel’s worship but long since destroyed and annexed by other invaders. Your hope—whatever hope you have—rests not in the foundation of this Temple but in your return to obedience to the values on which the nation was founded: care for the widow and orphan, justice for those to whom justice is denied, faithfulness to God. And to clarify the point, he uses a most intriguing metaphor: “Has this house,” he says, “…become a den of robbers in your sight?”

When we hear that, most of us think of images of violence and criminality. A robber’s den must be a place of murder, mayhem, and theft. But, in fact, it’s the opposite: it’s the place where the robber gang goes after they’ve committed the murder and mayhem, a place of refuge, rest, and security where they can count and divide the loot and plan their next move. It’s what the old westerns call a “hide-out” where you go when the posse is hot on your trail. Has the temple become a hide-out for the Judaeans, a place of safe refuge where they can avoid the consequences of their actions? Don’t trust in that, says Jeremiah. The law has caught you, the Babylonians are at the gates; God is about to wreak havoc in your haven.

Jeremiah’s point is that faithfulness to God is not wrapped up in what happens inside the church. It’s not what happens inside the Temple that’s a problem; the Temple is in fact just fine. It’s what happens outside in the city that counts. It’s the way you treat the lowest and the least in the world: the homeless man in the street, the undocumented child at your border, the woman who cries for help in the wake of abuse or assault. If you are looking for protection, protect those who need protecting. If you want to be the church, be the church to them.

It is surely no accident that Mark chooses this precise metaphor to place on Jesus’ lips when Jesus ventures into the Temple courts that day. He sees the Temple in full operation, with animal sellers providing animals required for the sacrificial ritual and money-changers exchanging Roman coinage stamped with the image of the emperor for temple coins that bore no image of any living thing so as not to violate the second commandment. He sees, in other words, the Temple doing and being exactly what the Temple should do and be. And he drives them out, bringing that doing and being to a grinding halt. And he says, “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers.”

We like to think of Jesus as exhibiting anger here, and who knows, maybe he was. We like to think that what he saw that day was dishonest commerce at the foot of the temple doors, and it provoked him to a righteous rage. The problem is that there is nothing in the text to suggest either that there was anything dishonest with the commerce in the temple court or that Jesus was angry or enraged—not a word; go back and look! And there is a good deal to suggest that this was a carefully calculated moment, all to make a point.

The calculation starts in v.12, before Jesus comes to the Temple. On his way there, he passes a fig tree, and Mark tells us, “he was hungry” (the only indication we get of Jesus’ inner state). Looking at the tree, he finds no fruit because—and Mark is carefully explicit about this—“it was not the season for figs.” So Jesus pronounces an end to the fig tree’s function, and moves on. But I have to wonder: was Jesus so out of touch with the natural rhythms of growth and harvest that he expected fruit when no fruit could reasonably be expected? Was Jesus expecting the fig tree to be more than a fig tree, doing and being exactly what it should be doing and being? Or is it that he knows that henceforth, seasonal barrenness can no longer be an excuse, and that being a fig tree in a fig tree world is no longer enough? After clearing the temple, as Jesus passes the barren fig tree, he tells his disciples that “whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you will receive it, and it will be yours.”

The point Mark’s Jesus seems to be making is not that Jesus can exhibit righteous indignation, but rather that being faithful is something larger, more encompassing going to church. The Temple, being and doing what the Temple is supposed to be and do, is no longer enough. It is not enough to seek shelter from the storms. Faithfulness forces us out into the weather to give shelter to others. This, I think, is why Mark uses the “den of robbers” quote from Jeremiah. Look beyond the Temple as a place of refuge, he seems to say, and see the Temple as the place where change begins. Pray, he says; believe, and the world itself will move. And then get out there and be part of the movement.

Now what am I suggesting to good folk gathered in good clothes in good faith on this good day? Just this: don’t get caught up in doing and being church to such an extent that you forget what doing and being church is really all about. It isn’t about how long the building has stood here on 6th Street in Fernandina Beach. It isn’t about whether the building is on the National Registry of Historic Buildings. It isn’t about the warm feeling you get when you walk in the door or how much you love the people you walk in with. Important as those things are—and they do have importance—they are not the point. And when you make them the point, well…that’s when the trouble starts.

In the last decade of the previous century, I served as pastor of a congregation in Atlanta; in fact, it’s where Wain Wesberry served as intern for three(?) years while in seminary. When I was there, Rock Spring was a medium sized Presbyterian congregation of about 250 members. I left in 1999 for other callings, and in the succeeding years the Rock Spring congregation went through some hard times. There were leadership controversies and financial struggles, and people found other places to go. I read an article in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution the other day reporting that the now 80 members of the congregation have sold off two and a half acres of its prime mid-town Atlanta real estate, including the church’s former manse and lower playground and parking lot, just to keep the fiscal life support machines running a little longer. I’ve often looked back on years and wondered what we could have done differently that might have set the congregation on a different course.

The people of Rock Spring loved their church, and they loved their church building. Loved it so much, in fact, that changing anything about it was anathema to more than a few. The bitterest argument I had as a pastor arose when we removed—temporarily—the front modesty rails and first two pews to make room for a small orchestra for a musical performance. It was as though the sacred ancestors were rolling in their graves. Love of that sanctuary was so overwhelming that the church did little else to reach beyond its walls. There were individuals in the congregation who gave out blankets and soup to the homeless on cold Atlanta nights, and there were a few intrepid souls who occasionally volunteered to staff the homeless night shelter at a nearby congregation, but for the most part “church” to most of those good people meant “sanctuary building” and the beloved friends they met therein and the warmth and security they felt in that building among those friends after a week’s buffeting in the rough-and-tumble world of Atlanta business.

Not that there is anything wrong with that: that is, in fact, the church being and doing what the church is supposed to be and do. The problem is that it isn’t enough. That congregation, for all its warmth and insular love, has become—to borrow Mark’s metaphor—a barren tree. One of the members of the congregation was quoted in the interview saying, “We know we have to change in order to attract young people.” Much as I love that woman, I can tell her that attracting young people won’t do it. It does nothing to reach out to widow and orphan. It does nothing to attend to the needs of migrants or undocumented or homeless. It doesn’t bind the wounds of the emotionally bleeding in the community. Most significantly, I think, it doesn’t follow the God whom no building can contain and who never stops moving in the world. It isn’t that God doesn’t love the good folk of Rock Spring; I know it is true that God does. But perhaps it is also true that God has seen that the church has ceased bearing fruit and simply moved on.

Both Jesus and Jeremiah would have us understand that faithfulness is not about individual morality and getting right with God. Faithfulness is not a private me-and-Jesus coziness, not some spiritual snuggle that allows me to feel safe and warm and special. It is rather a commitment on the part of the whole community—whether that community is a congregation like this or a nation that would call itself Christian—to be less concerned with its own security and more aware of the world God loves enough to risk dying for. The faithfulness to which Jeremiah and Jesus summon us does not separate religion from ethics. Rather, it understands that moral life in covenant with God involves rejecting the ways that harm neighbor. That moral covenant may start in this building, but it cannot stay here. It must bleed out into the spaces of our lives: work places and home places and voting places and learning places and commercial places and private bedroom places. It must be upheld in White Houses and state houses and migrant workers’ houses and your house and my house. If there is anywhere that covenant is not upheld, we cannot claim to uphold it here. Church—whether in 6th century Jerusalem or on 6th St in Fernandina Beach—is no shelter from the hard decisions about love and ethics. It is the place we learn how to make those decisions.

Here’s a poem.

Gods of Small Things

Let us be gods of small things,
lords of mice and roaches,
bastard sons and daughters
of happy, smiling gods
who bless their acolytes
with touchdowns and close-in parking.

Let us stand to the ends of things:
parting notes of postludes
in empty sanctuaries
apologetic exits
whispered at the door,
the echo of the deadbolt.

Let us walk the hallways after
light and hope burn out,
read from silent liturgy
prayers addressed to no one,
hear from mislaid hymnals
music no one sings.

Let us raise the chain-link fence,
last fence around the Table,
that bars the way to all
lest any come unworthy
to take the meal, until
the meal is taken from us.

Let us be the wrecking-ball;
swung from moral heights
we bring down the house
then hang condemned when done,
the evidence against us
stone not left on stone.

But let us be at last the rain
that falls on wrack and ruin
to wash away the stain
—see, even now it falls—
and waters wheat and vine
and pools in broken fonts. (1)

Here is my prayer for you. That you may be more than a robbers’ den and a barren tree. That you may be the rain that waters wheat and vine, until grows the grain for bread and the grape for wine. That you may be the font that, though broken, still holds the baptismal waters. That you may follow God into a strange new world where God is not in the temples but on the loose, and dwells with people of every sort, and wipes away every tear from their eyes. That you may move mountains. Indeed, that you may go out of here and move mountains.

(1) Paul Hooker, Days and Times: Poems from the Liturgy of Living. Eugene OR, Resource Publications, 2018, pp.8-9.

The bones of Joseph, which the Israelites had brought up from Egypt, were buried at Shechem, in the portion of the land Jacob had bought from the children of Hamor, the father of Shechem, for one hundred pieces of money; it became an inheritance of the descendants of Joseph.

 – Joshua 24:32

Impossibly long the trail
that leads from there to here,
up from parted water
through empty desolations
no one cares to own,
to a stopping place safe
from the whip, beneath a willow tree.
The earth is weeping.
Each step is a tear,
witness to the passage of his bones.

He is laid to rest—
if there is such a thing as rest
in this migrant life, always
moving with the rhythms of the world,
one step ahead of terror,
one step short of grace.
His father bought this land, they say.
He is at peace, they say.
It is inheritance, they say,
this land, this rock-hewn charnel for his bones.

But who belongs here? Who knows
any peace but the sweet caress
of the morning breeze, the fiery breath
of the mid-day sun, the cold rebuke
of the night-wind beneath the silent stars?
You claim this dirt, even
at the cost of blood and bitter gall.
The deed may be in hand
but you will not keep it,
and no case, no defense will be offered by the bones.

Others will inherit, too, in time,
when you have gone, scaled
another chain-link fence, waded
another muddy river, passed beneath
another scowling border guard
with a rifle eager for a lucky shot.
Move on, move on, until the earth reveals
its pillow for your head,
its blanket for your chill,
its inheritance for your lonely bones.

[A sermon preached at Shelton Chapel, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, 23 October 2018]

Exodus 20:18-21; Revelation 8:1

According to Exodus, a thick cloud enshrouded Mt Sinai, and when God spoke, it was with all manner of thunder and lightning and the blast of the celestial trumpet, Gabriel blowing his eternal horn. It was enough to make the whole holy host of them tremble like aspen leaves in a mountain breeze. So the people of Israel hunkered down in their tents and from behind their tightly drawn tent-flaps cried out to Moses: “You speak to us, and we will listen; but let God not speak to us, lest we die.” Then from a safe distance they watched while Moses climbed the mountain into the dense darkness where God was hiding while the echoes of divine thunder faded in their ears.

This semester, as you are doubtless by now aware, the faculty has accepted the assignment to preach on the theme: Hodie—God’s Today. We are challenged to answer the question: where and in what ways do we see God at work in the world of the present?

And here is my answer: I haven’t got a clue. I wish I did. Honestly, I’m a bit embarrassed. I have listened to my colleagues talk about their senses of God’s presence in the world, and I have been moved by their passion, eloquence, and truthfulness. All of which makes it harder to admit that I just don’t know. But these days, things that once looked to me like God seem now more like shabby idols of my own manufacture, and things that once sounded like the voice of God now seem little more than the tinkling wind chimes of my own wants and will. I am left to wonder if God has absconded into the cloud atop the metaphorical mountain and left me clutching at my tent flaps as the divine thunder dissolves into the silence of the world.

Annie Dillard—you’ve heard me speak of her before—once mused about the silence of the world in an essay entitled, “Teaching a Stone to Talk.” Here is a part of what she said:

Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of the world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. The Chinese say that we live in the world of the ten thousand things. Each of the ten thousand things cries out to us precisely nothing.

God used to rage at the Israelites for frequenting sacred groves. I wish I could find one. Martin Buber says, ‘The crisis of primitive mankind comes with the discovery of that which is fundamentally not-holy, the a-sacramental, which withstands the methods and which has no “hour,” a province that steadily enlarges itself.’

There it is, my friends: the mailing address of the modern world. We live at the intersection of silence and the a-sacramental, in a house that has no room for the holy.

I read an essay recently by Rachel Mennies, a Chicago-based poet and teacher, in which she advocates for a “poetics of bewilderment.” She yearns to teach her students “how not to understand a poem, and to embrace that not everything in a poem can ever be understood, even by its author.” A poetics of bewilderment acknowledges that “bewilder-ment is at the core of every great poem, and in order to be bewildered, you have to be able to wonder.” I suspect Mennies is pointing to the same idea the English Romantic poet John Keats two hundred years ago called “negative capability”: the capacity of “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” By whatever name you call it, such a poetic begins with the acknowledgment that in poetry, at least, it is more important to wonder than to understand.

I want to develop a hermeneutic of bewilderment. Its central principle would be a willingness to wonder without any of Keats’s “irritable reaching after fact or reason,” a posture of awe before the truth that not everything is available to be understood. A hermeneutic of bewilderment emerges from its tent and stands staring into the cloud at the foot of the mountain, straining to hear the last dying rumbles of divine thunder in the ever-increasing silence.

Bewilderment, whether poetic or hermeneutic, is a hard thing, not native to us. We like to understand. We moderns are, as a species, largely terrified of the holy, the not-understood, anything we cannot manipulate to our own ends. We want to control our environment. And when confronted with anything we can’t control, we duck behind our tent-flaps and put our fingers in our ears. La-la-la. Let God not speak to us, we cry, lest we discover we are, in fact, not in charge here.

Dillard continues:

It’s hard to desecrate a sacred grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. Did the wind used to cry, and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of the earth, and living things say very little to very few. Birds may crank out sweet gibberish and monkeys howl; horses neigh and pigs say, as you will recall, oink oink. But so do cobbles rumble when a wave recedes, and thunders break the air in lightning storms. I call these noises silence….

The silence is all there is. We are here to witness.

I have been reading apophatic theology lately. That’s the line of thought that runs from Clement of Alexandria and Augustine through a 5th c. pseudonymous author we call Dionysius the Areopagite to a 14th c. anonymous English mystic whose sole known book is that classic of medieval spirituality, The Cloud of Unknowing. The common thread in apophatic thought is that we have to be cautious about, even suspicious of, human language and thought about God.

A warning: this next bit is tricky. All language about God is metaphorical, if only for the reason that finite human words cannot contain the infinite reality of God. And all metaphors operate in the tension between similarity and dissimilarity. So everything we say of God—every theological metaphor—must carry within it both similarity and dissimilarity to God. If I borrow the Psalmist’s metaphor, “God is the rock of my salvation,” I affirm that something about a rock—perhaps its steadfast-ness and immovability—is similar to God. But God is also dissimilar to a rock: God is not unchanging or immovable. Indeed, God transcends such human categories as change or motion. So God neither changes nor remains the same, because God holds all possibilities at all times. God is neither moving nor not-moving, because God holds all places at all times. Thus, God both is and is not “rock.” If I affirm the metaphor of God as “rock,” I must also acknowledge that it stands in tension with the not-rock-ness of God. This tension, applied to all our theological metaphors, ultimately collapses all human language about God: all our metaphors break, all our words fall apart. Better, say the apophatics, to forget what you think you know about God, to recognize that, like Moses and the Israelites, there is between us and God a dense, dark cloud before which we can only stand mute in wonder and awe. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing says it this way:

So set yourself to rest in this darkness as long as you can, always crying out after him whom you love. For if you are to experience him or to see him at all, insofar as it is possible here, it must always be in this cloud and in this darkness.

I find that language strangely satisfying. Amid all the certitudes ringing through our rhetoric and echoing in the ether—certitudes about God and God’s will for America, for the church, for justice, for moral righteousness—I find myself yearning for the darkness and silence of unknowing. I find myself open to, even eager for, bewilderment. I no longer think I am here to understand. I am here to witness.

In the middle of John’s apocalypse, at the culmination of the vision of the seven seals that bind the Lamb’s Book of Life, there is an extraordinary moment. In the passage just prior, after the opening of the sixth seal, all the angels of heaven and all the elders of the Church triumphant have sung the great chorus celebrating the honor and power and wisdom of God. And then we turn the page, and there is this:

When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour (Rev. 8:1).

Silence for about half an hour. What a striking image! Amid all the theatrics of the apocalypse—trumpets trumpeting and choruses chorusing—abruptly the action grinds to a halt for half an hour. Before the apocalyptic drama climaxes and God’s victory is unveiled and the curtain falls on Satan and his minions—for thirty minutes all the actors freeze in place and the heavenly stage falls thunderously silent. And I begin to think: what if silence and darkness and the bewilderment of unknowing are at the heart of what God is up to in the world? What if the most faithful act is not always to act, but to wait on that darkened stage, to be still while heaven is silent, and to wonder at all we do not know?

Here is a poem about darkness and silence and not-knowing:

Worship
Rev.8:1

The night’s as silent as the shrouded dead.
We mime our parts in plays we did not write.
Stars applaud the empty stage instead.
The curtain falls. We bid you all goodnight.

We mime our parts in plays we did not write.
The cast bows low and utters not a sound
as the curtain falls. We bid you all goodnight;
ushers, pass the offering plates around.

The cast bows low. They utter not a sound
in praise or parody of their feeble play
while the ushers pass the offering plates. Around
You are the words; no one will say

if praise or parody. Our feeble interplay
is all the rage in fashionable conversation.
But You are the words. How can one say
what’s written on the day before creation?

And so we rage in fashionable conversation.
But still no match for chaos, storm, and spark.
What’s written? On the day before creation
we meet no gods awaiting in the dark.

We’re no match for the chaos, storm, or spark
the stars applaud. On the empty stage, instead,
we meet no gods. But, waiting in the dark,
the nights are silent as the shrouded dead.

I do not mean to equate bewilderment with deliberate ignorance, nor silence with callous indifference. I do not mean that the faithful soul may ever give up its brave quest to live out the prophet Micah’s call to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. I do mean however, taking my cue from Micah, to encourage a healthy dose of humility in that walk, and a bewilderment occasioned by the inadequacy and inevitable collapse of our knowledge of God. I do mean to emphasize the provisionality of every conclusion we draw about God’s nature and intent. I do mean to suggest that, while full-throated soliloquies about God’s presence here or God’s justice may be the last words of the scene, they are followed by silence as the curtain falls.

There will be those who say that humility and bewilderment make a poor foundation for ethics, a weak response to the cries for justice from those to whom justice has been too long denied. In such a time as ours, they claim, the need for faithful defense of the defenseless is acute. I do not disagree. Bewilderment and humility must not degenerate into accommodation with evil. There will be those who say that silence is not God’s last word, that God speaks another Word—one with a capital “W.” I do so confess. Still, it is no small source of wonder to me that this Word was born in the starlit stillness of Christmas, died amid the thunder and darkness of Good Friday, and rose in the eternal silence of Easter morning. Perhaps the wonder is that, no matter how God speaks, the message always seems to come wrapped in cloud and silence.

And that is why, in answer to the question, where do I see God at work, I offer not a where but a how, not a place but a posture. I offer a holy bewilderment and a cautious humility, and I place them respect-fully alongside the passionate certainties of our day as a reminder that not all things are available to be understood. There are moments in the life of faith when the most faithful way to live may be to live in wordless wonder, resting in the cloud of unknowing, and listening to the silence in heaven. Who knows? Perhaps this is one of them.

Annie Dillard, one last time:

The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is the face of God brooding over the waters; it is the blended note of the ten thousand things…. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, even to address the prayer to ‘World.’ Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.

[Annie Dillard quotes are from “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters,San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982, pp. 85-95.]

[Rachel Mennies quote is from “Less Than Certain,” http://www.poetryfoundation.org, 3 September 2018.]

[Poem, “Worship,” is an unpublished poem by Paul Hooker.]

Exodus 20:18-21

I wandered in this country then;
I do not recognize it now,
having spent too long in tents
beneath the mountain, storm, and cloud.
Its monuments are nowhere clear.
In place of towering obelisk
proud beside the silvered pool
is raised the phallus and fist,
a pornographic tale of fools.

I was a believer then
though hardly now would make the claim.
Hoary text, old prayer, and hymn
seem out of rhythm, vague, and strained.
Measured words mean nothing here.
This is the hour of rage and lies,
and sacred passions made absurd,
and grief that dwells too deep for sighs,
and sighs that dwell too deep for words.

I was a man then, but no more
would dare to boast of manhood’s sway,
such shame the boast must hold in store;
would rather walk a simpler way.
Is walking such a way allowed?
Beside the path are souls. They weep;
their anguish haunts men’s heartless dreams.
It is not mine to catch and keep
their tears, nor soothe their hurts, it seems.

I am a witness, then. I see
what cultured blindness keeps from sight,
the whir of wings as angels flee
abandoning the fading light.
God is not here, but in the cloud.
Yet in the cloud, draped like a pall
around the shoulders of the mountain
in grumbling thunder, flash, and squall
may yet be found the healing fountain.

Silence hovers like humidity
in the room. Prayers and sympathies
rise like steam in post-diluvian heat,
offerings to absent-minded gods.
He has little else to say or try or hope for.
But there is work, and so he rises too.

Gathers what the gale has left behind—
wedding photos, dancing hula-skirted
doll from Honolulu, Amtrac postcards
of snow-capped vistas in the Rocky Mountains,
the little Eiffel Tower made of pewter.
Each goes in the cardboard box he tries
but cannot muster strength to throw away.
For now, at least, the box is laid to rest
on the top shelf of the hallway closet
among the sprung umbrellas, widowed gloves,
detritus left by other, smaller storms.

In years to come, he will stumble over
pieces of remembrances once cherished,
but wind-torn, lost, and blown to god-knows-where
(Is there still a god who knows, or cares?)—
a candle-gilded dinner conversation
now come to ground in some neglected cornfield,
a shared purpling sunset repurposed as
a planter-box beside a front porch swing,
a pillowed smile before the lights go out
at night, now drained of warmth, mud-caked and drenched,
half sunk in standing water in a ditch.

He will stumble over them, and think
how strange they are and how alien,
will wonder were they ever really his,
and ask what sort of life would gather up
such random relics of aborted memory,
and rising, turn, and slowly walk away.