Psalm 95, 55 and John 4:16-35
H,
It has been too long and the
stop and start of this must be frustrating to the flow of ideas between us. This
is mostly my fault because I wait to “feel right” so I can write. I think I have
that backwards. I write to find my way into something and work it out into
something else with weight and height and being and truth. I cannot wait for all
these things to align because the truth is in this present state they rarely
do. We are too full of ourselves to capture the full nature of the holy life. We
define ourselves by the temporal scale of time. We forget to be eternal. It is
good that this path is a lifelong dose of something sublime. If we had to grasp
it in the minutes and the years we worship, it would be impossible. We do not
have the tools to cope with the deep introspection that comes with living in
God. It would consume us whole. It should. He wants it to.
Even as I write these words I realize I am hiding in them. I am being vague when salvation and worship compels us to be open upwards and sideways but never downward. We are open and vulnerable and connected with God and with each other but never with the dark that keeps our focus looking down on ourselves or up on ourselves or too much at ourselves. We lose sight of the truth when we make ourselves the light by which we see everything.
We are heading towards
fatherhood and the new upheavals of the so-called adult life. Yet we still have
the same pull backs, the same troubles, the same lusts and looseness, the same
listlessness and fear and doubt and lack of faith. We are still the same people
and we are heading down toward the same great fall. All we have in all of this
is the weight off of our shoulders of being authentic human beings when we
speak to God and when we connect with others.
The thing with saying that
is that it becomes the thing you hide behind. We spoke about it on the phone today.
The hiding in plain sight. The giving over morsels of yourself that do not embarrass
you because it makes you seem open while you hide the real mess underneath. The
magic trick of living in the light, which is not a trick at all, is to make
your peace with the mess underneath and to let God see it by your own choice
and be authentic enough to your fellow travelers that they realize you are
really connecting. That, my dear friend, is the three cord bond.
