"Your fire is dim"

H,

                            

I remember all those years ago when it seemed the fire would burn bright forever. I did not see it as a phase. We had our great Pentecost moment and it seemed like we would spread out and change the world in utter restlessness and bravado. Of course that did not happen. Life happens to everyone. Life breaks us all, the great poet said. It is supposed to, the great wind whispers.

We are not here to build worlds and create legacies of despair under the creaking weight of self-fulfilment. The fallen kingdom of self is an act of grace and disappointment is often just an opportunity to make an adjustment in how we see things and how we live. That sounds like the discredited science of self-help gurus but sometimes the bitter medicine of nectar is true. Cliche sometimes hit the spot marked “x”.

The light going dim is nothing but a learning curve that points to our own humanity. When the Christ spoke of seed falling on different kinds of surfaces he was mapping the whole trajectory of our faith. Sometimes we need to hear something once to produce the fruit and other times we need to hear it over the course of our lives. The flame is fine as long as it stays on.

And, it never really goes out. It may seem so. We might give it all up and go follow our own nature to that logical conclusion but something will be wrong. Once you enter the circle there will always be the shadow of it in your mind. You will carry it with you wherever you go. You were re-made this way. You will have to hide it deep down and cover it with unhappy layer over unhappy layer to make it seemingly silent. This is an eternal flame, after all.

It will be easier to let it grow out again. Even in captivity, disgraced and blind and alone, Samson’s hair started growing again. The moment he chose to touch it again his life regained focus and purpose in those last violent seconds. Isn’t that a powerful parable for a fire coming back to life and catching on? The blundering, lustful, disobedient warrior finally seeing when he had no eyes? The Judge of Israel becoming his true name in the last moments of his life.

He sits now in the pantheon of heroes to the life of faith.

We all have our struggles, drawbacks, flaws, some of them serious, and delusions about who we truly are. Yet we have these stories, this book, this grace, this faith and these reminders that the love of God is the true fire in our hearts. We can fail to recognize it many times but it will never go out. It is better we look at it so we can live.

And that life, more abundantly.

Amen.