the patient mystery

It started with a simple comment during our Great Texts Capstone course, where we sit around the big, boardroom table and drain coffee cups and complain about dialectic. "It's not like Aristotle can hear us."

"Maybe he can."

I said it offhandedly, perhaps flippantly. But I've thought about it since. I wonder if Aristotle can hear us.

Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

I am not interested in a kind of Christian universalism. The revelation of Christ marks a clear point in which the standard of salvation emerges, that we must call on the name of the Lord to be saved, confess with our mouths the reality of the Redeemer.

But what of before?

As the lectionary has taken us through Genesis, it is interesting to trace God's revelation of Himself. While He calls Jacob in Chapter 32, it is not until Chapter 35 that God begins to clarify who He is. Even then, Joseph takes a wife from the priests of Egypt, and it seems for a time that the One God is nothing more than a god out of many. It is not until the Exodus, it is not until tablet commandments and mountain descents, that Israel hears the Lord is God and God is One.

Again, I do not want to present this as a sort of Christian universalism, a byway by which we reconcile all our questions with the tidy presumption that mercy dictates permissiveness. Rather, I should like to consider the mystery of God's patience in His revelation. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the One God, was less concerned with being the One God to the people He revealed Himself to until much later. There were other things to worry about. There were other parts of the Story that needed writing.

So what of Aristotle or Plato? We know that they both concluded that there was a Force behind all things and that such a Force was also good. Given the culture of most pagans of the time, the idea of a deity that was also good and benevolent and just was a bit absurd. And yet, by way of natural reason, so they concluded. What does it mean? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps they simply perished into Sheol.

... in which also He went and made proclamation to the spirits now in prison, who once were disobedient, when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah ...

I wonder why this bothers us. I wonder why we feel the need to ask. Is Aristotle in Heaven? Perhaps. Perhaps he is part of the communion of saints. Perhaps he can listen in on our conversation around that boardroom table where we pick apart his dialectic and miss, in the process, that he perhaps knew something of this One God, this God who reveals Himself slowly, who chose to reveal Himself slowly.

Perhaps this is a patient mystery. Perhaps there is more of a question mark over some of those souls before the mystery of God through the Person of Christ was revealed than we realize.

I have other sheep, which are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will hear My voice; and they will become one flock with one shepherd.

Maybe. Perhaps, at least, we should keep the question closer than we are comfortable with. The action of grace upon our hearts is a patient mystery, too.

absurd mercy, letter twelve, preston to hilary

Today, I bring you the continuation of the blog banter Hilary Sherratt and I have doing, in which we write public letters to one another back and forth and invite you to join us in the comments. Read the letter I’m responding to here. Dear Hilary,

"I forgot that we are dust."

I did too. I forget it often. And I know when you wrote it you didn't mean abasement, that you speak of the reality we overlook too often, that however hallowed and blessed we might be, we are ultimately inspirited earthenware. (This has come to mind most acutely when I work with clay in ceramics, when I think to touch by clay myself, ridiculous as it may seem, by feeling that dust from which we were formed, to which we return.)

You wrote of the fragile self, of needing to begin at Ash Wednesday. I think you're right. These past days have been a challenge, abiding in the silent space with God. I am coming to understand that what He wants of me now is the obedience in the quiet, the sort of faithfulness that comes only when I dare to be still, to imagine a world in which nothing has been given but Him and that must, absolutely, be enough.

Do not be as the horse or as the mule which have no understanding, Whose trappings include bit and bridle to hold them in check, Otherwise they will not come near to you.

The rub of this, isn't it? The call to not need the Voice from the cloud each time we step forward, but to walk in His midst with an integrity of heart that longs for the right, chooses the right. But how to cultivate such quiet faith, such simple obedience?

I thought today about the ordinary grace of mixing the smallest amount of paint with the largest amount of water before hurling it with a kind of controlled--the word that occurs to me is violence, but it's not violence, because it's good, strength, perhaps--and to be completely surrendered to the pattern it makes all on its own. You've left it to gravity and angels once it flies, all your planned arc and angle only influencing so much. But when it works, when it flecks like spilled joy, you breath mercy. Mercy from such a simple thing.

That is where I am being led. I wrote about walking out of my own Ash Wednesday service because I felt Holy Ghost, or I thought I felt Holy Ghost, move me into motion. I have begun in that place, in the place of learning to follow even when it feels the steps are uncertain, when the hungry man might not be hungry after all. I am learning to take joy from paint spatter and words formed well, the curve of a g when written by hand and the things that should be and are, on their own, ridiculous.

But if they are held in tandem with the presence and glory of the Creator, if they are truly in the midst of His being, then these ordinary things are the vouchsafe promises of abundant grace.

But now we do not yet see all things subjected to Him. But we do see Him ...

By impasto and paint speckle, by sandwiches and gs, I see Him. I see the hands of Creator. No pantheistic sentimentality or spiritualistic vice: these are the pierced hands, these are the wounded, resurrected hands belonging to the One in whose image we are made.

For we need them to be, you and I. We who feel the lonely spaces acutely and know this world is tilted farther to the wrong than the right most days, as we yearn that "what is mortal will be swallowed up by life." Until then, until that swift and grand moment when all this comes to glory of its close, we breath mercy by the humility of our hearts when we realize paint spatter is grace. It's absurd mercy. It is maddening. But goodness, isn't it wonderful?

Love,

Preston

rend your heart, not your garment: today at deeper story

Today, I'm sharing over at Deeper Story. Everything about it felt wrong. We filed into the nave, passing by the stained glass saints keeping vigil over this generation, living in another century only inches from where they watch. We were a small group: the one like a brother, the one who makes me laugh wildly, the one who spills grace with each word. It was not they who were wrong, but I.

Me, with all these past months of the silence of God, with the living in the shadow of the joy, the other side of the grace. I felt wrong; I felt out of place; I felt the exhaustion of not hearing.

Because I used to hear. I used to feel. I used to walk in the midst of Him, or rather, knew I walked in that space.

And rend your heart and not your garments.

Is it possible to do Lent wrong?

I was giving up Facebook. I felt no motivation to do anything else. Last year, I had heard the Lord speak clearly, and I gave up meat altogether except for feast days and, more significantly, abstained from the Eucharist. I had grown, deep and full, through such mortification, such discipline.

But this year, this year felt trite. Giving up Facebook isn’t much of a sacrifice, isn’t much a good that’s left to then return to in rejoicing once the fast is completed. Yet I had not heard otherwise. I had not heard, it seemed, at all. Giving up Facebook only seemed right. But that was all. It seemed right. It didn’t seem much like I had heard.

And I thought that perhaps, if the ashes were made on my forehead, if I took that sign to myself, then perhaps I would hear Him again, feel His presence burn into the sign of the cross made upon my face.

Continue with me on this journey, over at Deeper Story?