The Precipitation of Awe

Some keep the Sabbath going to church
by Emily Dickinson

Some keep the Sabbath going to church —
I keep it, staying at Home —
With a Bobolink for a Chorister —
And an Orchard, for a Dome —

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice —
I just wear my Wings —
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton — sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman —
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last —
I’m going, all along.

 

“Everything, everything…

Everything is holy now.”

--Peter Mayer

I recently shared with a gathering of friends the reflection that, at the core of the Judeo-Christian faith, is this notion that God is intrinsically tangled up in creation.  All that is, a holy vocalization; everything that lives, animated by divine exhalation; all that redeems, a tangible manifestation of God’s own love.  We are wonderment; “very good,” according to God’s own assessment.  

 

And yet somehow – inexplicably – we have spent the last few months and years eviscerating one another; belittling and declaring war on one another, instead of simply disagreeing and living into thicker ways to love.  It’s hard to image greater sacrilege; hard to image how the Holy Imagination could be more violated; more sinned against.  It’s hard to imagine how we could be so blind as to fail to recognize our own kin – each other, to be sure, but also, as the old hymn asserts it, “the rocks and trees and skies and seas.”

 

This is the season in which talk of “incarnation” is all the rage, and it couldn’t come at a more needful time.  We could use something of the Divine among us.  Which of course it is, as Dickenson in the poem above poetically observed.  Transformed as we are by that signal birth some 2000 years ago when, as the Gospel of John put it, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” Bethlehem nudges us to look around us, not simply behind us.  

 

If we take that charge seriously, the implications are awe-filling.  Frederick Buechner once mused that, “Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of humankind. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant's child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too. And this means that we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break in two and recreate the human heart, because it is just where he seems most helpless that he is most strong, and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully.”

 

What would it mean, I wonder, to trust this promise of incarnation more broadly, more palpably…

 

 …in Democrats and Republicans; 

…in holy water and ocean waves; 

…in a scripture verse read in a pew, or sung by a red winged bird.  

 

Because avian choir is singing.  Because God is constantly preaching.  

 

Because “incarnation” – God made manifest among us – just might be bigger and nearer than we imagined.

 

What would change among us to comprehend that everything is holy now?