Opening Lines

Immutability, Peace, and Urgency

Dear Friend,

These are some of my very favorite opening lines of some of my favorite books. Wondering if you have any that you might want to share?

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God.

John Irving - A Prayer for Owen Meany

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”A woman who adored her mother, and had mourned her death every day for years now, came across some postcards in a store that sold bric-a-brac.

Joy Williams - Ninety-nine Stories of God and Other Stories

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It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities.

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“Let There be Light!”

God - The Creation

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“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The Gospel of John 1:1 ( KJV)

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Not a first line, but I think the connection will be clear enough.

Suddenly, I started meeting Christians everywhere. They were coming out of the woodwork: strangers emailing me out of the blue, priests coming to me for help with their writing. I found myself having conversations with friends I’d never known were Christian, who suddenly seemed to want to talk about it. An African man contacted me on Facebook to tell me he had had a dream in which God had told him to convert me. “If you want to know God,” he told me, “you need to read the book He wrote. You know it already: It’s called, ‘The Creation.’”

I’m trying to knit together a number of things that kind people have left on my desk this week. Perhaps you can make sense of them - maybe there is a pattern. Maybe there is none. Look for it if you are so inclined. And if you happen to see it, can you let me know what you are noticing?

Let’s start with the last quote from above. It comes from the essay I mentioned last week in which Paul Kingsnorth recounts his conversion, and it feels risky to lead with the idea of The Creation being God’s first book, His masterwork, as it were. But it also seems self-evident to me, and very much so.

This isn’t a new theme here. Doesn’t the Bible, itself, talk to the fact that God spoke the world into existence, sorta like a book, and presumably long before sixty-six books were knitted together to form the sacred text of our faith? Is it heretical to wonder if The Creation was the original sacred text, the first Bible to which we had access by virtue of being in it and a part of it?

What is the alternative? That God left his children alone in a vast universe with nothing to orient them to Him? That is a thought that exceeds my grasp by a long, long way. Far easier for me to believe (to give my heart to) is the notion that for however many years that came and went between the the creation of men and women and the arrival of the Bible, there was always creation to point to the creator for any who dared to rest their gaze on its magnificence, and that God dictated His grand masterpiece into the oceans and the heavens and the trees and into each chickadee, each rabbit, each leaf, each tree, each river, each pond - that is to say - into each created thing.

I’m not sure why I resisted this idea for so long. Even the more conventional Book of God, our God, the Bible, affirms that creation points to God’s glory.

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(Did you ever consider how it all began with light?) How else could it have begun? In my imagination, it was almost as if to say,

“I don’t want you to miss a thing. So before we get going, let me switch the lights on for you,” or

“ Light and Life are part of the very same story. Must be that way. Don’t you miss it.

Light and Life. Together. It’s important, and it’s literally everywhere.”

And what if that is so? What do we do with that? From where I sit, there is only one thing to do with it: To read as The Creation as carefully as we dare to read anything - even the Bible, itself - perhaps. Those are hard words to type because they feel like some will hear them as a betrayal of my childhood faith. But that is not the way these words are intended. Rather, I think them as a very late recognition of what is True - a truth that until recently I simply could not see.

(There are some who might hear these words as an apology for worshipping nature, itself, but that is precisely not what I am suggesting. I am not suggesting we worship creation any more than Christians might suggest we worship the Bible (although perhaps some might suggest we worship The Bible. I sometimes wonder if this was not the mistake the pharisees often made - confusing the Law for God and refusing the newness of Christ. And in my uncertain reading, Jesus had absolutely no patience for that sort of thing, healing on the Sabbath, in apparent violation of a strict, literal reading of the Law - as He often, perhaps even usually, did heal.)

Rather, I am suggesting that creation points to the Creator just as the Bible points to the Creator, each from a slightly different angle and each offering hints into His glory and character.) Perhaps this is why it’s hard for me to type these words. I think that in the faith of my childhood, I did come to believe that The Bible was not only to be read and respected, but also to be worshipped, as the sole source of the knowledge of God’s character. I am not saying anybody ever said these words to me, but I heard them nonetheless.

No blame. None. But I cannot return to that element of the faith of my childhood. Not that I will not. I cannot. Sometimes I wish I could. It would probably be far easier that way- at least for me.

Clean lines and no ambiguity. Nothing new to challenge me. Only certainty. No mystery. No chance of God being bigger than my imagination.

There is certainly comfort in that, Right?

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Christian Wiman writes (yes, him again):

"In fact, there is no way to “return to the faith of your childhood,” not really, not unless you’ve just woken from a decades-long and absolutely literal coma. Faith is not some remote, remembered country into which you come like a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which you’d been betrayed. No. Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life—which means, of course, that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change newness. It follows that if you believe at 50 59 what you believed at 15, then you have not lived—or have denied the reality of your life."

Some might understandably want to defend against such a statement, and perhaps for them, defending the faith of their childhood is a worthy endeavor. Who am I to say otherwise? But it runs counter to my experience of God’s abundant grace and with-ness no matter my circumstances, and counter to my reading of His book of creation, where nothing ever seems to be wasted. Would God waste a single moment in the life of his beloved child? Would he not use every moment in His relentless hunting of my heart to fulfill my greatest longing. … For Him? For me to insist on returning to the faith of my childhood is to deny His sovereignty over each moment, to deny His ability to shape each moment to illuminate His eternal with-ness, which I cannot deny, and continue to call myself a Christian.

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One of my first memories of Richmond was sitting in a Church and hearing a man who would over time become a beloved friend say, “It all begins with the creation story. If you can accept the creation as God’s work, then every word of the Bible follows, and if you cannot, then none of the rest will make any sense.”

I still think of that moment often - five years later. I can almost hear the tumblers of a rusty lock falling open that Sunday morning.

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I’m reminded of one of the marks that Merton left on me this spring, and I’m all but certain I’m repeating myself. But I think it bears repeating:

“The greatest temptation that assails Christians is that in effect for most of us, the Gospel has ceased to be news. And if it is not news it is not Gospel, for the Gospel is the proclamation of something absolutely new, everlastingly new, not a message that was once new but is now two thousand years old. And yet for many of us the Gospel is precisely the announcement of something that is not new: … the ancient and accepted ways, the ways that were not dangerous and which contained no surprises.

“Repentance is at the same time a complete renewal, a discovery, a new life, and a return to the old, to that which is before everything else that is old. But the old and the new meet in the metanoia, the inner change, that is accomplished by the hearing of God’s word and the keeping it. That which is oldest is also newest because it is the beginning. …The Gospel is handed down from generation to generation but it must reach each one of us brand-new, or not at all, If it is merely “tradition” and not news it has not been preached or not heard. It is not Gospel.


“Any word that comes from God is news!”

“But our idea of news might lead us to believe that any word
that …was said by God had to be so fixed, so determined, so rigid in its set form that it could never be anything new, never unpredictable, never astonishing, never frightening. If there is no risk in revelation, if there is no fear in it, if there is no challenge in it, if it is not a word which creates whole new worlds, and new beings, if it does not call into existence a new creature, our new self, then religion is dead and God is dead. Those for whom the Gospel is old, and old only, have killed it for the rest of men. The life of the Gospel is it newness.

…

What makes the Gospel news? The faith, which is created in us by God and with which we hear it as news. This acceptance of faith, this new birth in the Spirit, opens up a new dimension in which time and eternity meet, in which all things are made new: eternity, time our own self, the world around us.”

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Then what do I say to Hebrews 13:8, in which Paul writes?

Jesus Christ is eternally changeless, always the same yesterday and today and forever.

Of course, it’s a fair question, but I wonder if I hadn’t shaped these words to fit my own personal desire for safety and security, to eliminate any chance of the unpredictable, the astonishing, and even the frightening, and in so doing, created a god that fits neatly into my my brain-pocket and simply cannot escape the limits of my imagination.

Suppose instead Paul was referring to Christ’s pursuit of us as that which never, ever changes, rather than how that pursuit might look to us. Suppose we allow that God can and does adapt to the circumstances in our lives to make His deep, abiding Love known to us in a very personal way. I have come to believe this as the Truth and Hallmark and mystery of my faith - that God was and has always been with me, even when I denied Him, or when he didn’t behave as I thought He ought, or when He abandoned the script I had handed to Him to read back to me.

Doesn’t creation do the same thing? Doesn’t water take on the shape demanded by the environment, yet remain water always? Sometimes water is steam blowing through the earth’s crust at Yellowstone, At other times it is a river rushing down a mountainside; it is often a gentle brook; It can be a vast salty ocean; Sometimes a snowy morning in Richmond (like yesterday!) A pond filled with large-mouth bass? No matter the heat, cold, slope, ir pressure, water remains water always. No matter how it appears to us. Might God’s immutability be similar to this?

I wonder: What if what changes is our perception, and never God’s essential pursuit of his beloved children, and nature might be suggesting to us that God is way, way, way bigger than the limits of our imaginations. What a grace that would be!

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In response to last week’s post, a friend wrote:

When you write about your Abi, two forces fight inside me. The first is some mixture of fear and urgency. The second is expansive and peaceful. On her birthday, these forces fought and the second won.

First. I love getting these notes. Of course I do, Second, I’m so grateful to my friend for putting her finger on something with which I seem to struggle every day. The tension between peace and urgency.

Kathryn and I both recognize the competing forces my friend mentioned, and which seem to walk with us most days. Gracefully, most days they seem to find a place to coexist, even to find strength in one another, but only if/when we have the courage not to choose one over the other.

Peace seems easier to embrace these day. She is kind and gentle and offers a sweetness to the day. It's taken a long time to befriend Urgency, but she is the one who always insists we notice the tiny little joys of the Creation - the new mercies that arrive with each sunrise, and it is Urgency who insists that we look at things as if for the first time, or as if the last time, She has become a trusted confidante for which we are increasingly grateful because she always encourages us to notice our lives and creation, and perhaps even more importantly, to imagine them. Not as they might be, but as they are. She is the one to remind us that it’s not our job to give each moment meaning. Each moment, she knows, arrives pregnant with it’s own meaning. The urgency is to notice. Not to manufacture.

So if there is a thread knitting these thoughts together, perhaps it’s this. We can be at peace and still feel a sense of holy urgency. The urgency to notice what God revealed about the depths and breadth of His love for us when He wrote his great masterpiece that begins with the greatest first line in the history of great first line:

“Let there be Light!

(and there was Light!)

Oremus,

Ç

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Creator, Word, Life and Light,

You have written eternity into my heart.

I ask for the eyes to see and the ears to hear what the eternal newness of you that revealing through your light and life inscribed into The Creation,

And the courage to trust my imagination to You.

So that I might know You, and not simply know about You.

May about You never, ever suffice.