The Wind and the Oak Tree

Their are tendencies within us and forces outside us that relentlessly reduce God to a checklist of explanations, or handbook of moral precepts, or an economic arrangement, or political expediency, or a pleasure boat. God is reduced to what can be measured, used, weighed, gathered, controlled, or felt. Insofar as we accept these reductionist explanations, our lives become bored, depressed, or mean. We live stunted like acorns in a terrarium. But oak trees need soil, sun, rain, and wind. Human life requires God. The theologian offers his mind in the service of saying "God" in such a way that God is not reduced or packaged or banalized, but known and contemplated and adored, with a consequences that our lives are not cramped into what we can explain, but exalted by what we worship. The difficulties and such thinking, and saying are formidable. The theologian is never able to deliver a finished product. Systematic theology is an oxymoron.

Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder

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“The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

“How can this be?” Nicodemus asked.

“You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things? Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?”

Jesus of Nazareth, The Gospel According to John 3:8-12

Dear Friend,

Last week, I re-opened a gift from my mother-in-law. She had given it to me at my fifty-ninth birthday in August. It’s a book called Reversed Thunder by Eugene Peterson - and rediscovering it this week seemed to affirm a thing that seems to have been trying to get my attention for a while, like a limb scratching at the dining room window near the table where I sip my morning spiritual coffee - at least most mornings - as the wind awakens.

First, it seems increasingly clear that I am no more in control of my spiritual walk than I am in control of the direction of the wind. It’s uncanny how often what seems to be precisely the right thing shows up at what seems to be precisely the right time - and almost every time while I am expecting or even planning for something completely different. The trick for me (if there is a trick at all) is simply to remain receptive to whatever breeze arrives - to open the windows and wait for it to blow through. That is perhaps just another way of saying the trick is to Surrender to the Spirit.

I think so. Yet I think God is patient and willing to let me hold onto the illusion that I am The Master of Breezes as long as I insist, while He gently directs the wind to go where it must go, and redistributes the pages of my plan as He sees fit.

Second, the wind that scatters the paper on the dining room table has been simply and gently suggesting, perhaps far more than that, that I have continued to make the Truth of a thing contingent on my ability to understand it, and reminding me of the danger or leaning too hard into my own ability to understand. Most mornings, I do my best to keep the papers, which I have carefully and intentionally stacked on a monthly calendar - a sort of curated holy management plan if you will - from scattering. But it rarely works, and the only thing that my flailing to keep my papers in the places I put them does is frustrate me nearly to the point of breakthrough seizures.

Sometimes the choice to surrender is far more than simply choosing peace of mind: to choose surrender might be to choose life, itself.

What is that danger in leaning too hard into my own ability to understand, and to limit my life to those things I can explain? In Peterson’s words: that we (I) become stunted like an acorn trying to germinate itself in a terrarium. lacking soil, sun, rain and wind, and even if I should succeed in germination, I will never be the wild oak I was intended/made to be.

To me the beauty of Peterson’s challenge is that he offers an alternative to simple understanding - understanding that depends entirely on my own intellectual prowess, and which must make my world smaller, more cramped, and increasingly restrictive, as my intellect inevitably declines. I even wonder if perhaps the smalling of our worlds is the very intent of first seeking understanding before surrendering to the one worthy of our worship - if this is evil’s promise (and lie) to us. That if only we can understand, we might, indeed, control the wind, and thereby, be like God, and tame evil on our own terms.

I have also wondered if this might be among the more lavish gifts that any cancer, and especially brain cancer has to offer. There is no escape from the fact that so long as my world is comprised only of things that I can understand, the glass walls of the terrarium will inevitably close in on me and constrict my growth. Often the doctors remind me that my ability to understand what can be measured, used, weighed, gathered, controlled, or felt is as keen today as it will ever be. That might be scary to some, but what if, instead of being only a curse, it is also an invitation into, in Peterson’s (and Jesus’s) words, a more exalted life through worship (rather than one of mere understanding.)

And while it might not be popular to say this, (I hope that nobody hears me whitewashing an unimaginably difficult diagnosis) for others who share it with me - both directly and indirectly. I might would have resisted the offering just a few months ago, and railed against the suggestion that mental degeneration has been a near certainty all along - almost nobody escapes it at some level and at some point - as hard as that may be to acknowledge. It is a path that has literally nothing to do with cancer.

A cognitive decline over time, a diminishing ability to make sense of things seems a normal part of aging - and I wonder if it’s not a grace that might lead some (me) into a more worshipful posture at some point. I am convinced that cancer accelerated that transition. I wonder if you can hold your mouth in such a way that you can call this a grace. There is little doubt that my life is increasingly exalted the very moment I began to transition from a posture of understanding to one of worship.

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It’s fair to ask, “What is worship?” How might you answer this? I wonder if worship is simply the act of acknowledging our not-Godness in the face of the Father, and instead of trusting our own judgement of what is true and not true, (or even setting aside our ill-gotten knowledge of good and evil) and instead loving and placing our trust entirely in the one who, alone, is worthy of our love and adoration.

I wonder if trust is harder work than we sometimes imagine. I often wonder where might we be more vulnerable than prostrate at the shore of the glass sea that laps at the throne of the triune God? This might sound a lot like prayer to you, and I think it does, too. I often struggle to find the gap between prayer and worship. In his collection of poems, Once in the West, Christian Wiman writes:

My quiet
Niagara
of unnameable
things
over again
I go
in my barrel
of prayer
    - Christian Wiman

I love every single thing about this poem, but mostly the assurance that at least Christian and I are entangled. Perhaps you might recognize yourself in this poem, as well. I hope you might. (My only tiny complaint is that he was writing not about the wind, but about the water.)

It might sound like I am suggesting that we are exalted through humility and surrender. Exactly so. Wasn’t this precisely the example that Jesus offered us with His very life? I am open to other suggestions, but my imagination is not offering any. At least not today. Perhaps tomorrow with a new breeze. And if so, may I remain open to it, and not remain stuck in the trampled, barren ground of The Place

Where I am Right.

Oremus,

Chris

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This and That: Other reading this week that contributed to this post:

A question that has lingered since Sunday: What is the connection between our longings for the future and our losses of the past?

A different sort of miracle: Paul Kingsnorth writes: I was in Romania a couple of years ago and a Romanian monk gave me a definition of a miracle I've never heard before. He said a miracle is not when you magically change something into something else, it's just when you reveal it as it was supposed to be in the first place, when you strip away all of the the errors that are on top of it.

Losing my religion - the good kind of loss: For most of my life, I think I've just sorta accepted that my work is to co-create with God - to co-participate in His renewal/redemptive work of the creation. I think I simply accepted such a thought because it is so baked into western culture: this blind faith in progress available through hard work and technology (there are so many layers behind those words) and because I've been in western culture my whole life, I think I simply could not/did not recognize this was often more foundational than trust in the creator and the creator’s design - and that insisting on my judgement of what is good and what is evil and striving to recreate the world as I think it ought to be likely stands in opposition to it. Tolstoy addresses this notion of our worship of progress, and how it leads to despair in A Confession.

A friend writes:

Loving God with our whole heart, mind, soul, being implies trusting.

That’s our number one priority. All follows. Loving self, loving neighbor, listening to Holy Spirit nudges in one direction or another…and following or not. We have a choice.

Co-creating…yes, but waiting for the nudge. Otherwise, it’s not co- anything.

Love is all that is necessary and when you love, you listen to the one you love. All naturally flows…. Having a willing open heart toward God.

“What would You have me do today?”