O Drawer!
O Lover,
As well You know, I have occasionally flirted with wildly varying spirituality hypotheses involving everything. One such variant has been that You simply are not, at least no more than as projected wish-fulfillment. Alas, in addition to my faith being too fragile to embrace such vacuity, what would be the point of it? Another hypothesis has been that you are primarily divine object, manipulator, judge, and propitiateé. This view has no legs insofar as I am repeatedly repelled by such a deity. Third and fourth, respectively, have been deism (immanence swallowed up by transcendence) and pantheism (yet another materiolatry sans transcendence), each vulnerable to the possibility of Incarnation which, if true, might be game changing. These flirtations, while decades old, can and do occasionally surface in the present. And sometimes the aggregate of them, together with their more dogma-friendly sidekicks, can besiege me with a kind of heart-fog, the result a seeming train wreck, and I am marooned in a storm where “my only friend is darkness” (Ps 88:18).
EXCEPT. Except for one matter, one solitary experience: that of being pulled. Yes, somehow, somewhere, sometime, someone (?), however briefly, is acting upon me. This agent is experienced varyingly: as pursuer or stalker, encompasser or inundator, river or ocean. But what is common is the recurrence, tenacity, the brooding relentlessness, the seeming indefatigability of the source. While for this reverse gravity I employ the word “draw,” both in its verb and noun forms, these experiences do not in and of themselves reveal the disposition, temperament, character, to say nothing of the identity, of the agent. Nor does the biosphere’s confluence of unspeakable beauty and lacerating tragedy grant me much clarity. But that I experience my life as being acted upon has long since become indisputable: something, however unidentified, is hauntingly afoot, even (especially?) in my train wreck episodes. Even when merely my second or fourth best option, this experience has nevertheless become a constant and has skewered my attention. O, I was seeking, or so I thought, but in retrospect I was never not being drawn, acted upon.
So then, what or who is the impinger? On the malevolent/benevolent spectrum, what is the disposition of the drawer? In spite of my complicated religious history, my emerging response to this question across the decades has centered in Jesus, the Christ/Anointed One, the Incarnátus (Jn 1:14). More specifically, I have given myself to his astonishing claim that “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). I continue to embrace “yes!” to Your disposition, temperament, character, and identity as profoundly shaped and concretized by the nothing less than the revolutionary teaching, embodiment, behavior, life-/death-style, and cosmic Christification by the one named Immánuel (Mt 1:23). In short, he is my principal, sufficient, and definitive identifier of You as Drawer, and Your central characterization is that of his embodiment of that Love (I Jn 4:8,16). Your sundry impingements upon me are never absent that Love.
That said, I intuit subtle yet emerging indicators of this Your disposition surfacing far outside my own faith tradition or religions in general. Whether in classical music or the weather event enveloping this day, the rich human lifespan or amorous love, the similitudes ranging from the microcosmic quark to the macrocosmic universe, or the mystical edges of the other faith traditions, the Beauty, Good, and Truth of You as Drawer is adumbrated. After all, “the entire earth is full of [Your] glory” (Is 6:3)! But, at least for me, ever in a secondary, a reinforcing role, vis-à-vis the Christ. The lynchpin for me, Your decisive Self-disclosure, is the one whom the newer testament sets forth as both one of us and “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15), “the exact representation of [Your] nature” (Heb 1:3).
Long before You Self-disclosed to me Your identity as Abyss of Love, Your relentless drawing, a kind of reverse gravity, has been the constant, the acolyte ever escorting me toward and into a circle of Easters, ever nudging me into the inextinguishable Lumen Christi (Jn 1:4-9)! Indeed, he has shown me You, O Lover.
