The “Bending of the Grasses” and Beyond
[“I did not see God, for that would have blinded me, but I saw the bending of the grasses at the passing of the hem of His garments” (Sophy Burnham, b. 1936).]
O Lover,
From my origins as a child I was no stranger to that opened to me via the doors of sense, imagination, and emotion. I experienced those worlds as rich and eliciting wonder, and I explored them with a sturdy appetite. But that which these faculties apprehended was but the beginning. I also had inklings and intimations of the sort of Wordsworth’s “splendor in the grass” or Burnham’s “bending of the grasses.” My heart more than my head sensed St. Paul’s reference to Your “dynamism [dúnamis] and divinity” (Rom 1:20).
But unlike dynamism and divinity, regarding Your disposition, whether toward all things in a century of burgeoning cosmic awareness or toward me in particular, I would long be conflicted. Were you distant? Dumb? Demanding? Disciplining? Damning? Merely indifferent? While in time I would find some solace in a via negatíva which drew me beyond all depictions, representations, images, imaginings and names, yet I experienced a wistful vacuity in times when I was aware of You primarily in terms of who You are not. In the lingo of mysticism, it seems that the arc of my spiritual journey was bearing toward apophática even while I was yearning for a kind of kataphática lodestone regarding Your disposition. In short, I needed concretion as to Your heart. I still do.
It was largely upon entering the second half of my life that I was increasingly shown that lodestone of concretion: Jesus, “image [eíkon] of the invisible God” (Col 1:15). Having heretofore been familiar with aspects of him (e.g., teacher, model, sacrifice), I now was being encountered by You via him the second time around. Now, rather than being content with the historical or theologically circumscribed Jesus, the eíkon, I discovered within myself a growing hunger for The One whom he embodied and modeled, yet to whom he was invariably deferential. In short, to be engaged by him was to be pointed toward You. So what is the disposition of Your heart? In the words of Jesus, the Christ, in the Fourth Gospel, “The one who has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9).
O River of Love, You, a la gravity, are always encompassing and permeating down and down and down. In Your course to the very bottom You are relentless and inundating, finally and ever unimpeded by boulder or cul-de-sac. The Torrent of Your heart pools among the last, lowest and least of these. Such is the lavishness and inexhaustibility of You, self-disclosed in the Christ, who are Love Itself. More than mere goal, ideal or aspiration Your effulgence is both “unapproachable” (I Tim 6:16) and unitive, Your crafting a love song, Your infinitude an embrace. And this Your loving disposition is Reality Itself sans “outside” or “beyond,” sans antithesis or aftermath. Tu Sólus.
The disposition of Your heart, glimpsed via the aperture of the Christ, is the macro-horizon in terms of which I endeavor to live in these chaotic times, the prize on which I want to keep my eye.
