The Mystery
The days fly by, don’t they? They fly by in an all consuming
round of duties, constant activities, tasks to accomplish, people to
listen to, meetings to convene and keep focused, people in the hospital
or lonely people at home to visit, the days are full, just packed with
constant activity, phones ringing, new things to attend to, and on we
go. So Wednesday night, I left the office and picked up my
children at the library in the evening dark, we went to the grocery
store, picked up some food, got home, cooked dinner, and all the time I
was hungering and thirsting, not for the supper, but to get back to a
book I had been reading the night before. Bernard of Clairvaux’s
homilies on the Song of Songs, all about the love of God, and so
inspiring and beautiful. I didn’t want to eat, I didn’t even want
chocolate. I just wanted to pick up that book again. And
when I did, it was beautiful, so beautiful I had to stop and sit in the
stillness of prayer again and again. And it occurred to me, from
some place far from my ordinary mind, that this is indeed what language
is for – it is to do our very best to express the love of God – as
Bernard of Clairvaux did in these homilies. Not just language,
but music and art, it is all for this purpose, to express the love of
God, to lift us up, to inspire and encourage the soul in its quest for
God, in its lovelorn seeking after the source of its life, seeking
after God.
We are in the season of Epiphany, and here we are in the second of the
great epiphanies of this season – the baptism of Jesus. There are
three epiphanies, or one three-fold mystery, as the Orthodox liturgy
says. Dale shared this with me from the Orthodox liturgy.
Behold a triple mystery: the wise men come to Bethlehem; Jesus comes to
the waters of Baptism; water is changed into wine.
Birth, Baptism, Marriage, these are events that even now have the power
to shock us out of our ordinary daze and wake us up to the mystery of
the divine hovering all around us. My children’s birth definitely
woke me from my ordinary slumber. I had the sense that I was part
of something so much larger than my puny little concerns, my silly
little ego and its daily life. It was humbling and strange to
realize that God had entrusted me with care for these mysterious beings
I called my daughter and son. For a while, the mystery lingered
in my awareness and I could not look at them without it taking my
breath away. I was so in love, so caught up in the mystery.
And then, slowly but surely, I went back to sleep, and the same old
soap opera of life closed me in with its endless drama: forgetting that
I know nothing, I start to think I have some turf to defend and start
arguing with people about how to raise my children, or how to conduct a
worship service, or what the meaning of epiphany is, or what the
eucharist means, or . . . my goodness, what silliness. I listen
to all these discussions and I think, what am I talking about?
Who knows anything about any of this?
Why argue? Why debate? Why make such big deals out of everything little sentence?
I have to keep learning over and over this simple truth: whenever I
find myself wanting to prove myself right, I am not open to learning
the truth.
And I remember the mystery. The language is made for expressing
love and higher truth. The language is not created to prove that
anyone is right and wins the argument. There is no winning, there
are no sides, this life is not a campaign for president. There is
a higher purpose to this life than any of that. It is to seek God
and express the love of God, as best as possible using the beautiful
but limited means of expression we are given: language, art, music,
service like changing a diaper or bandaging a wound, or taking
someone’s hand and holding it quietly while they are suffering.
Baptism, it comes to wake us up again. And sometimes we actually sense
the mystery behind the sacrament. Before and after a baptism, I
try to be very still and quiet, and let the mystery speak. In the
midst of the ceremony, I try to pay attention to all that is going on,
giving my full attention to the sound of the prayers, the music, the
voices, the water. And the mystery sometimes overwhelms me.
Sometimes I wonder, in baptism and in Eucharist, if I won’t be swept
away by the mystery. But God is merciful, and allows me to
continue to stand here, and speak, and lead the congregation in the
ceremonies. So I do.
And then, back into the midst of the ordinary week, so easy to forget,
so quick to forget, the divine purpose of our lives revealed in
baptism, nourished in the Eucharist.
And marriage, the divine alchemy of love. Marriage which reveals
to us the mystery of Christ’s love for the church, the changing of the
ordinary water of our lives into the wine of the Spirit. So easy
to forget, so easy to fall back into the same old arguments and
frustrations of life, even with our beloved partners, our husbands and
wives, our children, our friends. So easy to forget.
Wordsworth, in his Ode to Intimations of Immortality speaks of this:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
The poem is quite long, but many of us remember this part:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
When we see the newborn baby, we are reminded. And
slowly, surely, it fades into a sleep and a forgetting once again, just
as the essential nature of the child is enclosed in a pretense of
imitation and predictable fantasies like an actor on a stage:
And with new joy and pride
The little actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his 'humorous stage'
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.
Is there hope for us then, that the star of Epiphany might
lead us to a place of remembrance that does not fade? Do we dare
to follow the star the rest of our days?
Wordsworth finds his hope
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
Dare we look through death? Dare we look through the sleep of our days? Dare we seek the Eternal here and now?
The voice of the Spirit tells us: Behold, this is my Beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.
Dare we listen and obey?
The Rev. Edie Bird
The Baptism of Jesus, 2nd Epiphany, 2008
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