Gimme' some water...

(Props to Eddie Money )

Reading the Book of Exodus this morning and really marvelling at the spiritual ideas presented. In the past, when reading Exodus, I have always somehow gotten hung-up on trying to picture (and understand) the plagues that the Lord sends against the Pharaoh and Egyptians - what was the darkness that you could "feel"? What's the difference between the gnats and the flies? Did the Nile really look (and smell?) like blood? Why could the Egyptians dig next to the Nile and still find water if the Nile was blood? Finally - how can the Egyptians do the same thing as Moses did - what was up with that?

This morning, though, I went in a different direction. After a recent bout in our house with Strep throat, which notably featured my wife and I both sick at the same time (for the first time...), I found that I started to get filled with a very negative attitude - it seems to fit to say that I was tempted to "grumble against the Lord" - at least a little bit. My thoughts were a confused jumble - "Does God want us all to die?" "Is it a good thing that we don't have a family support structure here locally?" "If this religion is all about "embracing the cross", I'm never going to make it!"

As I read the account of the Exodus, the words on the lips of the Israelites seemed to fit well in my mouth - "Did you lead us out here to die?" "In Egypt, at least, we had food!" "We're doomed, the Egyptians are coming!". In each case, they must be utterly dependent on God - or die. It's humbling to know that the words of the Israelites could be my words - likely WOULD be my words in a setting as extreme as the Exodus (allowing for the grace of God of course....).

I am somehow cross-correlating this to what I have been reading in The Dark Night of the Soul - the Exodus story certainly seems to qualify as a "Dark Night of the Senses" - the book is filled with stories like the Israelites at Meribah where there is no water - followed by another story where their food has run out (God sends the Manna and the Quail to feed them), followed by battles where they are outnumbered. As I have noted in a previous post, there is always this cry "Why did you bring us out here? We were better in Egypt!". It seems to me that the Dark Night of the Senses is not primarily an intellectual experience, it's a sense experience. "The desert" is the spiritual term for life lived (in a certain sense) "against" the physical senses.

And, in response to their "hardening their hearts", they are sentenced to "wander" in the desert. It's bad enough to pass through the desert on the way to something better, but to just "wander"...

Wow.

I find it so fascinating that it doesn't seem wrong to say that all of our physical senses - sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell - are all "darkness" as regards ultimate reality. In fact, it seems to me that it's not just darkness, but distorted light - bad information as opposed to no information at all.

This is where "grace" is so important. Grace is a word that I have heard on the lips of so many people that it is almost robbed of meaning. Functionally, I could define grace as "the word Protestants use most". But in light of this Dark Night idea, grace could be defined as "that which enables us to live through the Dark Night of the Senses" - since it's a Dark Night, grace, by definition, is not sensed. The most evidence compelling evidence I see of its existence is other people's lives lived right in front of me clearly under the influence of it. A significant component of my spiritual life consists in listening to stories of people who made it through the desert, through the Dark Night, not the least of which are the Israelites of the Exodus.

Here is where I begin to catch a glimpse of how awesome the Christian gospel is. We are not following a pillar of cloud and flame, but a God so committed to forgiveness so as to be render himself powerless against us when we ask for it. Even Peter, who "failed" the test, is gathered up again, indeed "carried through" the desert.

I have no faith that I will never grumble (I've lived long enough to know myself...), but I can have faith that I will be carried through even if I do.

Thanks be to God.

Disconnected Statues

In an earlier post, I wrote about my experience with statues in the Catholic church in contrast to some headless mannequins at the shopping mall.

Recently it has occurred to me that the Catholic church has no monopoly on the use of statues in America. I am referring, of course to the many civil monuments that include the use of statues (war memorials, historical figures, local leaders, etc.) that dot our American landscape - Lincoln's monument and the statue of the marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima to name just a few - plus countless thousands of others with more localized significance.

It sometimes seems to me that, in these times, these civil monuments are succeeding at everything except their intended purpose - namely to call to the mind of the observer some remembrance of the noble character or deeds of the one depicted. Rare is the case where, after I go up close to read an inscription at the base of a statue monument, that I have ever even heard of the subject represented, let alone have any qualitative sense of their spirit or what they were about. Oddly, enough, this is particularly true with respect to statues that depict people of local significance. This is so odd to me. It's kind of like all the lines in the Old Testament that we moderns considering "boring". Do we have any sense of the human effort that the scribes and monks put into copying those verses over and over, by hand and candlelight, so that they could be successfully handed down to bore us? They weren't just Xeroxing. There was no "clipboard". Why would somebody go to that trouble? Why don't we even seem to have a sense that there was trouble gone to?

In regards to these civil monuments, I sometimes feel like I someone in possession of a very finely crafted leather-bound book written in a language they can't read: I open the cover and see the all the beautifully scripted foreign characters inside. I close it again and think "Well, I have no idea what this says, but look how pretty the writing is! Look at the binding! What a beautiful cover! Oh, it must be a very important book to be made so well!"

These statues are for me little more than "mannequins of history" - trying in vain to get me to buy that which has been draped on them - as I stroll by with no more interest than a casual shopper.

My ignorance of history, especially local history, seems at times like an impenetrable fog that denies me the gift that was intended for me by the ones who erected these civil monuments. I am reduced to looking at the style of the clothing and the posture to see if I can intuit something of what is supposed to be conveyed. "Boy, that General so-and-so sure looks stern. I bet he wasn't somebody to mess with." or "Why did men always wear those goofy looking knickers back in the day?" or "Maybe I should wear a goatee like that?".

All of this has given me a sense that there is somehow a warping in my identify. I am something like a plant that is tried to grow by flinging its first roots as far as it possibly could. My identify is gaggle of "furthest reaches" and I am not rooted in the soil over which my center is actually physically situated. I am somehow more connected to things further away than things close at hand. I am more influenced by things thousands of years ago than things 100 years ago.

Weirdest of all, I feel like the only one looking at the statues....