Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

We shall not cease from exploration

Sunday, May 21, 2017

From John 14
Jesus said to his disciples, "In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me, because I live and you will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you.

I sat on an early-morning bench at UIUC's Japan House, shaded by green trees, watching morning shadows blow on the garden wall. A boy came through the garden gate with his grandmother and scuffled his feet in the gravel. I looked up. He looked across at me and turned away.

I wonder if he was listening to the sound of the gravel. Or if he was listening for the silence in between the sound. No one said anything. I smiled and turned back toward the shadows.

There is a Japanese word for this silence between sounds. The word is ma. Violinist Isaac Stern calls it "that little bit between each note - silences which give the form." For a major league baseball hitter, ma begins when the ball leaves a pitcher's hand and ends a split-second later when the ball reaches his bat. Or flies past it into the catcher's mitt.

When I can slow things down, then ma shows itself. Wikipedia's article on ma says it is "the simultaneous awareness of form and non-form, deriving from an intensification of vision." I like that. In this liminal moment of already-but-not-yet, I am having an "intensification of vision."

Jesus had those all the time. In this final sharing with his disciples, he struggles for words to describe immortal eternity in a temporal, finite world. He spoke to men and women who thought much less in abstracts and much more in practicals, as in, "How many loaves and fishes will it take to feed all these people?"

A Japanese Jesus might have broached the idea of ma in his discourse. "Don't focus on what is about to happen: my death. And don't get impatient for what will happen next: my new life."

Instead, "Settle softly like butterflies into the space between. There is no hurry here. God's timing is perfect. I am in him and you are in me."

The fullness of God's time is always about the space between what WAS and what WILL BE. This might be the best of times; but because I'm usually in a hurry, it doesn't feel that way.

In his melancholy, less mature youth, poet T. S. Eliot recognized this space but felt betrayed by it. He was just too rushed in those younger days. He wrote "The Hollow Men" out of his impatience and despair:

"Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the Shadow. For Thine is the Kingdom ... This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper."

Many years later, re-christened and in love again with Jesus, Eliot recalled Julian of Norwich's confident words at the end of "Little Gidding," one of his Four Quartets:

"Quick now, here, now, always - a condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything) - and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well, when the tongues of flame are in-folded into the crowned knot of fire. And the fire and the rose are one."

Jesus knows there is no sting in death, so of course Jesus invites us into the fire with him. And like Jesus, we too discover the pure God-man energy we have always been made of, as our wood burns into charcoal and finally turns to flame.

"Be still and know what Jesus knows." Father, your words settle in my soul and give me rest. My heavy-laden lungs, breathless with fear, relax and know how much you love me, and how there is no fear in love. Even in this fiery furnace, you are teaching me to breathe.

Devotions Archive

We shall not cease from exploration

Sunday, May 21, 2017