i see the light (the spirit is breathing)
advent 1 2005
To the faith community of the
beloved in
Sometimes when I am walking I see things. When this happens I am sometimes astonished that I hadn't seen it before. Sometimes when I am walking I don't see anything. But when I do it is as if it were being revealed to me. It is like being awakened from sleep,a walking sleep, and made witness to the living breathing presence of life. For example, I am walking down the street one day. The sun is shining, nothing special about it, when suddenly the leaves of a tree are turned and from them a light shines, a glowing brilliance, and I look closer and I see that the tree is breathing. I know it sounds crazy but what is happening is that I am noticing that the tree is alive. The world is alive and breathing. God's world infused with God's spirit is breathing. The spirit is breathing. I am not making this up.
A poet named Dom Helder Camara saw it before me.
The spirit is
breathing.
All those with eyes to
see,
women and men with ears for hearing
detect a coming dawn;
a reason to go on.
They seem small, thee
signs of dawn,
perhaps ridiculous.
All those with eyes to
see, women and men with ears for hearing
uncover in the night
a certain gleam of light;
they see the reason to go on.
One time in the fall when all the flowers are dying and the garden is many colors of brown I happened to see it. It was a very small flower of a bright pink, but more than pink, richer, bolder, a brilliant color standing as tall as it could in the midst of the brown and drying garden and I was astonished to see it. Why did I see it? I might not have. It seemed to speak to me without words saying, take courage, there is life in the world and beauty and hope. The spirit is breathing.
I have seen the light. God is love and gives life to all who choose to go where love will take them. In Advent it is love that is coming, not just any love but the love that lights the universe, the love that is the breath of life. Love is coming to save us and because it is coming we long for it and the longing is not really distinguished from what it longs for.
Those of you who love profound and
beautiful literature , if you haven't read Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson you are in for blessing: Listen to this:
To crave and to have are as like as a
thing and its shadow. for when does
berry break upon the tongue as sweetly a when one longs to taste it, and
when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth,
and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here
again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to
wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may
lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know
it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smoothes our hair, and brings us wild
strawberries.
The miracle of Advent is that what we long for is already here, what is coming has come, what we await is all around us and within us and when we open our eyes to see and our ears to hear we will see the light hear the beating of our hearts. the spirit is breathing. and so are we. To paraphrase today's contemplative word: The moment of truth is not when there is something to see but rather it is the moment that we see it.
Robinson has one other little gem I
would like to share: We had spent our
lives (she writes) watching and
listening with the constant sharp attention of children lost in the dark. It
seemed that we were bewilderingly lost in a landscape that, with any light at
all, would be wholly familiar.
And so it is true for us I believe for when we see the light we see what we already know but didn't know we knew. The spirit is breathing and there is hope, real hope, not just the fanciful, optimistic hope that comes and goes with the whim of the moment, but the hope described by Charles Dinsmore which gives us ground on which to stand. He writes:
We
can be reconciled to life in its severest aspects if we are confident that the
disasters are not meaningless, and that the valley can be made a place of
springs. (quoted from Atonement in Literature and
Life in Imaging the Word, vol.
1)
The witness of the prophet Isaiah speaks to our longing for God: From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for God. For the prophet, too, it is about seeing and hearing and waiting. There is also the longing of the experience of silence and absence that we know all too well, a longing that resides in hope as well, the hope of these words, Yet O Lord, you are our God, we are the clay and you are the potter we are all the work of your hand. For all that seems missing, lacking, wanting, there is this: we belong to God, we belong to what we love and long for. And God holds us in that longing as a mother holds her newborn child who may not be able to see or to understand yet the love that holds her close but who is no less loved for not understanding
It is not insignificant to me that the word in the gospel this morning points out that we can see in the life cycle of a fig tree what is coming. Life is all around us, and the promise of life to come, and life, in its constancy, is always changing. The seasons come and go but then they come and go again and we who are alive breathe with all life and if we stay awake and notice what is around us, calling out to us, we find that God is offering hope that will heal our broken hearts and strengthen us for the work of reconciliation and redemption that we are about. We do not know the day or hour only that we have this day and this hour to breathe, to live, to love. May we gather at the table to breathe the breath of God, to drink the light that has come and is coming, the light that gives us eyes to see.
(Sometimes when I am walking I see the earth breathe.)
i see the light. the spirit is breathing.
