August 11, 2019
Good morning, 8th Day.
Let us pray:
Gracious One, you lovingly, continuously invite us to radiant, courageous, creative, compassionate lives in you. May we turn our faces toward you in trusting faith, the “yes” of our lives unfurling and blossoming in the bright sun of your love. Amen.
Today’s New Testament portion, from chapter 11 of the Letter to the Hebrews, is one I keep coming back to. It provides me key coordinates on my spiritual map, locating me in God’s space and time, in the larger scheme of things. It reminds me, as well, of the kind of journey I want to be on.
It focuses on God’s call to Abraham, already 75 and his wife Sarah, age 65 and childless. Abraham heeds God’s call to leave his homeland with Sarah, but is given no clue about where they will be going. But he is given two promises:
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the first is that Abraham will find a new homeland.
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The second is laid out beautifully in today’s passage from Genesis, which links to the passage from Hebrews : “Look up to the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able. This is how numerous your descendants will be.”
That description, of descendants as many as the stars of heaven, has always spoken to me deeply. When I was 10, my family was traveling down Missouri backroads to a fishing cottage on a lake in the Ozark Mountains. We pulled into a family diner for dinner as the sun was about to set. When we came out, it was completely dark—darkness this inner-suburb girl had never known before.
This is my first memory of awe: of looking out from the gravel parking lot into the heavens, and seeing stars, everywhere, a deep dimension of stars on top of stars on top of stars, going on infinitely, like when mirrors are aligned just right to create the same image reflected and re-reflected, and then re-reflected, on and on….except that *now* it was with stars, and could go on across the universe.
What a wonderful way to show Abraham the infinite blessings God had in mind for him and his descendants! Surely, that’s what super-charged Abraham’s journey. But year after year passed: 25 of them, with Abraham surely approaching despair more than once. But God kept God’s promise, and Sarah birthed a child, Isaac.
In next week’s lectionary, the Hebrews 11 saga continues: more of our spiritual ancestors making decisions to follow God-given visions, despite all tangible evidence pointing to their certain failure. Some do succeed wildly: but some suffer unspeakably. The stars in the great cloud of witnesses which surrounds us received no guarantees of success, or even of surviving.
When we hear this story, it’s as if we’re hearing a community elder, the story-teller, reciting the ancient tale of my lineage—OUR lineage—not our genetic lineages, but the story of who our spiritual people are. We descend spiritually from a line of people who have repeatedly heard God’s promises, and responded courageously, though the actions required seem reckless, ill-advised, and daunting.
So this is a passage about memory. But it is also a passage about vision. Something moved so strongly in our ancestors that they repeatedly made wildly audacious choices. Why? What were they seeking? They were “looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.”
“A city that has foundations” would be a city built on solid ground, on ground that can bear the weight, unshakable. A city with foundations will not be washed away in the next flood or blown away in the next hurricane. This city will stand the test, will last.
The comparison is to all known earthly cities—built as they have all been on shaky spiritual ground. Cities have typically been either walled fortresses to defend against armies, marauders, or thieves. Or they’ve been settlements established at geographical points favorable to buying and selling, the trading of goods and amassing of wealth. Even settlements begun around sacred sites become mixed with more dubious human motives, to become sites of power, control and money-making. This city with foundations will be different.
A city “…whose architect and builder is God.” I have an architect friend, who designs restorations and additions to old houses and non-residential buildings. When she is considering a project, she begins to see the potentials and even see ways to turn what seemed to be constraints into new possibilities: I could see it in her eyes and feel it in her quietness. She’s feeling for the rhythms, for the harmonies, for the beauty; but she’s also planning toward the needs of those who will use this space. She loves the materials, the colors and textures: she loves the little details as well as the big design.
So, too, with the city whose architect and builder is God: it is built in imagination, in beauty, knowledge, understanding and compassion. It is a place where everyone’s needs are being considered, resources made available for everyone to thrive, and grow into creators themselves. It has ample public spaces, shared space where the people gather in community, rejoice and mourn together, support each other, give and receive compassion and forgiveness.
The story of our ancestors and the vision of God’s city locate us between past and future, between memory and imagination. We bring to mind the story of our lineage because we are on the same road, with the same destination. Our remembering is for the sake of the future, for strength and nourishment for the journey. Our lives are shaped by these stories in both directions: our vision of the future is as active as our pasts in determining who we are right now.
But once we’ve located on God’s map and begun the journey from our home in How Things Are Now, we can feel awkwardly suspended in uncharted spiritual space that is neither our homeland, nor the city of our longings. My Midwestern family would say about that feeling of awkward in-between-ness that one was feeling “neither fish nor fowl.” Which leads me to speculate that Fish and Fowl are also our fore-runners in this journey: I suspect that the longing or urgency that leads us from our established places in the world into a search for the city built by God is the same energy of longing or urgency that moved some fish to wiggle out of the water to eventually become frogs; and which also urged some frogs to become lizards; and lizards to begin to take to the skies in flight. We’re all on the same Spirit Wavelength.
We may get only the briefest glimpse of a better way, but such glimpses can change everything. Our allegiances change; we may no longer fit easily into the old structures. The Spirit Wavelength moved me to leave the practice of law for a more relational way to live in the world; led me come to Dayspring from Austin in 1984 for a Wellspring introduction; led my family to leave Texas for Maryland to follow a longing for a more inclusive culture for raising our family. And then from that decisive turning have emerged many others, taking me along paths quite different from whatever fantasy life I had planned for myself.
The most recent leg of the journey has taken me into a committed engagement with creative writing. I been doing more writing for a couple of years: I wrote a weekly responsive Call to Worship for a small Methodist Church for almost a year: it was like writing free verse poetry. For the last 15 months, I’ve been part of the team that takes turns writing the Inward/Outward Sunday Gospel Reflections.
Then last November, I ran across a question that felt meant for me:
How would you want to spend your time after the world that we’ve been working for has come to be?
My inner response came in a flash, as if it had just been waiting to be asked: I wanted to make things up, to create stories that both reflect and also go beyond what I’ve known. Thus began an enthusiasm for creative writing, and particularly for writing very short fiction pieces. In January, I made a 12-week commitment to write two hours a day, six days a week. That changed everything, and I’ve continued to write 12-15 hours a week ever since. It’s the first time in decades that I have experienced so many bursts of joy in just the daily living of my life.
Like Abraham, I’m hearing this new call unseasonably late in life. There is a lot of craft that can be mastered only through practice, and I might not have enough years remaining to learn. The impressive vocabulary of adjectives and verbs I had in my 30s has dwindled significantly (thank you, God, for online search engines.) And beneath that, it may be that I’m just no damned good at it. And, especially if I’m not good at it, and won’t be “successful,” how could it possibly be God’s call when there is so much human need crying out for tending in this city and country? There are many questions.
At the same time, there have already been spiritual and relational fruits. I walk through the world with more attention to the specifics. I admire and enjoy the process of giving and receiving feedback with care that is part of the culture in writing classes and groups. And by trying to put myself into the lives of characters that aren’t like me—to speak as they’d speak, and act as they’d act—I’ve been guided into a deeper empathy and understanding for human lives. I’ve also gotten clearer about the present limits to my empathy and understanding. For all this, I’m already grateful. And I know there are ample American creative writers included in The Great Cloud of Witnesses—including the extraordinary Toni Morrison among them.
I suspect that as more pieces of the picture are put in place as I move on, it will be shown how the path that now looks disjointed or chaotic has been leading me to my people and my spiritual homeland, and to my true inheritance. At least I hope so.