Daily Reading for August 5
“I love to tell the story of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and his glory, of Jesus and his love . . .”
This Sunday School song, echoing from my earliest childhood memories, suggests a question—just how do we tell the story of the unseen? So, it’s about Jesus and his glory—but how and when have we witnessed heavenly glory? We can perhaps speak of Jesus’ love with great personal authenticity, but without viewing Jesus in the flesh, without seeing him at his Father’s right hand, words fail us again. . . .
We try, in the moment, to make sense out of what may often seem surreal, horrifying, incongruous, paradoxical, irrelevant, absurd, while retaining a kind of eschatological hope that God’s order, peace, design, glory, and joy will fill all the spaces in our widely scattered personal and cosmic jig-saw puzzles. We look forward to a time when, like Moses, after his Sinai encounter with Yahweh, our faces will shine in a way that no earthly description could illuminate. . . .
We are all, whether or not we are conscious of it, swimming in waters of unknown depth. St. Paul prayed for his friends that “the eyes of their hearts might be enlightened.” The stories, the poems, are there to be attended to, to be absorbed if we are willing to give them our attention, to follow the path of exploration and observation, eyes and ears alert, to follow the word, even giving over our conscious control of where it will lead. Madeleine L’Engle calls this way of life “becoming the servant of the word.”
Like Mary, with her available womb, like the ancient prophets, standing in the gap, a foot in two worlds, with souls attuned to both heaven and earth, like the psalmists listening for celestial tunes and translating them into the real poetry of both desolation and exaltation, like the Son of God himself become flesh, we fulfill our destinies by telling and re-telling the story that weaves together divine transcendence and earthy human experience.
From “Reversing Entropy” by Luci Shaw, quoted in Shouts and Whispers: Twenty-One Writers Speak about Their Writing and Their Faith, edited by Jennifer L. Holberg (Eerdmans, 2006).