Proclaiming the Unknown God

Photo by Judith's daughter on a trip to Athens

On one of his never-easy missionary journeys, Paul was left in Athens, waiting for his companions. He was not prone to "wait" placidly. Athens was a hub city, a volatile mix of the fortunes and misfortunes of humanity. A hub, also, of gossip. And Paul could be expected to comment on his perception of the spiritual pot luck—the "wealth" of gods available for the pickin,' and well-displayed at the Areopagus on Mars Hill. In the midst of the panoply, he noted an empty altar with a stark "non-identity": TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Here was his opportunity to Name that unnamed God. And he did, to decidedly mixed reactions!

In this world despoiled by violence and hatred, wrenching poverty, shallowness, and rampant greed, we come face to face with this Unknown God—Whom we have come to know, and Whom we have chosen to serve: The eternal I AM …through Jesus, the Christ.

How do we faithfully serve a Savior whom we cannot “see,” who is hidden from the eyes of the world—this Eternal Being who straddles the universe even as He binds up our battered hearts?

How do we proclaim Him to a world “gone insane” with its various fratricides? It begins best with prayer. Always, with prayer, before we even open our mouths. Do we even know how to pray for (truly, against) such an unending tsunami of grief and horror as we see beyond and around us?

Like the disciples who gathered around Him, we can only say, “Lord, teach us….”

The Lord’s Prayer, the "Our Father..." is a good starting point. It is fairly radical. It leaves our own small perceptions and anticipations (or lack of them) behind and steps up to a new concept—a new conception, perhaps. It joins us with Him in seeing what we cannot fathom down here in the trenches. After all, HE prayed it to us, for us, from where He “stood!”

I call it, for lack of a better term, a Genesis Prayer. Prayer that creates “something out of nothing,” that separates Light from darkness, that can only begin where He begins (not in our own “mind-set”), and end where He “comes down.” Whether we’re praying for a person or a nation, a disaster or a blessing, we can only see the “tip of the iceberg” unless/until we have invaded the Kingdom for a larger vision. What we see, of course, has less to do with our spiritual giftedness than His yearning to bring us alongside to help Him do the heavy lifting. The yoke is fully weighted upon Him and rests lightly across our soul. We only have to listen.

When we pray this way, against the currents, so to speak, we are often on uncharted ground. But it is firm beneath us. We have only to follow the Spirit’s leading. Praying with Him, stumbling, perhaps, into prayer unformed before the very saying of it, our words teaching us, thought by thought, we learn as we go. We witness this only inwardly, at first, savoring the wonder of new comprehension. But soon or late, it begins to seep out through our spirit’s pores—like an invisible language—and becomes now an articulation, a quiet testimony to a Savior who reigns in the depths of chaos and the heights of Heaven. Our confidence lies in His “confiding in us.” We speak from this new understanding, and sometimes we speak words that whisper “Genesis!”

Like the words of Paul, who knew exactly what God had to say when he stood before those blank Athenian faces. From the unknown god to the suddenly knowable One, the I AM revealed. Out of darkness, Light.                                           

Harvesting Eden

Photo by Judith Deem Dupree

This post was originally published on the Ruminate Magazine Blog on 19 August 2015.

Today I stewed up a vat of plums gathered from the arching boughs of our two trees out back. Tomorrow is Jam Day, a sticky-messy sauna of stirring and puree-ing and sprinkling in the magic of sugar and pectin. Then . . . oh, tasting the fruit of my labor! On homemade bread, I insist. Only that will do. The bread has been waiting, frozen, for this first sweet moment.

We planted our small orchard―a plum, two apples, a pear, a cherry―nearly a quarter century ago. My original vision didn’t extend beyond the thought of these now-weighted branches. Of picking as if I were a child turned loose in a candy store, envisioning a sweet-wild taste in my mouth that no grocery purchase could touch. My teeth almost ached with lust for it all!

And after the first few years of their probing babyhood, my gawky, dusty-green adolescents began to blossom here and there between their shaggy knees and elbows. I recall with delight the first apple blossoms on our small “granny.” Eden!

Nothing less than Eden. My tree. It was my beloved green granny! It still is. My soul is entangled in its lattice of leaves. Last year over a thousand apples ripened through October, like a mis-seasoned Yule tree all decked by nature.

Along the years, by a miracle of nature or bird or critter, three more gift-trees showed up: Our plum gave us many babies each spring, popping up beneath its sweep of limbs. We dug up and gave away some―and kept one, as fertile as its mama. Out front, in an old wooden tub of soil, an apricot seed cracked open and unfurled, and soon enough fruited.

Today, long and firmly grounded, it perfectly shades our spare bedroom, dangling its small golden-orange globes in front of the window. And in the tangle of vinca beside our front porch, a “bush” thrust up one spring, filling a bald space nicely. Lo, in a couple of years its strangely familiar blossoms spoke for it: apple! Rosy, tangy-sweet fruit now replicates delicately, bobbing in the breeze.

A bit like Elijah in his cave, we are, in God’s quirky generosity, fed by ravens―yes, those hulking black shadows in the pine which nag incessantly, lest we forget that we owe them a dole a day from the seed bin. A fair trade indeed.

Now, upon this day, standing at the kitchen window, I see His current-timeless panorama. Our trees have aged along with us―creaky, a bit more brittle of limb. Weighted with fruit, or waiting―an inward thrust we cannot measure. Occasionally barren. Seasons of drought and of bounty . . . each of us, trees planted. Life as orchard.

Younger friends now come by in early summer and scale our ladders, with long-pole pruners in hand. They stretch to heights of our pear tree that we cannot, dare not reach―to trim dangerously bending branches. To cull what seems far too many immature pears. Ah, the timeless reluctance of letting go―of ladders, of fruit! Of whatever we cannot climb or carry. Weighing the promise of abundance against the poverties of broken. We have learned broken.

And now this new, sweet harvest―knowing this: These pears and grannies, et al, this varied fruit―“my” fruit―I have discovered, is not mine at all, beyond the tending. Its unprecedented largess, newly picked or processed―by me, by delighted others―is scattered around the village and sometimes far beyond. That is the wonderful way of His Kingdom. The trees I have pruned are part of my own essential life-pruning. That’s His way too. And so, I celebrate this today also: a fruit-of-life called friending.

I have years of canning, saucing, jamming, freezing, dehydrating behind me. Often done in tandem with friends both young and “almost-my-old” old. The fruit of His labor. The labor of His fruit. My kitchen and heart are full.

This small Eden truly runneth over, flourishing in unexpected soul-soil, bursting through hard shells, blossoming into new identity. Often, oh yes, rooting and blossoming despite the entropy that time imposes, shaping something indefinable . . . sweet and tangy, birthed with promise.

Finding Quiet: Silence as Presence

Originally posted on the Ruminate Magazine Blog, 18 June 2015

The world is speeding up, and I am slowing down. It was inevitable. It’s all right, of course… mostly. As I grow older, life enhances the quiet ways and shoves at the expediencies that used to shove at me.

It is good to quiet down, to make pause without breaking faith with my to-do list, or someone else’s. Good to miss a beat in my endless rumba with that great god Expectation. To laugh at my clumsiness. To slow dance with the Holy Ghost. To fall in love with all the neighbors I have never known, and marvel over the way yeast rises and makes miracles.

I begin to practice yearning, hungering―fingering the world for a larger scope of being, foraging for things that lean back in time and connect with the unknown known. For all the maybe’s I have spilt along the way, that maybe spilled into the eternal. Now, here, I begin to stop and listen to life more suddenly, and, oh, oh I hope more freely.

I think we get lost so easily in the great cacophony that pervades on planet earth. Does this sound overstated? Hyperbole? Of course; and yet, it happens every day, to all of us.

We vibrate to the whole of life, even in our essential partial-ness, our chosen partialities. What is out there pervades. Invades. We cannot help it; we are caught up and moved along by the great, lumbering sum of all the infinitesimal parts. An endless, sometimes relentless tide. We are, each, one of those small fractions, often rubbed raw, bruised by the enormities and the sum of all the smallnesses. It is as hard to put words to all this as it is to live with it. The world, indeed, is too much with us. And so silence, a certain kind of silence, truly is golden.

We so need a sense of it―of silence as a presence within a welter of external stimuli. This reality is dear to me―that silence hides within the bedlam. It is near-aberration in an age of “auditory graphics,” when all that engulfs the world is poured out upon us by every media, from every angle, for every purpose. As if there is no other way to live?

Of course. What we must treasure, what I am defining, is peace. What is notable is that it is imparted in such a way that it bides with us, resides within us. This is renascence! A revelation that becomes a revolution. There is a quiet, a storm shelter, built to the scale of the human heart.

HE says: My peace I give unto you.

Within these few words lie an inner world of rest.

This is peace which cannot long hide beneath our hide. It becomes unquenchable. It flings itself against the ramparts of our neuroses until they crack. It breaks through every Yes, but… that we have posited. The days both here and there and everywhere grow full, full, full of slow or sudden, timeless, ephemeral Graces. They swallow up the nervous jangle of urgencies that wrap us daily.

Be still and know that I am God! I will be exalted…

If His Kingdom is real, it must lie both beyond and within the cacophony. It simply must. And if we are to survive, and to thrive―to live well within our own skin and cope with whatever lies before us, beyond us, we will receive that Rest within the silence that lies beneath the noise.

The “noise” of life doesn’t own us. Finding that quiet “place” beneath―yes, within the existential clang―becomes our grounding, the birth-place of miracles. We carry the seeds wherever we go.