I have searched for you, Lord; Lord, you are ever calling me. And yet I am immersed in human language, those symbol-translations, rough-cut boulders as heavy, material-laden, weak analogies to the fluidity of the thoughts of the heart; I am always expecting you to speak to me in boulders, when you actually speak in that water, the wind, of the heart. I knew this better when I was eight, as I escaped the workaday world and lay for hours on a boulder in a pine forest on the Boy's Side of Anatolia College and watched for you in the light peeking through the needle-laden branches and the cloud-castles of a blue sky; like Elijah discovered, though, I found you not most deeply in the light or the castles; you yourself were beyond sight and poetry. Like Elijah, when I kept my heart open to finding you, I heard your call in the small, gentle wind as it caressed the pine trees, and then me. You spoke to me beyond words, you gathered up my emotions, quieted my mind, sharpened my soul, and spoke directly to the center of my being, language clear and pure that cannot be adequately expressed in symbol or analogy or poetry, though perhaps the poets can come the closest to your language. I cannot write what you told me exactly, but it changed me, changed my life, forever.
Then I lost you, Lord; Lord, you ever called to me. Now, when I am tired of ambition, tired of trying to be something others want, exhausted by ego, I have begun to desire your voice, as I once did, childlike, again; the deer panting for the waters now, again, is one of your images calling me back. You had to crush my ego, my demands, and yet you have never let me fall irrevocably; you have helped me see that much in this world blinds us, but that nothing blinds us so much as pride and the fear that is the inevitable result of putting self at the center of the cosmos. When I began to leave all to you, I could hear you calling, though I had become again a neophyte in the language of the heart. So, you worked me through living parables, one after the other.
When you came to your people in Palestine, you became a living parable, and you told those who were not open to the language of the heart parables, "because though hearing, they are deaf." Your life on earth was a layered poem, an epic with many facets, many devices, many tropes and metaphors, to reach people of all kinds and all levels of openness, like a rhetorician who works simultaneously with a thousand tools, a master above all masters of the art of communication, and you did this, burdened by speaking with boulders to those who could not understand the language of soul-water.
You do the same with me, because my ears are clogged with the dust of this world now: ego, expectations, authority, property.
So, you called me again through another living parable; in a deep and hard decision, a life-changing one, you asked us to seek you, and gave us the grace to even desire, above all else, if only in the conscious part of us, our reason, our weak wills, Your Will. As a boulder-speaker, I was looking for you to just tell us the way. I told you, in the beginning, that "the desire in my heart is to be fruitful for You; it brings me the joy of being who I am meant to be; so Lord, I asked, please just tell me where you would like us to be fruitful; we both want this most deeply. To serve you and be fruitful for You."
Then there was silence; You seemed to recede. Why would you not tell us clearly? Instead, you began to make each way, each road leading away from this crossroads, equal; you kept us at an aporia, a point past which our reason alone could not go: I thought you were being evasive and cruel, and I cried out over and over; I was so afraid of making a mistake, of not following You.
In Adoration one evening, I heard you speak again in the water-language of the heart. You said something like "Of course you cannot go forward without Me; of course your way will be a disaster if it is outside My Will. You know what that is like, Tami. You have done it many times, and so yes, I confirm your intuition that You need Me. I am here." So, I went out, driving home in my beloved truck, rejoicing that the Lord would show us the way. Yet, the confusion returned, continued. My doubts, like the dirt rising to the top of the water when the pond is agitated, rose again and choked my heart.
It forced me to dig again, dig deep, with my husband, past the surface and into the layers of my true self. I found selfish desires from the past, wounding from the last ten years, and deep pain, and so much fear, and ambition, and ego, and also love and gratitude and forgiveness and repentance. I began to see that it must be about love, and trust. I watched my husband in his childlikeness and his humility; I watched him trying to lay down his life, his career, his desires, for me; I watched the beauty of masculinity pouring out self for the good of the family; I saw him struggling with his own wounds and fears. I felt alone, we felt alone, and confused, but I kept calling out to the Lord, more and more in the language beyond words, asking the Holy Spirit to speak for me, to call out the truth, good or bad, that still lay hidden in our hearts. I longed, with Moses, to speak to Him as a man speaks to his friend, face to face.
I began to see that we are, I am, hopelessly tangled in images, narrations, tangled in the boulders that choke the flowing river of the heart, and so as Lewis says, "How can He speak face-to-face to us until we have faces?" How can He speak to us clearly, pour out His water, when our hearts are boulder-like? So I went to His poetry, the translations of His fluid language into the pebbles that humans can finger, carry, more easily: I went to the Scriptures, and like a lost man searching for a trail under the leaves, I looked for him in David's cries, Jeremiah's exhortations and dehortations, in Isaiah's trumpet-calls. I looked for him in St. Paul's mysterious allusions. I called to all my heavenly family to help me, and I felt, sometimes, their presence as a fierce fire and clear, cold water, as pure and unadulterated joy that lives beyond the messiness of this life. They watched with me, they watched me like a mother watches, still and intense, as her small child tries to make his way across a narrow bridge over a rushing river. They were speaking to me but it seemed beyond language, somehow silent, or beyond me. Maddeningly, even, they seem to relate to me from the already completed pattern of my life, from that other shore, and so were responding with that end in mind rather than the immediate end I wanted, of just knowing the way forward. The answer was deeper, beyond the boundaries of my rational mind.
In my searching, I found again Jeremiah's poetic image of the river flowing from the east side of the temple, and I realized the Lord had given me that image many times during my life: the image that I, also, am meant to be His temple, and that water from my heart, where He lives in me, will flow out, and many fruit trees will be planted by and along and because of that river. He has promised me this, even when I least deserved this, even when He knew that I would go the wrong way; it is as if He says, "This is what I made you for, and I will bring it to fruition in your life, because my plans are not thwarted...I will bring to completion the work that I began in you when you first called to Me, came searching for Me among cloud castles as a child, came listening to the wind."
I found Socrates again in the
Symposium; I found, through him, Diotima, who says to Socrates, "This is the way of going": she is speaking about how, through everything we learn about, as we grow and mature, we are meant to ascend a ladder of love; we first only see the Good and Beauty in bodies, in physical objects, but as we grow, we begin to see that this Good in these particulars is more deeply expressed in the reason, in the will where virtues are developed, in the rational and then spiritual, and finally, to draw in another image from Plato's
Republic,we come out of the Cave and are meant to "converse with Beauty" directly. Yet the lover of wisdom, of the Good, is speaking with Beauty (which implies a person with whom I can converse) and simultaneously must hold the glimpses of Beauty, what he cannot yet see fully, and must return to the Cave to draw others up towards this Good; in this life, we still must converse with Beauty and Goodness as He lives within the boulder-like particulars of our earthly life. In the
Symposium, for example, Socrates is, at one moment, in contemplation outside Agathon's party, in direct contemplative conversation with Beauty, and yet after a time makes his way to the party and through the ensuing boulder-rhetoric, and just like Christ with 'those who cannot hear,' draws the others higher up the ladder of love towards a conversation with Beauty: one feels that Socrates, especially as he nears his death in the
Phaedo and
Crito, is living in two worlds: an increasingly pure conversation with Beauty and a difficult, painful, tiring conversation with those who still barter with boulders, an uncovering of Beauty where He is found in the particulars. Only one living in this tension, living along the Ladder of Love, ascending and descending, can truly teach.
Yet all things that have existence are good, and through their participation in Good Himself, they can speak to us in lesser or greater degrees of Beauty and Goodness Himself. It is not that we, in this life, can ever leave these earthly realities behind, and Christ has made it so that these earthly things will even be baptised into that language of water, of healing, of the heart, of His heart; in the fullness of time, in the fulness of Christ, creation will cease groaning and will become conversant in the language of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit who is, in a sense, the spirit of Love that Diotima speaks of, that Love who 'sleeps out along the roads' always desiring and drawing us toward that Good and Beauty, and yet, beyond Diotima's wisdom, and Socrates'. He is also simultaneously the completion also, having no need, an eternal, complete, perfect Love creating within Himself a place of desire so that He can, in His mercy and self-giving, allow us a place in Him. He hollows out a place for me so that I can "make up whatever is lacking in Christ's suffering." The Christian life, the Real Life, is a paradox of the union of particulars and universals; Christ is a living image of this paradox: He is God and man. Beauty and that in which it subsists can, in Christ, become one, can reach completion. It is a paradox. It is beyond language.
So, with Socrates, in my particular pleas for guidance, I felt deeply only that "I know what I do not know"; we stepped out in faith and in some darkness, but on one of two roads, two roads that He had made equally rich, equally blessed. And I realized the deep love in this; He had hollowed out a choice that we could make, really make, in peace and blessing. In that darkness of great light, a light so bright and full that it blinded us, I panicked again. What if I was fooling myself? What if we were harming ourselves and others, and being selfish? Only when you really try to be docile to the Lord do you find out how deeply selfish and stubborn you are; only when you try to fear the Lord do you realize how deeply brazen you are. You realize also that truly Satan roars around like a lion, ready to devour the straggling and the weak sheep of the flock, that fear and sin draw him like the scent of blood flowing from the wound in the leg of the lamb.
We reached out to mentors, the spiritual giants in our lives, those farther along the road to the Lord, both those older and younger than ourselves in the age of this life (for often that time-age means nothing in the realm of the Lord). They prayed and advised and encouraged. My mother gave me Isaiah 61, which speaks in another way about fruit trees being planted; it says that God will do the planting.
This morning, I listened again to the boulder-poetry given us by others who have tried to fear the Lord--Psalm 128; all I had to hear was the first few lines:
Blessed is the one who fears the Lord
The one who walks in the Lord's ways.
You will eat the fruit of your labor;
blessings will be yours;
The Lord will make you rich indeed.
I heard, suddenly, the Lord, speaking clearly in the language of the heart, and I cannot do it justice with these symbolic boulders, but I will try: He said to me, "Do not think about mistakes; you have done your best to fear me, both of you. No matter where you go, I will plant those trees; because you have
tried, even imperfectly, to fear Me, because you have
tried to cultivate the pure desire, in the heart, for My Will,
I will condescend to follow you wherever you go. In fact, I will go out before you and the water will flow from you both, and I will plant my trees and make them fruitful. Because your husband is trying to not despise humility for My sake, and you are trying to lay down your will, even though you are both still proud, I will lift you both up."
I know that the lifting up, for the Lord, looks upside down to the world; it looks like a dumping into the dust, sometimes; but for those who look, ever, for Him as the source of joy, even His flinging one into the dust and beyond, His picking one up for any use, is happiness.
I have searched for you, Lord; Lord, you are ever calling me.
