Life Itself is Grace

Listen to your life.
All moments are key moments.

I DISCOVERED THAT IF you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living on Rupert Mountain opened up onto extraordinary vistas. Taking your children to school and kissing your wife goodbye. Eating lunch with a friend. Trying to do a decent day's work. Hearing the rain patter against the window. There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly. . . . If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

-From Now and Then and Listening to Your Life

Zacchaeus

ZACCHAEUS APPEARS JUST ONCE in the New Testament, and his story is brief (Luke 19:1-10). It is also one of the few places in the Gospels where we're given any visual detail. Maybe that is part of what makes it stand out.

We're told that Zacchaeus was a runt, for one thing. That is why, when Jesus was reported to be en route into Jericho and the crowds gathered to see what they could see, Zacchaeus had to climb a tree to get a good look. Luke says the tree he climbed was a sycamore tree.

We're also told that Zacchaeus was a crook—a Jewish legman for the Roman IRS, who (following the practice of the day) raked in as much more than the going tax as he could get and pocketed the difference. When people saw Zacchaeus oiling down the street, they crossed to the other side.

The story goes like this. The sawed-off shyster is perched in the sycamore tree. Jesus opens his mouth to speak. All Jericho hugs itself in anticipation of hearing him give the man holy hell. "Woe unto you! Repent! Wise up!" is the least of what they expect. What Jesus says is, "Come down on the double. I'm staying at your house." The mob points out that the man Jesus is talking to is a public disaster. Jesus' silence is deafening.

It is not reported how Zacchaeus got out of the sycamore, but the chances are good that he fell out in pure astonishment. He said, "I'm giving everything back. In spades." Maybe he even meant it. Jesus said, "Three cheers for the Irish!"

The unflagging lunacy of God. The unending seaminess of human beings. The meeting between them that is always a matter of life or death and usually both. The story of Zacchaeus is the gospel in sycamore. It is the best and oldest joke in the world.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Youth

YOUTH ISN'T FOR SISSIES EITHER.

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words  

You

IN THE BOOK OF GENESIS the first word God speaks to a human being is "You" (2:15), and in the book of Revelation the last word a human being speaks in effect to God is "Come, Lord Jesus!" which is to say "Come, you!" (22:20).

It is possible that the whole miracle of creation is to bridge the immeasurable distance between Creator and creature with that one small word, and every time human beings use it to bridge the immeasurable distances between one another, something of that miracle happens again.

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Yhwh

IN EXODUS 3:13-14, when Moses asks God's name, God says it is YHWH, which is apparently derived from the Hebrew verb to be and means something like "I am what I am" or "I will be what I will be." The original text of the Old Testament didn't include vowels, so YHWH is all that appears.

Since it was believed that God's name was too holy to be used by just anybody, over the years it came to be used only by the high priest on special occasions. When other people ran across it in their reading, they simply substituted for it the title Lord. The result of this pious practice was that in time no one knew any longer what vowels belonged in between the four consonants, and thus the proper pronunciation of God's name was lost. The best guess is that it was something like YaHWeH, but there's no way of being sure.

Like the bear in Thurber's fable, sometimes the pious lean so far over backward that they fall flat on their face.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words