you know, for the most part, i have a great deal of confidence in articulation. which is not to say that i am confident that i can always say things clearly or write things well, but in general i have a lot of confidence that i can, if pressed, get out what i need to say.
that was certainly true when i was teaching. if my students didn’t get what i was saying, i simply tried another approach, and another, and another, until they got it. and it’s true now of my relationships. i figure that, even if we can’t agree on something, we can talk things through until we have a clear understanding of the other’s perspective, and can settle peacefully on that.
i am confident, moreoever, in the power of articulation, of what Saying Things can do. when, for example, i am Muddled, or troubled by something, i’ll just start talking to bill, bless his soul, or one of my dear friends and– voila!– things become clearer. or i sit down, pen in hand, and write it out, and soon enough the words shape themselves into something understandable, something with heft enough to let me weigh it in my mental hand, and roll it around a bit there, and get a handle on it, so to speak.
but more and more of late, this articulation thing is Not Working So Well.
example: tonight at emmaus way. we’re taking our time studying jacob, that slippery liar and thief whose story takes up so many chapters of genesis. i’ve missed a few weeks of our study now for various reasons, so i was pleased to be there tonight, especially so because we read and discussed that bizarre wrestling match in the wilderness. that’s a great story, and one that has always mystified me. i mean, here’s jacob, a mere man, one who can’t even keep his wives content for five minutes together, and he’s wrestling with God. and God can’t beat him. honest. that’s what it says: “when the man (God) saw that He could not overpower him….”
perhaps you know the story. if not, this is a spoiler. next it says that God asked jacob to let Him go. and jacob says he won’t let the man (God) go until He blesses him. and God does it. He renames jacob. calls him israel, and in so doing gives jacob the name of His people for ever and ever Amen.
tell me that isn’t a weird story. God can’t overcome jacob’s struggling, and then jacob asks God for His blessing, the very blessing that was promised jacob when he was born. and that gives one pause, because jacob was promised the blessing from the very beginning, and then, for the next dozen chapters or so, goes about trying to steal it, and connive it, and manipulate that promise from everywhere. he tries to get what God wants to give to him, what God has promised to give to him, but he tries to get it all by himself.
and then, when finally he asks God Himself for it, instead of manipulating it out of the fool esau, or deceiving it out of blind isaac, then he gets the blessing.
oh. so that’s where it comes from.
our discussion of jacob’s story didn’t stop there tonight, though. then we tackled the even more difficult issue of blessing itself, of what it is, and why it might have been that jacob didn’t trust God for it, and how, even for us today, God’s blessing can be so hard to recognize.
we’ve made a stellar mistake, you see, and it is this: we believe that god’s blessing is what will make us happy. so we think our new job is a blessing, or maybe a car, or a vacation, or a fabulous deal on a pair of shoes. and these things are blessings, perhaps, in the way that all happiness and all good things are evidence of His kindness and grace.
but God’s blessing of abraham’s descendents wasn’t all peaches and cream by Anybody’s standards. from the get-go, it included the guarantee of slavery: “know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years.” (gen 15:13) lucky ducks.
and yet it makes sense to me because, although i haven’t been enslaved, i’ve had my share of trouble. and maybe you wouldn’t believe me when i say to you that bill losing his job four years ago was a blessing, or my plummet fifteen feet from my neighbor’s deck was a blessing. and maybe these weren’t blessings.
but what was and is a blessing is what i share with jacob, and it is something ineluctable…. so how can i say it? it is His presence in my life, His action in and through it, in spite of me, because of me, because He loves me, and His doing things in this world in spite of it, because of it, because He loves it.
that is the blessing. That is the blessing.
here it is in the words of dear frederick buechner, in his retelling of jacob’s story, in the son of laughter, picked up here just after jacob has deceived his father:
it was not i who ran off with my father’s blessing. it was my father’s blessing that ran off with me. Often since then i have cried mercy with the sand in my teeth. i have cried ikh-kh-kh to make it fall with a sob to its ungainly knees to let me dismount at last. its hind parts are crusted with urine as it races forward. its long-legged, hump-swaying gait is clumsy and scattered like rags in the wind. i bury my face in its musky pelt. the blessing will take me where it will take me. it is beautiful and appalling. it races through the barren hills to an end of its own.
we don’t get to understand the blessing. we aren’t promised all happiness, all peace, all good things, all contentment. we are promised to be participants in His redemption, whatever it may look like, to be children in the kingdom of heaven, and, in the end, to go Home.
so i sat there at emmaus way tonight, with these and other thoughts whelming in my mind, and i thought of all the ways that i choose to manipulate God’s blessing, to try to make it be what i want, and to try to escape it anyway i can.
and then i took communion, that sweet Body and Blood, and thought about it entering my bloodstream, reaching even to my extremities, finding all that is wretched and unfaithful, and making them His yet again.
and i rode home with my family, my mind still swollen with Him and what all of this means. and the fact is that i can’t grasp it. i have tried here to articulate it, to tell you something of what i see now that i didn’t see before. and believe me, if i have told you anything at all, then truly what i have given you is just the light reflecting off the surface of the water. it is the smell of the bread but not its taste, the memory of the experience without the experience itself. these are the edges, the periphery, the rough wrinkles of the outskirts.
and that is why i have written in lower case here: because He grows so big and words are inadequate. my words can’t inscribe Him within the compass of my mind, can’t form a shadow of Him on this computer screen.
wouldn’t you know, i read the following passage to my children the other day. it is from lewis’s prince caspian. lucy, after time away from narnia, has just been found by aslan again:
“welcome, child,” he said.
“aslan,” said lucy, “you’re bigger.”
“that is because you are older, little one,” answered he.
“not because you are?”
“i am not. but every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”
and so i do.
