My friend Lucinda owns a lovely, historic
wooden farmhouse on Cape Breton Island, in Nova Scotia. It stands alone on an
isolated strip of land overlooking a beautiful bay. The first night that I
stayed there, on my first visit several years ago, I awoke in the middle of the
night to a loud rattling sound. Now, I was in the guest room way back by the
garage, alone on the first floor of the house, and the room in those wee hours
was pitch-black. The only light came from the moon outside, positioned so that
it vaguely outlined a tall silhouette outside one of my partially-open windows.
As I saw the silhouette move, I heard whoever was out there jiggle the mosquito
half-screen that was propped in the window, as if they were trying to open it,
and my teeth started clattering along with the screen. My heart thumped and my
mind raced: Should I play dead and hope that the murdering rapist at my window
would go away? Or should I try to scream for Lucinda upstairs, hoping that would
scare him off? I decided not to move, praying that he just wanted to rob us and
go away. After what seemed an eternity but was likely only a few minutes, I
heard the gravel crunching as the intruder moved back away from the house. Needless
to say, I spent the rest of the night listening in fear for him to return, the
door of my room creaking open, as he made his way into the house for some evil
intent.
The next
morning, I told Lucinda about the nighttime intruder, and obviously concerned,
she called a knowledgeable friend to come look around outside. Lo and behold,
he found only hoof prints in the gravel outside my window, either from a deer
or even a young moose. The terrible,
bloodthirsty man at my window was nothing more than a curious or hungry animal,
checking out the new arrivals in town. When I read the words from today’s reading
in the Song of Solomon, I couldn’t help but chuckle, thinking of my love-sick Canadian
moose: “Look, he comes … bounding over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle
or a young stag. Look, there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the
windows, looking through the lattice. My beloved speaks and says to me: ‘Arise,
my love, my fair one, and come away.”
The Song of
Solomon is love poetry, pure and simple. I invite you to read the whole book
sometime … Believe me, you will wonder what on earth it is doing in the Bible.
But in the Bible it is, and its descriptions of passionate, longing love have
for centuries represented for Jews the love between humanity and God, and represented
for Christians the love between Christ and the Church. I sometimes squirm when this
erotic language is used for God, wondering cynically if many of our Christian
mystics are perhaps suffering from too much celibacy. And yet, what better
metaphor do we have for divine love, than human love? As embodied creatures,
what better language do we have for spiritual longing, than powerful physical
longing? Why can’t the lover at the window, impatiently rattling the screen,
inviting us to come away, inviting us to be transformed from winter into
spring, be our ever-loving God?
Up there in Cape Breton, I was afraid
of the lover at my window because I could not see his face. If I had known that
it was a moose or a deer, I would have perhaps quietly tiptoed to the window,
offering him a bit of apple from the soft palm of my hand, rather than hiding
under the covers. If my human beloved calls at my window, then I will recognize
his voice and throw open the shutters. But with God, it is so difficult. When
God calls in Scripture, how do I know that I am understanding those ancient words correctly? When God calls to me through
my religion, how do I know that it is not a man-made tradition imitating God’s
voice? How do I know that I am not confusing God’s presence with a bunch of
stuff that, to use Jesus’ earthy language, is destined for the sewer? Before I
risk my life getting up out of my nice warm bed to open the window, I want to
know that it is really God out there in the dark. And yet, if I don’t get up,
what good is the invitation?
My favorite C.S. Lewis book is Till We Have Faces, a Christian
retelling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, a myth as full of erotic imagery
and human love as the Song of Solomon. The title comes from the end of the
book, when the narrator, placed in a kind of trial before the gods, realizes
that all of the self-justifying words with which she has covered herself during
her lifetime, are meaningless. In a moment of revelation, she says, “I saw well
why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can
be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How
can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”[1]
How do we get a face? Just as we cannot
love another human being without a face, without a self, we cannot love God
until we know who we are. We cannot see God until we have a face to see with.
We cannot speak to God until we have a voice to speak with. It is not God who
must become visible, but ourselves.
Theologians often accuse James,
today’s epistle, with preaching works righteousness, with forgetting that we
are saved by God’s grace and not by what we do on our own. But I believe that,
in today’s reading at least, James is pointing out what the old woman in C.S.
Lewis’ novel is making clear: Acting upon God’s invitation is not a matter of
being a good, educated listener, accepting some teaching that is read aloud. It
is not a matter of nodding one’s head solemnly at the truth of the Gospel or of
speaking flowery words. Acting on God's invitation is to love as Jesus did, to love in the
passionate, outpouring way that God loves each of us. It is, of course,
Christ’s face that we are to adopt as our own. It is Christ’s voice with which
we must learn to speak. What we are waiting for in our dark world is for some
real honest-to-goodness loving and suffering and following of Christ to have
marked us with Christ’s image.
In today’s epistle reading, James
describes God’s inviting Word not as a lover at the window, but similarly, as a
mirror, a mirror in which one sees oneself as the Beloved of God. Imagine a
mirror that surprises you, not with your latest wrinkles and gray hairs, as my
mirror does me, but a mirror that allows you to see yourself as the treasure
that you are in God’s eyes. A mirror that reflects the light of God’s Son into
your human soul. A mirror like the all-forgiving eyes of someone who is madly
in love with you.
If we merely peek into this extraordinary mirror from time to time,
turning back into the darkness and living as if there had been no reflection,
as if the gray hairs and frowns and wrinkles are all that there is, then Christ’s
image will not take hold in our flesh. Imagine lovers who say, “I love you,”
and then just sit there without touching or elaborating on what is in their
hearts. Such a love would not last long. Religion can be all talk and no
action. God calls longingly at our windows, and we religious people fight over liturgy or
the wording of Creeds. We are the scribes and Pharisees, the good religious people
cowering in our beds afraid of a new rattling at the window. “Religion” alone
is no guarantee that we are acting on God’s invitation.
On the other hand, says James, if we
turn away from the mirror determined to recreate the love that we have seen
there, to reproduce it in the world around us, then we are blessed and
transformed. It is by caring for the poor and outcast in their distress, says
James ever so plainly, by avoiding the corruption of the world, that we make
what we see in the mirror real.
With Hurricane Isaac wreaking
destruction again on the Gulf Coast, I was reminded this week of a movie that
is perhaps the antithesis of the imagery of the gazelle at the window. The Beasts of the Southern Wild is a
movie full of the darkness of our world. A little girl lives in abject poverty on
the Gulf Coast, forgotten by the society that lives on the other side of the
levy that condemns her home to flood waters. Her mother is a prostitute who has
abandoned her. At age 6, she fixes cat food for her own supper. Her alcoholic father
drinks and hits her. A hurricane is on its way to wipe away the only community
that she knows. The evils confronting her from within and without are
represented by beasts in this movie: big, boar-like prehistoric animals called
aurochs. Frozen in the ice-age, the aurochs have been freed by the melting of
the polar ice caps, and they are slowly closing in on her Louisiana home. These
beasts are not like gazelles leaping joyously over the hills. They lumber slowly
and relentlessly toward the girl throughout the movie, like the hurricane
itself, menacing her with death and destruction, instead of offering love. At
the end of the movie, as the six-year-old is going to the bedside of her dying
father, the enormous beasts arrive, huffing and puffing as she turns to face
them on the road. What will she do? Surely they will devour her. I was
surprised at her response. “Go away,”
she says simply. “I have to take care of my own.” And they turn back. For all
that was lacking in this little girl’s family, her father had indeed impressed
upon her that she belonged to him, that together, they were strong. Her father and
her community were engrained in her soul. “One day,” she kept saying, “future scientists
will find evidence that a girl named Hushpuppy lived with her father in the Bathtub,”
their small, endangered community. In spite of everything, she had some kind of
face with which to face the evil in her world.
Can we say as much? Will future scientists
look at the evidence that we Christians leave behind and see the face of Jesus Christ?
It’s interesting, isn’t it, how welcoming the divine gazelle at the window and resisting
the evil aurochs on the road are both accomplished by one and the same action—by
caring for the least of God’s beloved creatures, by performing the healing,
loving action that gives us the face of the Beloved, the face that can turn even
winter into spring.
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