Behold, God is my helper; it is the Lord who sustains
my life. Psalm 54:4
To those who know a
little of Christian history probably the most moving of all the reflections it
brings is not the thought of the great events and the well-remembered saints,
but of those innumerable millions of entirely obscure faithful men and women,
every one with his or her own individual hopes and fears and joys and sorrows
and loves–and sins and temptations and prayers–once every whit as vivid and
alive as mine are now. They have left no slightest trace in the world, not even
a name, but have passed to God utterly forgotten by men. Yet each of them once
believed and prayed as I believe and pray, and found it hard and grew slack and
sinned and repented and fell again. Each of them worshipped at the Eucharist,
and found their thoughts wandering and tried again, and felt heavy and
unresponsive and yet knew–just as really and authentically as I do these
things. There is a little ill-spelled ill-carved rustic epitaph of the fourth
century from Asia Minor: –“Here sleeps the blessed Chione, who has found
Jerusalem, for she prayed much.’ Not another world is known of Chione, some
peasant woman who lived in the vanished world of Christian Anatolia. But how
lovely if all that should survive after sixteen centuries were that one had
prayed much, so that the neighbours who saw all one’s life were sure one must
have found Jerusalem! What did the Sunday Eucharist in her village church every
week for a lifetime mean to the blessed Chione–and to the millions like her
then, and every year since? The sheer stupendous quantity of the love of God
which this every repeated action has drawn from the obscure Christian
multitudes through the centuries is in itself an overwhelming thought. –Gregory
Dix
The passage to Puerto Peñasco is pretty dang bleak. There
simply is not so much very picturesque about the tattered plywood and tarpaper
shacks and rusty rebar poking out of haphazard stacks of cement blocks. The
relentless wind pummels bedraggled creosote and swirls dust into every possible
crevice. Unfinished shuttered and abandoned buildings speak of broken dreams on
each street corner.
And yet. Small clumps of school children clad in plaid
skirts and buttoned sweaters clamber over the barbed wire to take a shortcut
home. A woman with two children clinging to her knees offers up three kinds of
tamales to those who pause at the blinking red stoplight. An ancient abuelo hunches over a whittling project
on a front porch of sorts just down the block.
The horizon is scratched out with bold black jagged lines
dividing heaven and earth. Tucked behind myriad steepled chapels of Seventh Day
Adventists and Church of Jesus Christ of Later-Day Saints and Baptists and St.
Michael’s Parish little white crosses gather together to point upward, humble
reminders of the obscure yet beloved lives of mankind.
Somehow it is heartening to have an Anglican monk articulate
the grand act of worship that overwhelms me on the road…the sheer stupendous
quantity of the love of God. And I don’t understand how all the pieces fit
together, the shattered pieces of puzzle that at first and second glance appear
to have been tossed up by a giant angry or indifferent hand and which is worse?
This morning Richard Rohr reminds me that to choose the path
of allowing and trusting,
to choose to believe in an Ultimate Love is not the path of fatalism, but
leading with a yes. When you can lead with yes and allow yourself to see
God in all moments, you’ll recognize that nothing is ever wasted. Trinity is in
the business of generating life and light from all situations, even the bad and
sinful ones.
And what is true is that I know He has broken through the
harsh dividing line, with arms lifted up.
There are too many tales, actual breathe in, breathe out stories, many
of which occurred on these very same dusty roads, of Him reaching in to the
moment. Reaching in with sometimes a simple bag of potato chips or a double cab
pickup truck running on empty all night long.
Let me kneel down once again in remembering. As oft’ as I
eat this bread and drink this cup, proclaiming this Ultimate Love until His
final act of restoration, the triumphant thunk of the last puzzle piece sliding
into place, the beauteous glory of creation whole once again.
It is good.
