There is this quote that rings in my head lately as I read for class and make my way through the Torah. It goes something like—scriptures are unsettling but it is because of the unsettled Character behind the text. It is quite a claim, I am realizing, that Someone is not only with the most challenging of texts but also within the content of these stories of desperation, judgment, humanity and grace. It is unsettling right?
It feels as if I am the one who should describe the world—me tell me how to live into this whole thing, but it seem the unsettling has a way of giving opportunity to trust in something beyond my own experience. God is the one with whom all experiences are given voice and redemption. God is, in some ways, a giving back to human experience—having absorbed your ache and fear and hurt and trust, God is the one in the text that is coming alongside characters like Hagar—the one enslaved, impregnated and sent away. This Character is on the move as well, surrounding a situation with the thickness of presence and then having to turn an ear to hear the cry from what seems to be too far sometimes.
Another quote, offered by the same author in a different book, has a pinging echo in the mix of these thought. That is that home—landedness—is not so much a place but a place on the way with YHWH. That is, God is the one with-us, even now—the God of the living. That is settling and unsettling. So, as I find some new rhythm and rhymes in this new and old place, I have this sense that the story is going somewhere. That the events, desperate wanting collections of human existence, are the unsettlement we situation ourselves in—with hope and honest vigor—that tomorrow meets us today, that God’s wind inhabit our lungs so that we might sing a song with our lives, from the unsettled crevasses of soul—thick with blood, healing the plains.
