Life is far more spacious than we seem to see. Reality is open and full and ripe with grace that is constantly wooing us into a more honest more loving more true relationship with everything. Life is so spacious that this deeply connected reality that we wade through can even include death. In fact death is central to the pattern of the crucified God. God carves this pattern into the very fabic of reality as Jesus dies and rises. Someone who trusts Jesus carries a cross like the One who has gone before them, it often ends up being the price of social non-conformity. It is a descent rather than an upward path. Richard Rohr talks about it as a river that we can’t, or dare, push. We are already in it and it is deep, rushing with love and truth. We lift our feet and allow ourselves to be taken by this “Big Juicy Goodness,” as I have heard Anne Lamott say. We have no ladder to climb and no place to be, but here, collected and connected in every moment that flows to us and through us. Annie Dillard once wrote:
i can not cause light; the most i can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. it is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. light, be it particle or wave, has force; you rig a giant sail and go. the secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
Jesus invites people to open themselves to the possibility that God might reign through them, that the reality of God might flow through their very being and fundamental existence, how they relate to everything—how they see everything. Often what we understand or see in our small little worlds feeds back to us what we have already determined about a situation or that person or groups that think that way. I find myself doing this every time I talk about war and think about Christian traditions that support state military action. It is like they are trying, passively, to relive the Crusades. I label, I dismiss, I get angry and defensive and the feedback loop tells me more about myself than them, whoever them might be. There is a solidarity that is planted in us when we open ourselves to God, when we lift our feet and float. Rivers flow and move in ways we can predict if we are in a boat, but when you are in the thing—it moves you. And maybe that’s the point—we are restless people—fighting all sorts of things, giving ourselves to a mistaken oasis, trying to land and conquer for ourselves the places we make sacred. When it is all sacred, even the pain, we settle not on some secure land mass but in our very being trusting the flow of God’s spirit giving every breath, every puff of solar wind.
