Moses said, “Show me your glory, I pray…” And the LORD said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you…but you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.”  And the LORD continued, “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.” – Exodus 33:18-23

Dearly Beloved,

Who are the people who have led you to see the world anew?  My list is long, dominated by those whose words have opened new worlds to me.  Two of them—Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard—died in the last month.  Both authors summoned their readers to recognize the holy in familiar places, places within reach, places in the gaps. 

Berry, who as a young writer left New York City’s literary scene behind and committed himself to cultivating a life marked by the daily rhythms of a working Kentucky farm, published over 50 books of poetry, essays, fiction and non-fiction. In The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002) he wrote:

“The most significant religious events recounted in the Bible do not occur in ‘temples made with hands.’ The most important religion in that book is unorganized and is sometimes profoundly disruptive of organization. From Abraham to Jesus, the most important people are not priests but shepherds, soldiers, property owners, workers, housewives, queens and kings, manservants and maidservants, fishermen, prisoners, whores, even bureaucrats. The great visionary encounters did not take place in temples but in sheep pastures, in the desert, in the wilderness, on mountains, on the shores of rivers and the sea, in the middle of the sea, in prisons….”

In the novel Jayber Crow, Berry puts likeminded words on the lips of the novel’s protagonist:

“As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.”

Berry’s take on living meaningful lives never fails to capture my attention. Committing ourselves to PLACE, getting to know and be in conversation with specific land, its creatures and rhythms, will ground us, says Berry.  The kind of commitment Eugene Peterson calls, “a long obedience in the same direction.”

Annie Dillard, whose book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won her the Pulitzer Prize at age 24, bid us with fresh language to drill into the marrow of the everyday wonders and mysteries of the spirit-infested natural world.  Reflecting on Ezekiel’s critique of false prophets and Moses’ desire for a face-to-face encounter with God (see Exodus quote above), Dillard writes:

“The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock…a universe.”

We may long for a revelation that provides incontrovertible proof of God’s existence.  We may wish for a sacred encounter that serves as a dike to keep doubt at bay.  But Dillard and Berry tell us that the places we’ll find such revelations are right before our eyes, and that sacred knowledge can be honed and cultivated through engagement with the natural world—God’s first Sacred Text; a world which has God’s fingerprints all over it. 

With you on the Way,

Pastor Erik