trompe l'oeil: our own personal Jericho

Recently Nathan told me about a visual he had had to describe where we've been in the last couple of years...he pictured a completely dark room with no doors.  In that room, God seemed to be marching him around and around inside of the perimeter.  As he walked, he kept asking for an open door to walk through that would take us out into a more spacious place, one that wasn't so confusing, and would make the trajectory of our lives more apparent.  But God seemed uncommunicative and so Nathan kept walking.  He described feeling lost...Where was the blasted door?  And why couldn't he see his hand in front of his face?  Silence.  Finally he came to the understanding that there was no door.  The only direction he was receiving from God was to keep him from walking into false doors...trompe l'oeils that were really just walls in disguise.  The Holy Mystery was protecting him from arriving into the wrong place.  Since he shared that image with me, I can't get the idea of stumbling into walls out of my head.

"As John says, God puts out our lights to keep us safe because we are never more in danger of stumbling than when we think we know where we are going.  When we can no longer see the path we are on, when we can no longer read the maps we have brought with us or sense anything in the dark that might tell us where we are, then and only then are we vulnerable to God's protection.  The only thing the dark night requires of us is to remain conscious.  If we can stay with the moment in which God seems most absent, the night will do the rest." (Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark).

Which brings me to Jericho.  That crazy story in the Old Testament in which the Israelites are commanded to walk around the city's walls once a day for a week.  It's found in the sixth chapter of the book of Joshua if you want to look it up.  Brick by brick and stone by stone, walk, walk, walk.  At risk of sounding sacriligous, it seemed like the Israelites were sent on a fool's errand.  Then on the seventh day the instructions sounded even more absurd....walk seven more times around, God said, and then blow your trumpets and give a war cry.  But don't storm the gates or do anything else to take the city by using the tactics you know.  I will make the walls fall down by my own strength.  Not just open a door, but obliterate the wall completely.

What does that even mean?

Well, the Israelites had two choices:  they could take a disorienting, week long walk around a wall, or go home to relative safety that came at the cost of permanent defeat.  

Barbara Brown Taylor (you've got to look her up!) says:
"...the good news is that dark and light, faith and doubt, divine absence and presence, do not exist on opposite poles.  Instead, they exist with and within each other, like distinct waves that roll out of the same ocean and roll back into it again.  As different as they are, they come from and return to the same place...This faith will not offer me much to hold on to.  It will not give me a safe place to settle.  Practicing it will require me to celebrate the sacraments of defeat and loss, but since the religion I know best has a lot to say about losing as the pre-condition for finding, I can live with that.  I think I can even live inside this cloudy evening of the soul for a while longer, where even my sense of God's absence can be a token of God's presence if I let it." 

Here is a picture of what is outside my window today:

Barrenness and beauty.  Warmth and freeze.  The sun illuminates while the snow shrouds everything.  In other words, a picture of Jericho both before and after.  

"If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it." 

(Jesus, Matthew Chapter 10)

In grace and peace, amen.