Early, when I’m doing chores I notice but don’t notice: the wood walls of the barn. The manger where I set dusty grooming tools. The shavings pushed back in Mrs Horse’s stall. Water buckets I sloshed and tossed out even before Mrs. Horse walked around looking for me and her portion of hay. I turn on the My Daily Office Podcast because I can sometimes hear the word of the Lord better than I can read it.  As I hauled a bucket to pour for Morgen’s afternoon drink, I heard the first reading from Job:
23Â Then Job replied:
2 “Even today my complaint is bitter;
    his hand[a] is heavy in spite of[b] my groaning.
3Â If only I knew where to find him;
    if only I could go to his dwelling!1
The bucket pulled on my arm. I hoisted it and dumped it into the bucket I’d just sloshed and emptied and clipped to the wall. Mrs Horse stepped up to the doorway, ears forward, friendly I put my hand on her face. Job’s longing, his longing, his longing, his longing. How I’ve longed to see God up close and personal, in the flesh, the fire, ever since I was a little girl.
But I was afraid he might take me up on it. I was outside looking at the stars, standing by the elderberry bushes growing alongside the Big Barn at my childhood home. It was so clear I could see the bubbles in the Milky Way. I wanted to see God like the guys in the Bible, like Moses and Elijah, like Abraham and Jacob, like Ezekiel and Daniel, like Mary Magdalene and Thomas and John, who saw the weird turbulence of heaven.
I didn’t ask because I was terrified at the thought He might show up with those burnished bronze legs, and hair so white I cannot look, and blazing eyes and a sword flying out of his mouth. I wanted to see God but then again I didn’t. I still don’t, but then again. The terror would kill me. I don’t even want to hear his voice calling in the night, no I don’t, except through the Bible, his love letter to me, or what people tell me, or my pastor, or even books, or the created, blessed world. I don’t want to lose my mind.
Right around the same time, I was five or six, my mother took me to a foundry, long since abandoned. Foundries shape steel. To be shaped, steel must be liquid, a thousand degrees hot to make it liquid. It was a field trip for the Helderberg workshop, a summer school for children that paired them with their interests without their having to slog through high school to get explore it in college.
Dark. The windows high up. An overcast sky on the other side. The smell, the smell, burned metal like a burned coffee pot, water boiled away. The floor sandy, black. I didn’t feel my mother’s hand, though she held it, I think. A man lead us. Huge pots swung here. Swung there. White molt spilled out. Then sparks beneath a plate. Somebody welding. Jump. Jump over it. But I couldn’t. What if I stepped on that plate, hot from sparks? Someone lifted me over.
Huge pots, out of control pots, with white molt. A vat tips and liquid light and heat pour out. I screamed in terror—those pots might swing into our bodies, splashing us with living fire. Huge pots tipping, spilling the white molt into a trough. Sparks flying up. Sparks beneath me. Huge pots swinging anywhere they wanted. Huge pots swinging at me. Sparks everywhere. I screamed. Couldn’t stop screaming.
Mother hoisted me in her arms. Somebody walked us away from the tour to metal stairs to the office, a wood paneled office and a secretary. My mother set me down, looked out the window. I could feel her impatience. She wanted to see the rest of the fire. Though she said nothing.
Even now I feel like Job though right this minute I’m not demanding an audience, to stamp out my frustration at unfair suffering like Job. Simmering underneath my heart is this longing. In the Daily Office, I’ve read how Moses asked to see God face to face and God said he could only see his backside and stuck him in the cleft of the rock, otherwise Moses would not survive. I wonder if that’s because God didn’t want to show the scars in his hands and feet, the pinpricks on his forehead from the crown of thorns. I wonder if God’s suffering would be too much for Moses to see, the suffering of a God whose people betray him by shaping a golden calf, a cow for god’s sake, to control him, by pouring him into a mold, from gold they’d just worn in their ears. The suffering that billowed into anger that Moses quelled with his prayer that God keep his honor among the nations by not destroying the people he’d promised to deliver, promised to give the beautiful land.
But Moses threw down God’s careful writing on the stone because he was furious. I don’t get the golden calf. I don’t get the perversion that must have been a wickedness close to Sodom’s, that drove Moses to call out who is on the Lord’s side, the Levites answering, taking swords through the camp slaughtering 3,000 neighbors and brothers and sons. Then he calls them good. What kind of God is this? Did the vultures dive down to chew on the bodies? Did the flies buzz?And the stink and the tears of the wives of the slaughtered men who walked with them through the Red Sea?
What kind of people who’d seen the plagues in Eygpt, who’d seen the Red Sea stand up, so they could walk on dry ground, who’d been fed by bread from heaven, and wild quail and water from the rock would fashion a gold god, would dance so crazed they sounded like a battle? Was it the terror of the trumpet, the smoke, the rolling fire, that sent them to Aaron with their gold, pleading for a god they could see and touch and carry from place to place?
What kind of gold calf have I built, after I’ve seen God’s work in my life? Heck just the fields and redwing blackbirds and flashing rainbow, a world full of God’s love, and the consecrated bread and wine, even if puny bites and sips, should be miracle enough. And what kind of ferocity do I need to cut down my attachments to those things like the Levites cut down their calf worshipping neighbors? I’ll tell you right now I don’t have it, the ferocity to wheel a sword at my favorites. Or is it letting go of control, of laying ourselves in God’s hands, to let him mold us the way he wants.
At times I have wondered if the visions of mystics were mere, clear imaginations, sprung from the Holy Spirit. I’ve written down a few. But I am no starving saint holed up in a cave somewhere.
My longing had gone quiet for years until I started reading Martin Shaw and Tony Hoagland’s Cinderbiter, a compilation of old stories about creatures crossing between this world and the other, though maybe it’s all this world, but modern eyes can’t see those creatures because we are so seated in materialism and that we have gone blind to other presences. Well at least I have. My brother claimed he saw a flying saucer land on our flat. A friend says she’s seen ghosts. Shaw’s Snowy Tower and Malcolm Guite’s Galahad and the Grail call forth my longing to look for what can only permit itself to be found.
Though sometimes I feel something heavy, fat and slow that swells like bubbling insulation squirted out of a bottle, that swells like a fat pig in the cracks that I can’t push out of the way– acedia-sloth, the noonday demon where I can’t even call my neighbor to find out how her surgery went. I’m tired of waking up my feet shocked, waking up feeling accusation crawling all over me—you’ve wasted your time, you’ve not studied enough to prep for the coming catastrophe. Prayer, my friends’ prayers for me, and a good night’s sleep can shove it out of the way.
My longing can turn bitter, it can devolve into longing to die, especially when my sorrows rise. They are never clean, bittersweet tears. The scholars say dying is the route to God’s presence, the gateway to becoming fully human. But my longing to leave this life is a smack in the Lord’s face for the presence he’s already scattered in the world.
Other scholars say we can have paradise, here, now. That right now we are seated with Jesus at the right hand of the father. That we are the most frightening thing in the room. A truth that is like a sword popping that acedia pig, dissolving it to nothing more than dew on the grass the sun dances on. That longing is a call to die before you die, to go on a quest for loving God and your neighbor, to not letting any root of bitterness or resentment take hold.
Malcolm Guite’s Galahad and the Grail and Martin Shaw’s Snowy Tower, both talk about the search for the holy grail, an image for this longing to see God, for a power that feeds the people like manna and quail from heaven, or the five loaves and two fishes that fed the 4 and 5,000 or the bread and wine, body and blood that feeds us now. It’s a relief there are stories pointing the way to how a person might search for something as mystical as the grail. It’s a relief to crack open Galahad and the Grail and read about wonder, about a story when rivers can be embodied and cry out at their ravaging by machine men and see that kind of magic dwells in the land.
Job talks about how he doesn’t see God but God sees the path he takes:
But he knows the way that I take;
    when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.
11Â My feet have closely followed his steps;
    I have kept to his way without turning aside.
12Â I have not departed from the commands of his lips;
    I have treasured the words of his mouth more than my daily bread.2
There’s comfort that God is close enough, though hidden, who walks with us. I can tell him things and they get straightened out, quietly straightened out. Though I don’t get it, the confidence Job has by saying he’s kept the way, the commands have not departed from his lips. How do we walk into that, as aware as we are of our failings as people? By faith in the finished work? Faith in what Paul says in Colossians: “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority.”3
I gather up Mrs. Horse’s hay and walk it outside. I toss half in her bucket behind the barn, where she nuzzles through the clover, candy hay and walk the rest to the other side of her paddock so she gets some walking. The clouds and sun make shadows that move across the distant fields, the sunlight against brand new leaves, the shadow against fields quietly waiting for tilling and seeds, the shadow making me see the light illuminating the fields bathed in it.
References
1 Job 23: 1 – 3, NIV
2 Job 23: 10 – 12, NIV
3 Col 2: 9, ESV
