Gospel reading: Matthew 3.1-12
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"...She also needed conversion in another sense, a long, slow dialogue with the scriptures to enlarge her as a person."
-Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace
My spiritual director in seminary was a remarkable man named Roger Ferlo. Before going to seminary himself he taught Shakespeare and Dante. And I think his long, slow dialogue with literature had a great deal to do with his affection for scripture. (Some of you have read his lovely book, Sensing God: Reading Scripture With All Our Senses.)
I met with him after chapel one day where we had just read one of the stranger passages from Revelation. One with beasts and swords and blood. My early encounters with Revelation were pretty harsh. And I think I had replaced the sheer terror certain passages once inspired with a mild embarrassment. Among more broad minded Christians it was acceptable to roll one's eyes at John of Patmos, or Paul, or even the bewildering character of Yahweh in the Old Testament - as thought they were all some offensive relative we feel compelled to distance ourselves from and apologize for.
We met in Roger's office. And as I sat down, he eased into a chair opposite mine and said, "What were those people going through?"
It took me a few moments to realize what he was referring to. I had evicted the images from Revelation almost immediately from my imagination. They were still expanding in Roger's. Knowing that all stories emerge from real lives he wondered what must have been going on in the lives of the community that produced a book like Revelation. What were they suffering to write of such things? Where do such terrible and glorious imaginings come from?
I think that Roger's lovely openness and trust of the scriptures must be the fruit of that long, slow dialogue Kathleen Norris speaks of. And in Roger I can see clearly how a person is enlarged in the process.
In some ways our relationship with scripture is not so different from other human relationships. We learn how to take things from people over time. What once offended us about an old friend we now take with a grain of salt. Or when someone we love and trust lashes out at us, we don't wonder suddenly if we were wrong about them all along. We don't wonder whether this person is really a monster who's pulled the wool over our eyes. We wonder what else is going on. We wonder what's wrong. We wonder how they've been hurt.
Before our relationship 'enlarges', while we're still feeling things out we don't know quite what to make of the strange gestures, the blunt way of speaking, or the saccharine sweetness of this new acquaintance. With an old friend whatever is said, no matter how offensive or bizarre, is just one more phrase in a long, slow dialogue. Old trusts aren't so fragile.
A simple comment by someone I trust changed my experience of scripture forever, I think. The strange parts of the Bible don't frighten me so much anymore. And I no longer want to purge the Bible of its strangeness. It's often the strangeness that entices me now.
So when I read from the last chapter of the Bible's last book - yes, dear old Revelation - among images of a city with gates like pearls and walls of jasper and gold and precious gems, among all this wonder I read, "These words are trustworthy and true." And in spite of myself, in spite of my incomprehension, in spite of my too small imagination, I somehow respond, "Amen."
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Conversion and the stump of Jesse.
Isaiah 11:10 says, "A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of His roots."
Have you ever tried to get rid of Nandina? You can cut it down, even pull it up, but it always seem to come back. My conversion has been sort of like that. Like Kathleen Norris "I did have a religious upbringing, and I count that a good thing. I was fortunate enough to be raised by parents who took their religion seriously--it would have been unthinkable for them to let me grow up not knowing Bible stories and hymns, not having experienced Sunday school and worship." Then I too as a teenager fell pray to "spiritus contra spiritum' and came to worship another kind of spirit.
After some twenty years wandering in the wilderness, one thing led to another, and the day came when it looked as if I had no choice but to turn back to the faith of my childhood. It was not something I was looking for, or could have made happen, but "Blessed be the Lord God, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous deeds." (Ps 72:18) On August 4, 1998, I heard God speak to me through another person just like me, and the slow meandering dialogue of conversion came back like a shoot from a stump.
John the Baptist says "Do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor,' for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham." (Mt 3:1-12) Apparently he is able to raise up children to Abraham from the stoned as well. Like a shoot springing from a stump, God raised my faith from the dead. Wondrous deed indeed! So, no matter how long you've been away, I can tell you from my own experience, the long slow dialogue of conversion may be working in you, and you don't even know it.
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