Ecstasy

Gospel Reading: Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43
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If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry.
- Emily Dickenson

For a denomination so obsessed with sex (according to the headlines at least) the Anglican Church is rarely charged with tolerating too much ecstasy. Many of us understand well enough what Tobias Wolff wrote about himself as a student at Oxford: "When we talked about ideas, we treated them dispassionately, donnishly, as if they were moves in a game of chess."

Theology can be a similar exercise. Talking about God can be a safe substitute for an experience of the transcendent.

In English class we're made to memorize lists of poetic devices. We learn about rhyme and meter and simile and metaphor. And we can leave such a class with the impression (unspoken perhaps) that writing poetry is just a matter of careful assembly. As if the making of a poem were comparable to playing with a verbal erector set, bolting this to that to make this lovely other thing. But this doesn't sound like the poetry Emily Dickenson describes. She doesn't know poetry by its parts. She knows it by what it does to her.

I think faith is meant to be much the same. Our talk about the mystery of God was never meant to be a 'donnish' exercise. We're not meant to keep God at a safe distance. In fact, the contact we have with God in our liturgy, in our music, in our strange encounters with God's other children may be preparation for those rarer moments at life's extremes. It's in those experiences in which our bodies go so cold that no fire could ever warm them that faith suddenly matters. That God suddenly matters. That religion is nothing at all like a game of chess. It's a matter of life and death.

The seed parables seem to be safe because their central metaphors happen slowly. But to describe the life of faith as the growth of a seed is to say that it involves the whole being. Faith isn't something that happens out there in the world of ideas. Faith isn't a cosmic game of chess. Faith isn't about comprehending something. It's about being comprehended by something beyond us.

Maybe faith is meant to be a kind of ecstasy. Sometimes a slow and patient ecstasy. Sometimes a sudden inbreaking of the transcendent at life's extremes. But either way we are drawn into or towards the mystery of God. And the religious life becomes no longer something dabbled in, but something that takes hold of us at the core of our being. Like the strange, ordinary miracle of a sown seed growing into wheat.