Mountains in a sudden flash of sunlight across a harbor.
An impulse at a Hare Krishna parade to join the chanting
from the sidelines, good Methodist that you’ve always been.
The eye contact between you and the unknown woman who’s just
pulled you back onto the curb out of traffic you didn’t see coming.
The desire to kneel down at the back of a church, when you
haven’t darkened the door of such a place since you were sixteen.
The realization, in the middle of a random sexual encounter,
that both of you (or all of you) are in the Presence of something vastly bigger
and more important than a short spell of uncomplicated pleasure--that your
trick is looking back at you with the face of God.
The sacred, grace-filled letting go in the last days of a
lover’s life that Mark Doty describes with such heart-opening clarity and
vulnerability in Heaven’s Coast.
The flash of lightening across the night sky of a quiet mind
in the meditation hall, nice Jewish boy from Dallas that you are.
The kind of experience that leaves you stammering something
like, “Oh--it’s You again.”
From my own perspective grounded in the Christian tradition,
these experiences are already foreshadowed in the vagueness of biblical
accounts of the Resurrection. No two Gospel accounts tell the same stories. Mark,
the earliest of the four Jesus narratives that eventually got included in the
Bible, doesn’t have a resurrection account at all, just an inexplicably empty
tomb from which two women flee in terror at dawn. My favorite is the story from
Luke of two disciples on the road to Emmaus, who fall in with a stranger to
whom they tell the news of Jesus’ death. The stranger starts laying out for
them everything in Scripture that predicted the Passion. That evening, they sit
down with him to a meal, from which he vanishes, in the same moment that they
recognize the risen Lord “in the breaking of the bread.”
There’s plenty of space in that story for me: I don’t know
what the fuck would show up in the Polaroids that nobody took, and I don't much care. I just know that
the encounter broke their lives open, as it breaks mine open.
This isn’t about a resuscitated corpse. In Christian terms,
this is about the Second Person of the Trinity taking flesh at times and in
places you never saw coming, setting ablaze the ordinary world of our material
existence. After all, it was God’s flesh all along, before we were given a life
lease on it. “He comes to us as one unknown,” wrote Albert Schweitzer in The Quest of the Historical Jesus. It’s
about “the acknowledged Christ” (the phrase belongs to Indian theologian M.M.
Thomas), ever present in the world, shoring it up from below as well as drawing
it down from above, known across cultures by a thousand different names, though
none can ever comprehend him/her. The One who vanishes from sight most
completely in the dogmatism of those who think they have sole possession of the
truth.
Enlightenment is powerful shit. The very simple ambush as I stumble along in darkness thinking that I am in the light. And it never is final. I am part of the unfolding. And the contours of my own complexity are stunningly beautiful valleys and peaks precisely because of the play of shadow and light. I am reminded by this beautiful post of yours that it is in persons. Usually the anonymous ones, the unexpected ones. The fleeting nature of these encounters add somehow to their power.
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