Rain is pelting the windows of my office. I walked outside to get a sense of the storm, its character, and the temperature had already dropped some ten degrees…the tops of the water oaks frenzied by the torrents of wind a November cold front brings. I am forever amazed and enamored by the flux of weather…the mysterious violence of the change it brings…We think from while to while that we have tamed her…but we know better; we are contingent to her…she, a metaphor of how our world is…mutable, extravagant, dangerous and beautiful…a metaphor for the life of faith…faith at its best, the artful embrace of change.
Perhaps it is the embrace of change that is our work in our maturing in the faith. I’m reminded of’ Yeats’ poem Lapis Lazuli wherein the poet’s two protagonists are witnessing the destruction of a civilization, the worn patriarchal cycle, but are able to see the grand meaning of it all, the hope of it…the truth of the matter…as Hamlet and Lear, in spite of the tragedy they endure, see an unlikely and surprising reconciliation, unresolved in the play…but a premonition…. and therefore the beauty of a world mutable, transient…pulling at the seams of possibility…Change, an uncontainable mystery forever creating and recreating the world….and the beauty of it…the redemption that comes in spite of the violence….Perhaps I’m naive…but I believe beauty will have the last word.
We are beginning again in the Church our reading of Matthew’s Gospel, year A in the lectionary. Just this past Sunday we read about the abrupt and rude and random advent of the kingdom…people snatched about…violence that erupts because of the fear of change….Matthew’s admonition is to keep awake…look on the world with artists eyes and know that God’s truth will come to bear….see with glittering eyes through to the way God intends the world to be and then embrace it with all due courage, give yourselves to it, speak well of it… because change comes regardless… and we may as well know and name the beauty of it….as best we can see.
