Nowhere held as much meaning for him as this church. And never was it more significant than it was now, in its lonely reverence.
He used to come more regularly, when his grandfather had also come more regularly; he could still easily recall the childhood pranks he’d pulled with the other churchgoing children – throwing bits of paper into Mrs. Jones’ hair, for example. Or the time he and a friend had deliberately spread mud down the center aisle only to find they’d accidentally spread something else. Good times. The memories settled the turmoil of his churning spirit, and he smiled as he leaned back, basking for a moment in his melancholy.
All around him, the church mirrored his mood, and the candlelit stone rippled in shadow. The pews seemed to breathe, creaking, humming in repose, dust rising and settling with every wooden exhale. Alive. Anything might come alive if you sit still long enough. At least, as alive as you expect.
And that’s the question, isn’t it? Does reverence beget meaning? Or the other way around?
He held a finger to the pulse beating between the pages of music nearly five hundred years old; the ink seemed to almost swell with the tide of life all around him.
These walls: brother’s wedding, daughter’s baptism, grandfather’s funeral. For generations of his family, this building had meant sanctuary and refuge; and for billions across the planet, places like this had offered meaning in the vast wilderness of human activity. At least, so it seemed.
He closed the hymnal and set it back in its proper space. He glanced at the essay on the bench beside him. It didn’t belong, with its 21st century font, printed straight out of a copy paste flurry toward the end of his work day, and its stapled unity that guaranteed so much with so little. He felt himself recede into his mind and registered a hand, his own, brushing the papers farther away; of course, the instinct was simply superstitious. Ideas don’t hurt you if they get too close. Do they?
Now, pause here – briefly. Keep our friend in your mind’s eye, but travel with me into the words on the pew and into the barren sprawl of the 1960’s Wild West. Imagine heat. Imagine sweltering, ancient heat drifting across the land and scorpions and skeletons in the sand. It’s called Death Valley for a reason.
If you listen closely, the burning wind sounds like a scream. Maybe you wonder at first if your mind is playing tricks, but then you see a huddle of desperation standing at a yawning hole.
Water bubbles up in frothy rage.
The absence of the wind coats everything with a sticky helplessness.
A pile of diving equipment organized for rescue.
A scattered collection of more equipment like litter.
The sun gazes impassively.
A pregnant woman sits like crumpled paper at the mouth of oblivion, discarded.
Four men gather just past the edge, clumped around a fifth in isolated agony.
All of this, and more, offered in precise aphorism; I’ll stop and let you read the original. Go find the essay on morality. Listen, and come back to sit with our contemplative at the church. Go. Watch for the widow at the boiling well.
John looked again at the article as if it had been calling, and in a way it had: he could still hear the cries of that diver, gone down into the depths so far he came back with but pieces of his mind.
And the widow’s man didn’t come back at all…
The scene was dreadful. No wonder it provided shape for a morality untethered from the absolute. No wonder it gutted meaning. Well. For some people.
He turned his eyes back to the fresco at the front of the church, the one he’d come to see. Jesus. His hands were open – in supplication and invitation – they reached out to the man through the air, through the collective breath of the prayerful held over centuries. To those penitent seekers (like the little band of the desperate at the widow’s pit and like our contemplative, like all the suffering sinners and saints of this earth, like predator and prey alike) he seemed to say what they’ve always said he did: “Come.”
And this word, streaming forth across the stony tiles, from a painting in a common church, seemed to settle contagiously upon the man – not necessarily that he would be safe in such company, but saved.
That he would be saved for something, that pain is fertile soil, that things matter.
Does reverence beget meaning? Or the other way around? The stories in the text beside him supported the former: those who expect things to come alive begin to see those same things breathe. Those who revere the sacred thus /make/ the sacred what it is. In other words, nothing really means anything more than what we say it does. And why? Well, because there’s too much suffering. We shouldn’t pretend, they say, to know what’s good when there’s so much bad. The woman’s husband drowned in hellish waters before he met their child for God’s sake! Or maybe not his sake. Whether he let it happen or made it happen or couldn’t stop it from happening, it’s just another tragic example of the gaping absence in the skies. So, stay grounded. Don’t pretend the horizon means anything or that your preferences amount to some kind of Truth.
John sighed and glanced at the document beside him. He thumbed through the pages from a cautious distance. The argument frustrated because it resonated. In little ways…in so many little ways, except…
Except it was an unimaginative story. It was a narrative that failed to match the depth of mystery in the universe which calls us to imagine a story of more dimension than we can measure: a story that can account for the hope and agony, the beauty and ugliness of rescue through the waters of hell.
That was the difference for him, and it’s why he stood to leave and left the papers on the pew and walked out toward a world of things that matter. A world of things moving in a direction, following a narrative as deep and mysterious as reality.
“Come,” was the glorious alternative to the essay’s grieving, “Stay.”