Warmth, comfort, terror—but the good kind of terror. Maybe we should say “awe.” You have your own ways of describing these moments.
Some friends of mine just returned from Haiti where they spent a week holding babies in an orphanage. They are still trying to find words.
But it isn’t just extraordinary experiences when this happens, is it? It also happens in the day-to-day, ordinary moments. I was with my friends at one of our favorite restaurants the other night. We had been there at least three hours when I noticed we were the last ones in the place. The employees were starting to stack chairs and vacuum the floors, and we were still talking. I was looking around the table at my wife, whom I just adore; our friend Shauna, who may be one of the best storytellers on the planet; Tom, whom I would take a bullet for; and Tom’s wife, Cecilia, who is one of the most loving, authentic people I have ever met. And I’m sitting in this restaurant looking around the table, soaking it in, totally overwhelmed with the holiness of it all. The sacredness of the moment. That sense that in spite of everything awful I have ever seen, we’re going to make it. I know that sounds like it’s from a greeting card, but I know you know what I’m talking about. Ordinary moments in ordinary settings that all of a sudden become infused with something else. With meaning. Significance. Hope.
The neighbor kids, Malcolm and Isabel, were over a few nights ago with their dad, Tim. My boys got out plastic sleds, and we were trying to see who could sled down the hill in our front yard . . . in September. Cars were slowing down as they drove by, filled with people wondering if these kids were actually sledding on grass. And I was standing in the front yard laughing and pushing the kids down the hill. The trees overhead were just starting to turn color, and Tim was telling a bizarre story about what had happened to him that day, and the kids were laughing, and everything was in its right place.
I assume you have had moments like this when you were caught up in something so much bigger than yourself that you couldn’t even put it in words.
What is it about certain things that ignite something within?
And is that something actually someone?
Whatever those things are that make you feel fully alive and like the universe is ultimately a good place and you are not alone, I need a faith that doesn’t deny these moments but embraces them. I need a spiritual understanding that celebrates these kinds of transcendent moments instead of avoiding them. These moments can’t be tangents. They can’t be experiences that distract from “real” faith. These moments can’t exist on the edges, because they are a part of our faith. A spirituality that is real will have to make sense of them and show us how they fit. They are expressions of what it means to live in God’s world.
Something Bigger
I was in Rwanda a few years ago, and a group of us went hiking in the slums of Kigali with a woman named Pauline. Pauline spends her free time caring for people who are about to die of HIV/AIDS. She agreed to take us to visit one of her friends who had only hours to live. We hiked through this slum for what seemed like miles, and as we got farther in, the shacks became smaller and smaller until all we had to walk on were narrow trails with sewage crisscrossing in streams that ran beside, and sometimes under, the shacks.
Eventually we ended up in a dirt-floored, one-room shack about six-by-six feet. A woman was lying under so many blankets that all we could see was her mouth and eyes. Her name was Jacqueline. Pauline had become her friend and had been visiting her consistently for the past few months. As I knelt down beside her on the floor, I watched Pauline, standing in the corner, weeping. Her friend was going to die soon. What overwhelmed me wasn’t the death or despair or poverty. What overwhelmed me was the compassion. In this dark place Pauline’s love and compassion were simply . . . bigger. More. It is as if the smallest amount of light is infinitely more powerful than massive amounts of dark. The ground was holy.
I’m sure you have had similar experiences. In the strangest of settings, maybe with people you barely know, you become aware that the ground beneath your feet is holy. It is sacred. There’s something else, something more, going on here.
I went to a funeral several years ago and walked into the lobby of the chapel and immediately thought I was the first one there. Then I realized I wasn’t the first one; the husband of the woman who had died was there, standing over the open casket. I walked over to him as he stood over her body, put my arm around him, and didn’t say anything. Just the two of us in this big open room, looking down at his wife’s body. He just kept saying over and over, “She was such a good woman; she was such a good woman.” And we stood there together for a while with my arm around his shoulder, and I listened to him repeat, “She was such a good woman.” The ground was holy.
A young woman in our church gave birth last week to a two-pound baby who died the day after being born. My friend Matt went to the hospital to visit them. When he entered the room, he realized the baby was still there. And the couple was sitting in shock, stunned that this had happened and happened to them. Matt walked in, greeted the couple, and then took the baby in his arms and kissed it.
I wasn’t even there, and I can feel the moment. The pain, the anguish, the sense that something else was going on in that room that we only get glimpses of from time to time.
Because it isn’t just concerts and surfing and the high points, and it isn’t just those beautiful moments in the midst of the everyday and mundane; it is also in the tragic and the gut-wrenching moments when we cannot escape the simple fact that there is way more going on around us than we realize.
Everywhere
Last year some friends asked me to be the pastor for their wedding ceremony. They had been together for a while and decided to make it official and throw a huge weekend party, and they invited me to be a part of it. They said they didn’t want any Jesus or God or Bible or religion to be talked about. But they did want me to make it really spiritual. The bride said it in her own great way, “Rob, do that thing you do. Make it really profound and deep and spiritual!”
So we decided to meet the morning of the wedding to actually plan the ceremony. It was a stunningly beautiful day, and we met on a cliff overlooking a lake in the midst of a thick forest. The wind was blowing the tops of the trees way up above us, the sun was coming through in yellow-and-white beams, and at one point an eagle flew overhead. I kept waiting for someone to cue the orchestra.
Anyway, I asked my friends why they wanted to be married in such a natural, organic setting, since it was four hours from where we all live. They talked about the beauty of nature, its peacefulness, and the way they fell in love in this part of the state. Then the groom said something I will never forget: “Something holds this all together.”
Something holds this all together.
So then I asked them if they thought it was a mistake that they had found each other. And they said, no, they believed they were meant to be together and it was no accident that they met and fell in love. I then asked them, “Do you think whatever it is that holds all this together is the same thing that has brought you two together?” They said yes. Same thing.
So I said that maybe what makes their relationship so meaningful to them is that it’s a picture of something much bigger. The same force that brought them together holds the whole world together. I then asked, “So today, your wedding is about something far more significant than just the two of you becoming husband and wife, isn’t it?”
They then said they would call this glue, this force, “God.”
I tell you all this to point out that my friends already intuitively believe certain things about the universe and the way the world works. All I was doing
