Dec
11
Both Here and There
MIssion Churchyard Cross, Steve Givens 2010.
He was but two,
the age they call “terrible,”
the age that elicits terrible questions too.
He stood at the crib at the church’s entrance;
he glanced up at the cross in the church’s sanctuary.
Then Aidan asked his mother,
“How can Jesus be both here and there?”
from “Aidan’s Question” by Bishop Robert Morneau, A Splash of Sunshine and Other Glimpses of Grace, Orbis Books, 2011.
Aidan’s question resonates deeply in me in these days leading up to Christmas. For especially now we Christians face this great, painful and glorious paradox of the wood – the wood of the stable and the wood of the cross. Back in my undergraduate days, I wrote this (very) short poem:
Word
turned flesh
falling from above
finding rest
in a cross-stitched world
of straw
and wood.
Cross-stitched we are, indeed. We are sewn and bound together in faith by these two images, one of the Baby Jesus lying in the manger and the other of a full-grown 30-something man hanging on a cross. In both he is held by the things of earth, by the texture and smell of wood and soil and iron.
Yet he is God from God, light from light, present at the creation. He is both the voice that speaks the words, “Let there be light,” and he is the Word itself. And yet he cries out to his mother, holds out his arms to find her breast in the dark of the stable.
He is the promised of nations, the Prince of Peace, Lord of Light and Lord of All. And yet he sleeps soundly in his puzzled father’s arms.
Ours is a faith built on these paradoxes of wood, and many others as well.
We place our faith, our very lives, in something we cannot see. We sing, we pray, we worship a God while some scoff at us for addressing thin air.
We hold out our hands and accept small pieces of flat bread and tiny sips of wine because we believe them to be the very real presence of Christ’s body and blood. Two disparate things seemingly in the same place at the same time.
Mission Churchyard Cross #2, Steve Givens, 2010
This is life for us searching and questioning souls living here on earth. And the truth is, we need the mystery of being “here and there at the same time.” We need it somewhere deep down, some place too far away to reach and, yet, there it is out of the corner of our eye. We need to know God is above us, watching over us, guiding the universe, but we need to know that God is right here, right now, as close as a whispered prayer.
For we belong both here and there. We are both here and there. We are soul and we are body. Although I like C.S. Lewis’ version of this theology better:
“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”
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Previous thoughts on advent and Christmas:
Waiting for Christ with Bright Eyes
