This is a nice reflection piece with this week's Old Testament lesson, Isaiah 11:1-10. It's also fitting while swimming in the changes and chances of life.
From Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 25th anniversary edition (1999), page 9:
That it's rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same tie we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, "The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?" It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug (cf. 139) was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator's once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus (cf. 146). Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey? "God is subtle," Einstein said, "but not malicious." Again, Einstein said that "nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning." It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem (Ps 139:5). In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God "set bars and doors" and said "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further" (Job 38:9-11). But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?
Also, listen to Josh Ritter's Thin Blue Flame, posted below: "Only a full house..."
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