Advent Journal: Wind in the Lilac

Bright sun on the sideyard lilac, snow buntings weighing down each branch. For years that bush didn’t bloom at all. Then, the year I planned to cut it down, it threw a couple of scrawny blossoms skyward. It has been blooming – awkwardly, sparsely, beautifully – ever since. Point taken, I guess. Angels abound.

It is hard to impress upon people that in order to see Jesus you have to let go of Jesus. You have to turn away from the cross and let him die on it. He’s gone and he’s not coming back.

When you really reach that juncture – when your condition is the condition of the disciples on the Road to Emmaus (imagine their grief, imagine their fear) – then Jesus becomes possible. But remember! He finds you, not the other way around. And – I track the Emmaus story very closely here – it can take a minute to recognize him.

Hence the invitation, always: Jesus is here but you’re overlooking him. Or you’re looking right at him and calling him something else. Stop looking for him, stop insisting on him and instead just let him be. He’s here; there’s nothing you need to do. Sit on the pending revelation.

Wind in the lilac knocks one or two buntings to the earth.

Marianne Sawicki makes an important point in Seeing the Lord. She says that the earliest followers of Jesus emphasized hearing rather than seeing him. The value of seeing Jesus with the eyes comes later, as the Greek tradition and its emphasis on logic and order (and hierarchy) take precedence. But before that, in the Aramaic language, in peasant Jewish communities in lower Palestine, the focus was on hearing Jesus. Even more critically (for Sawicki) what one heard was validated by the action it inspired. Jesus was a teacher who wanted his lessons brought into application (thank you Tara Singh). The emphasis was not on understanding but on doing. In other words, the healing contemplated by Jesus wasn’t conceptual but actual. And the actual wasn’t mysterious either. It sugared out as reliable food and shelter for everyone, without qualification or condition. For Sawicki, there are two basic conditions for seeing Jesus: first, words are inadequate unto the task and second, “sharing of the necessities of life is essential to it” (84). On the Road to Emmaus story, the disciples don’t recognize Jesus until they invite him to rest with them for the night and share their food.

I don’t think this is about soup kitchens and food shelters and whatnot. Those are fine – I’m glad they’re there – I donate and volunteer. But I think the invitation is to go deeper. I think we really have to discover the specific way in which we desire the other’s well-being. Not as a condition of my personal happiness or fulfillment but as an authentic expression of Love Itself. Nor is it about martyrdom – you eat, I’ll starve. It’s about sharing. We are by design cooperators, communicators and coordinators. And the outcomes of all that activity – that cooperation, communication and coordination – is coherence.

Coherence is about relationship, and relationship is about sharing. Noah Websiter, in his 1828 dictionary, said that coherence had to do with consistency and connection, all “proceeding from the natural relation of parts or things to each other, as in the parts of a discourse, or of any system.” Coherence is about flow and fit – the river within its banks, say, or how a close friend kind of knows when you need to hear from them. Coherence is what works, and works without calling attention to itself. When we cohere we are happy, we are settled. We can handle what happens. We know we are in it together, and that togetherness is salvation.

I’ve been tired the past few days – a bad cold, lots of work, et cetera. I’m writing slowly this afternoon, long paragraphs that kind of meander and I don’t have the inner discipline to stop them. I keep gazing at the lilac. A few minutes ago a snow squall nearly obscured it; now the sun is bright again. What I said earlier about desire – that’s going to need to be reflected on and developed.

The woman at the well points to Jesus but for me she truly pointed at the interior blocks to my awareness of Jesus’s presence. Paradoxically, addressing those blocks meant letting go of Jesus – which really just meant, becoming responsible with respect to my projection of Jesus. Absent Jesus, you find yourself realizing he had some good ideas and you might as well in your own stumbling sort of way try to practice them. “Bring each relationship to coherence,” the woman at the well said. Or was it Jesus? It’s hard to say sometimes. Did I save the lilac bush by not cutting it down? Or did it save me? Who is grateful for who here?