not tonight, darling

in the secret
in the quiet place
in the stillness you are there
in the secret
in the quiet hour i wait only for you
i want to know you more

i am reaching
for the highest goal
that i might receive the prize
pressing onward
pushing every hindrance aside out of my way
i want to know you more

open the eyes of my heart, Lord
open the eyes of my heart
i want to see you
i want to see you

see you high and lifted up
shining in the light of your glory
pour out your power and love
as we sing 'holy holy holy'

i want to know you
i want to hear your voice
i want to know you more
i want to touch you
i want to see your face
i want to know you more

holy holy holy
holy holy holy
holy holy holy
i want to see you...
(andy parks/ paul baloche respectively)

we need to be careful what we ask for, lest we get where God will open our eyes… we invite God to come and manifest himself when we join the elders, the angels and the heavenly creatures in singing “Holy Holy Holy”…

BUT when we sing this- when God may well intend to respond to our prayerful call/cry for vision and insight- we check our watches and start to get our stuff together so that we can do whatever it is that we’ve planned to do next…

what if, on this day, God said:

I want to pour vision and insight- my word and manifest presence- into this place to ready you for a work that I intend to do through you in this community, this city, this province, this country and to the ends of the earth…

Wait- where are you going? Don’t you want to see me? Don’t you want to hear my voice, touch my face, all like you said?

What do you mean ‘that was just a song?’

in the movie 'the notebook', james garner's character, noah, reads a love story to this elderly woman (played by gena rowlands) named allie that he regularly visits in a hospice. as the story of two young lovers progresses, the audience begins to pick up hints as to the identities of the characters in the story: the young man and the young woman in the story are noah and allie long before a debilitating mental illness claimed huge portions of allie's memory and personality. he reads to this stranger in hopes of calling back to himself, if only for a few minutes, the girl he fell in love with and has been with for decades. he reads the love story to call her back to her true identity and their mutual love. he reads and hopes.

near the end of the film, the veil falls and the recognition in her eyes and the warmth in her voice authenticates the transformation. she asks him how long they have (for she is, in the moments of lucidity, aware of her condition) and he confesses that the last time she returned it was only for five minutes.

all that hope and tireless perseverence and waiting for five minutes?

five minutes of what?

of true intimacy

of things being the way they were meant to be.

of relationship restored

of paradise regained

as heart wrenching as it seems, it appears as though five minutes of these things is worth it all...

they put some music on (irving kahal's I'll be seeing you) and dance together, sharing sweet words of love and intimacy, but when she starts to dream and to plan for a future, he cautiously says 'not tonight, darling'

but she's already gone. the time counter on the player says we're at about three minutes this time. his heart breaks yet again, and with it, the hearts of the audience watching the film.

i suspect this is a poignant enactment of something that takes place unendingly between God and his beloved- us. God moves closer and we, in a moment of lucidity recognize his face, giving both ourselves and God a taste of what once was; what was always meant to be; what can't really take place again until death from our fallenness reunites us forever.

and God's heart breaks again and again as he whispers 'not tonight, darling' while i'll be seeing you plays in the background. someday it will be different. someday it will be forever.

but until then, God keeps visiting, inviting us to remember by reading us an unending love story until that day when all the veils fall and the light and freedom of the eternal now replaces the shadows of this temporal causality cage that is life just east of eden.

I'll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces
All day through.

In that small cafe;
The park across the way;
The children's carousel;
The chestnut trees;
The wishin' well.

I'll be seeing you
In every lovely summer's day;
In every thing that's light and gay.
I'll always think of you that way.

I'll find you
In the morning sun
And when the night is new.
I'll be looking at the moon,
But I'll be seeing you.

I'll be seeing you
In every lovely summer's day;
In every thing that's light and gay.
I'll always think of you that way.

I'll find you
In the morning sun
And when the night is new.
I'll be looking at the moon,
But I'll be seeing you.
(irving kahal)

metaphors, myths and merry go rounds

nothing gets our attention like a good storm.

God often uses symbols and metaphors- things like storms and floods and such- to communicate with people. The problem with speaking in metaphors and symbols is that people don’t always get them right away… and yet, if God were to come out shooting straight with humankind, one of two things might happen:

a) heads explode while bodies are consumed by holy fire.
b) people would simply get used to God
(perhaps this familiarity is what caused the rebellion back in Eden)

see, God knows his created well enough to know that he must temper his revelation, lest we become so familiar with the stuff of the mysteries of God that God’s presence and revelation no longer matter to us… they become the feeling of life and are dismissed in the same way that clean air, fresh water and savory food no longer cause us to pause and be thankful..

in the regular things, we regularly fail to grasp the deeper meaning. we miss the poetry of God. falling back upon our need for literal meanings and empirical reasoning.

but nothing gets our attention like a good storm.

my son tells a story of a kid that he went to school with in the early grades. his name was leroy.

leroy was a thrill seeker and was prone to try anything, especially if there was sufficient adrenaline rush involved. as a ten-year old, he had already discovered the correlation between personal danger and social esteem, and had become somewhat of a folk hero among the fifth graders. however, his greatest feat was still ahead of him...

until the day of the big storm when leroy's social status was elevated from folk hero to local legend.

it was a beautiful, sunny saskatchewan day in the late spring. however, as is true of most beautiful sunny saskatchewan days in late spring, the wind picked and and started to take over everything. as clouds began to gather and darken and the ubiquitous wind rose to sculpt them in real time, everyone on the playground was running for shelter and safety. leroy, however, turned and ran right back through the wind to the dustiest spot on the playground.

where he ran in circles.

faster and faster he ran, kicking up a tremendous amount of dust until he was barely visible at all to his schoolmates, all watching the spectacle from safely inside the building.

but amidst the dust and the wind and the circular run, something strange began to happen...

now years later, the kids, all much older and more sophisticated, reflect upon the scientific possibility of it all and the realization that some stories do grow in the telling. however, on that day and for a long time afterward, the only fitting assessment of what they had all witnessed was that

that was the day that leroy started the tornado.

seeing something happening and participating in it
rather than fleeing from it…

what if one were able to measure the movement of the wind and build a merry go round right at the centre of where a storm were to touch down? what a ride that would be!
hmm...

Q: what do we do when we hear that God is moving?
A: head for the storm cellar?
A: go out and play in it- embracing it and being embraced by it, participating in the stories of God that people will tell for decades, maybe even centuries…?

window weather: this is another sunny day,
but i can't help noticing that the wind is picking up...

*youtube convergence credits: visuals from the wizard of oz and audio from great gig in the sky (pink floyd)... speaking of playing with serendipity, if you watch wizard of oz, having cued pink floyd's dark side of the moon cd on the third roar of the MGM lion at the beginning, you will experience one of the most interesting aesthetic coincedences ever discovered...

jones drove the train

the first record bought with my own money wasn’t a cool one…it was a ktel compilation of novelty songs from the late 50's and early 60's called Looney Tunes that would still find favour among Mad magazine reading 12 year-olds in the 70's. being that i fit the demographic targetted by the marketing strategies employed (there was a silly commercial with bad animation that offered cartoon exerpts of a few of the songs, making them seem far more brilliantly satirical and emotionally satisfying than they actually were) i rushed down to the closest retail store and bought my own copy full price. on it was along came jones- a song of considerable melodrama performed by a group called the coasters... not the craziest song on the record, but perhaps the most spiritually meaningful.

mel·o·dra·ma

1.	a dramatic form that does not observe the laws of cause and effect and that exaggerates emotion and emphasizes plot or action at the expense of characterization.

(huge thanks, as usual, to www.dictionary.com and www.biblegateway.com)

sometimes, in our desire to understand and summarize a lesson in scripture, we can reduce it to the level of melodrama…the depth of God’s desire to redeem his own, the crowned of creation, from an agreed-upon autonomous existence hell-bent on self-destruction can often come off as a simple white-hat versus black-hat cartoon.

and then he grabbed her! (and then?)
he tied her up! (and then?)
he threw her on the railroad track! (and then?)
a train started coming! (and then? and then?)

and then along came jones...

now, describing placing black hats and white hats upon real-life characters caught in a day to day existence on fallen planet earth is trickier than writing a simple plot with simple characters and putting it to music...

nothing is ever simple or tidy.

and yet scripture bears witness to the following through of God’s promises to remain involved. God promises a restoration of all things, and then takes humanity through a series of successive approximations, revealing in holy moments, glimpses of his glory; offering hope for the future of this fallen race in God’s bigger picture.

exodus 19.9-11, 16-20
2 chronicles 5.11-14
isaiah 6.1-8
acts 2.1-6
joel 2.28-32

at the end of his second chapter, the prophet joel describes 'day of the Lord' and in this description we read of an incredible deliverance that is promised to 'everyone who calls on the name of the Lord.' the UK band delirious reflects upon this to some degree in a song of theirs called God's Romance which has a rather catchy and intriguing chorus:

Everyone here is the kingdom come
Here is the God who saves the day
And we will gladly run into the glorious Son
Singing that Jesus is alive

what i find so engaging about this lyric is the melodramatic, saturday morning superhero phrase: the God who saves the day.

being that we read the phrase 'the day of the Lord' so often in scripture to describe a time when, according to Gospel.com, "God will make his creation whole again and destroy evil," i find the melodrama of the God who saves the day accessible and attractive.

having watched too much tv as a kid, i remember the song along came jones being most poignantly enacted on the old irish rovers tv show…

in it, jones drove the train.

I don't care about economy, I don't care about astronomy
But it sure do bother me to see my loved ones turning into puppets
There's slow, slow train coming up around the bend. (Bob Dylan)