The smudge on the conference room table didn’t really show a lion’s face.  But I’ve been drawing lions lately, and have begun to know the pattern of their faces, and so I was predisposed to see eyes and muzzle staring up at me from the dark, burnished wood.  I was so taken with it that I got out my sketchbook and drew it, even though I knew I was being rude, and seemed to have checked out from the conversation in the room.  And I thought about the woman who saw Jesus’s face in the tortilla.  I thought about her without cynicism, because I felt that I understood her.  It wasn’t that she needed a miracle.  She didn’t need Christ’s face to appear to her in a burn pattern on flat bread.  If something miraculous was happening, it was happening inside of her, because she was so focused on Jesus that she could see him everywhere.

We see the things that we’re already concentrated on – they become visible to us in the world.  I’ve always loved this tendency towards saliency, our ability to make meaning by narrowing our focus.  But these days I’ve become wary of forcing my meanings on the world around me.

I’ve been reading nature poetry, Mary Oliver especially, and I love the turn that her poems take about three quarters of the way through.  She’ll be doing nothing more than describing a scene in nature and then, suddenly, she lets insight break in like a break in the clouds.  I admire this, but I also wonder about its merits.  Should we inflict our insights onto the environment, onto swans and frogs and herons?

I wonder about this because I’ve realized that I’m not a nature poet.  I’m not really a poet at all.  The focus of my writing is on people.  Yesterday morning I was standing in line at Buckeye Donuts.  It was early, and the restaurant had that sparse, clear feeling of a well-lit place in the predawn.  The man in front of me was deaf, and obviously a regular.  He pointed to what he wanted with great precision, and the man behind the counter was fluent in reading his gestures.  There was a young black man in a vest and a trilby hat standing against the far wall, waiting for his order to be handed to him.  The deaf man gestured at him, and the man responded with words, smiling, because it was a conversation that they’d obviously had many times before.  I watched all of this and felt a great inner joy, the same joy that Mary Oliver seems to feel when watching a loon rise from a lake.  But I couldn’t say what the meaning was, because the deaf man and the man in the trilby hat have their own meanings, and who am I to superimpose my meanings onto them?

Perhaps its enough to simply observe their gestures.  And yet, I have Christ in mind when I do so.  An image rooted in my consciousness, a tendency to see His face swimming up to the surface of things.  Sometimes its the face of a lion.  I will not say that the deaf man and the man in the trilby hat were Christ, the Christ that

plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces. (Hopkins)

They may have been, and Christ’s face may emerge from their own.  I will always be watching for it.  But I want things, and people, to have their own meanings, too.  Maybe it is only a statement about myself, the specificity of my concentration, the direction of my saliency, when I say that I see lions in tables and Jesus in people.  Maybe that is enough.  And maybe there is something miraculous about it, in a small way, because it points to a change in me, if not the world.

Walking through the Annie Leibovitz exhibit at the Wexner was like reading a novel or a short story.  The images built and built, and there was a sense that they were leading to something, some high point which would pull all of the images together and make their meaning coherent.  It was a rainy afternoon, but the light inside the galleries was clear and bright.  I went up narrow interior stairways, around corners, through open hallways, all of which grew the sense of moving through a labyrinth – the sense that there was a center, and I only had to get there.

I came around a corner and found four black and white images, all in a row.  Plain, awkward looking women.  They stood out, because the last few galleries had been full of intense color.  Ella Fitzgerald in a red hat and dress, standing against the green and silver leaves of a rose bush, ferns of a more consistent green pulling the viewer’s eye to the grass at her feet.  Mohammed Ali reclining against the red sweep of a staircase.  Leibovitz is a genius at placing colors in startling, lovely contrast.  All of that, and then the four plain women, in black and white.

I studied them.  They looked tranquil, thoughtful, kind.  And then I turned to the other wall.  Four large portraits of Las Vegas showgirls.  Breasts and feathers everywhere.  Teased hair, heavy mascara, blush and sequins.  Four women, in order.  I studied the caption cards on the walls beside them.  After a moment, I realized that they were the same four women from the black and white photographs. But how could that be?  They didn’t look the same.  One set of photographs showed quietness, relaxed humanity, faces drawn inward and almost indifferent to beauty.  The other set showed wild exuberance, a nearly manic showiness, faces posed for display in a carnival.  They seemed like different women, but were the same, and as I looked back and forth at the two sets of portraits, I couldn’t decide which set expressed the greater reality.

I’ve been reading Mary Oliver’s House of Light, and have stopped to read this poem again and again:

LILIES

I have been thinking
about living
like the lilies
that blow in the fields.

They rise and fall
in the wedge of the wind,
and have no shelter
from the tongues of the cattle,

and have no closets or cupboards,
and have no legs.
Still I would like to be
as wonderful

as that old idea.
But if I were a lily
I think I would wait all day
for the green face

of the hummingbird
to touch me.
What I mean is,
could I forget myself

even in those feathery fields?
When van Gogh
preached to the poor
of course he wanted to save someone—

most of all himself.
He wasn’t a lily,
and wandering through the bright fields
only gave him more ideas

it would take his life to solve.
I think I will always be lonely
in this world, where the cattle
graze like a black and white river—

where the ravishing lilies
melt, without protest, on their tongues—
where the hummingbird, whenever there is a fuss,
just rises and floats away.

Perhaps the plain, black and white portraits are the lilies, simple in their bright fields.  But I think I’m wrong to call those portraits human, and not describe the garish show girls as human as well.  After all, can our humanity stand plainness?  Don’t we long for the green, bright face of the hummingbird?  I, like Mary Oliver, have often wanted to just be.  To set aside human complexity and complication, and become like the lily, or the deer that longs for the water brooks.  But to do so would be to pretend that I’m something other than I am.  Human, complex, and sometimes garish, wild, and showy.  Yet I feel Oliver’s loneliness as well.  We can never rest like a lily without longing for something more, and we can never stretch ourselves towards that something more without longing for the lily’s rest.

I wandered away from the two sets of portraits, thinking these thoughts, but the exhibit wasn’t finished with me yet.  The story it was telling me hadn’t reached its climax.  On the top floor, in the second to last gallery, there was a display of pictures from Leibovitz’s recent pilgrimage.  She traveled across the country taking pictures without any people in them, trying to reclaim her art for herself, without worrying about financial or commercial interests.  The pictures were arranged like paintings in a 19th century exhibit, many images clustered together on three walls, at different heights and with very little space between them.  On the third wall there was a photograph of two lima bean pods, both open, their sides like wings of a moth.  I stopped before it, transfixed.  The beans nestled against gray, webbed plant fiber, pale against the green.  The fiber was dense and clumped, like old plaster or crusted salt.  The pods sat on red, pebbled dirt.  They were so simple, and so complex.

Nature is simple and complex.  Both our nature, and the nature of the lily.  That is why we want to be like lilies of the fields.  Not because they’re different then us, but because they remind us of ourselves.  Like us, they are both plain and elaborate, webbed with cells of tremendous complexity, composed of varied colors.  Yet they seem free within themselves, within their complexity, free to be two things at once, rooted and sparse, caught in a wedge of wind, always wild with change.  Perhaps this is what Christ meant.  Consider the lilies of the fields.  Consider yourselves.

It was raining on Tuesday when I walked into Paul’s Diner and saw that Laurie had gotten there first and was sitting in our regular booth, reading her Bible and making notes in a wire bound notebook.  Laurie’s Bible is black and small and slim.  Its black cover is crinkled and chipped in places from years of use.  We talked, as we usually do, about our lives, our children especially, and about the lectionary readings for the coming Sunday.  We’ve been meeting for a year now, and I’ve come to rely on Laurie’s insights.

It was near the end of our breakfast together that I began talking about the thing that had really been bothering me.  The Friday before we had talked about the end of Exodus in the Biblical literature class I’m taking at Ohio State University.  My professor, Jim Fredal, had been talking about the similarities between both Exodus and the Deuteronomic Code, and suzerainty treaties in the ancient near east.  Scholars believe that a good portion of the Pentateuch is formally based on these treaties, in which an Emperor would set out the expectations he had for his client kings.  As Professor Fredal talked, I felt a quiver at the edges of my faith. To base an understanding of God’s relation to the world on an elaborate ancient treaty form feels a little like basing that understanding on an iTunes contract in today’s context.  I’ve always defended the Old Testament from its detractors, mostly because I love Job and the stories in Genesis.  But now I had to admit that those detractors had a point.  God in the Old Testament doesn’t seem to offer us unconditional love.

I said all of this to Laurie, and she asked if the story of Jesus didn’t take away all of that.  If we read the Bible as a story of God’s development as much as humanity’s, we see that God eventually abandons this contractual, conditional relationship with us.  It is, of course, good to remind ourselves that the Deuteronomist was putting words in God’s mouth, that if God changes throughout the Bible, it’s only because our understanding of God changes.  But with Jesus we see a profound change in that understanding.  “All God really wants is to be with us,” Laurie said.  We talked about the Gospel reading for this coming Sunday.  “All God really wants is to welcome us as children.”

This felt profound to me, even though I’ve heard it in a hundred sermons and said it myself any number of times.  I’ve started a new job, and its parameters are wide and somewhat ill-defined, although the scope it gives me for creativity and experimentation is amazing.  But I’ve been looking for someone to approve of my work, to say to me “you’re doing a good job.”  And the funny thing is that many people have said that, but I haven’t been able to hear them, because a large part of me keeps worrying that the work isn’t justified somehow.  I don’t know what success looks like, and neither does anyone else.  It’s as if I’m afraid of being judged by God.  Yet all God wants to do is welcome me.  I feel like I’ve fallen into the mindset of the Deuteronomist, hoping to get the contract right, and hoping that if I do, God won’t abandon me.  I needed Laurie to tell me that God will never abandon me, because all God really wants is my company.

The rain had let out when we left the diner, and I took a bus downtown.  I was meeting Dick Burnett, the Rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, for lunch.  We planned to meet at the noon service and go to a restaurant afterwards.  It turned out that Dick and I were the only ones who attended the service.  But Dick didn’t seem worried about this at all.  He led us in the prayers and the readings, gave a small sermon, and then he did something remarkable.  Before we celebrated communion together, he blessed me.  Specifically, he read this blessing over me, from John O’Donohue’s book To Bless the Space Between Us:

May your new work excite your heart,
Kindle in your mind a creativity
To journey beyond the old limits
Of all that has become wearisome.

May this work challenge you toward
New frontiers that will emerge
As you begin to approach them,
Calling forth from you the full force
And depth of your undiscovered gifts.

May the work fit the rhythms of your soul,
Enabling you to draw from the invisible
New ideas and a vision that will inspire.

Remember to be kind
To those who work for you,
Endeavor to remain aware
Of the quiet world
That lives behind each face.

Be fair in your expectations,
Compassionate in your criticism.
May you have the grace of encouragement
To awaken the gift in the other’s heart,
Building in them the confidence
To follow the call of the gift.

May you come to know that work
Which emerges from the mind of love
Will have beauty and form.

May this new work be worthy
Of the energy of your heart
And the light of your thought.

May your work assume
A proper space in your life;
Instead of owning or using you,
May it challenge and refine you,
Bringing you every day further
Into the wonder of your heart.

I don’t know how Dick knew that this was the blessing that I needed, but it felt like magic.  “May you come to know that work / Which emerges from the mind of love / Will have beauty and form.”  Indeed.  And may I feel God welcoming me into that work, and welcoming me as a child into divine presence.