The unsafeness of God

I mentioned earlier that I’d yielded to the urgings of a couple folks and set up on Facebook (which I hadn’t thought of doing on my own hook, since I’d tried MySpace and disliked it); I’m grateful to them for that. So far, what I’ve appreciated most is the chance to reconnect with a lot of folks I’d lost touch with, friends from high school (and further back) like Melissa Holgate and Elizabeth Howe and people from Hope as well. Among the latter group, someone I always really appreciated was Erin Koster (now Erin Ortlund), in part (but only in part) because she played the primary role in leading Sara to attend Hope, which obviously has been a great blessing to me. 🙂 I was reading her blog this morning, and was struck by her post on the first snow of the season up in Saskatchewan. She uses a quote from Frederick Buechner on that subject, one that I didn’t remember (even though I’ve read Telling the Truth, it was some time ago); and somehow—maybe it’s just the way Buechner’s writing works on my brain—it put me in mind of this passage from The Hungering Dark:

As the Italian film La Dolce Vita opens, a helicopter is flying slowly through the sky not very high above the ground. Hanging down from the helicopter is the life-size statue of a man dressed in robes with his arms outstretched so that he looks almost as if he is flying by himself . . . [When] the great dome of St. Peter’s looms up from below . . . for the first time the camera starts to zoom in on the statue itself with its arms stretched out, until for a moment the screen is almost filled with just the bearded face of Christ—and at that moment there was no laughter at all in that theater full of students and their dates and paper cups full of buttery popcorn and La Dolce Vita college-style. Nobody laughed during that moment because there was something about that face, for a few seconds there on the screen, that made them be silent—the face hovering there in the sky and the outspread arms. For a moment, not very long to be sure, there was no sound, as if the face were their face somehow, their secret face that they had never seen before but that they knew belonged to them, or the face that they had never seen before but that they knew, if only for a moment, they belonged to.I think that is much of what the Christian faith is. It is for a moment, just for a little while, seeing the face and being still; that is all. . . . Just for the moment itself, say, of Christmas, there can only be silence as something comes to life, some spirit, some hope; as something is born again into the world that is so strange and new and precious that not even a cynic can laugh although he might be tempted to weep.The face in the sky. The child born in the night among beasts. The sweet breath and steaming dung of beasts. And nothing is ever the same again.Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too. And this means that we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break in two and recreate the human heart because it is just where he seems most helpless that he is most strong, and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully.For those of us who believe in God, it means, this birth, that God himself is never safe from us, and maybe that is the dark side of Christmas, the terror of the silence. He comes in such a way that we can always turn him down, as we could crack the baby’s skull like an eggshell or nail him up when he gets too big for that. God comes to us in the hungry man we do not have to feed, comes to us in the lonely man we do not have to comfort, comes to us all in the desperate human need of people everywhere that we are always free to turn our backs upon. It means that God puts himself at our mercy not only in the sense of the suffering that we can cause him by our blindness and coldness and cruelty, but the suffering that we can cause him simply by being ourselves. Because that is the way love works, and when someone we love suffers, we suffer with him, and we would not have it otherwise because the suffering and the love are one, just as it is with God’s love for us.