A skim coat of glory

photograph (c) Katherine E. Brown

“And now, thus says the LORD, the one who is creating you, Jacob, the one who is forming you, Israel.

You shall not fear, for I redeemed you; I called you by your name. You are mine.”

Isaiah 43:1 (my translation); Isaiah 43:1-7 NRSVUE

I’m sitting up late Friday night and glance at the window, get up to move closer and look more carefully. Did I see some movement in the air? Has snow begun? I peer through the windowpane towards the porch light of the house opposite. No snow. Not yet. Perhaps the quiver I saw was a trick of my eyes, or my imagination, or even just my desire. Wanting snow.

We are due for snow. More snow, I should say: we already had a good fall this week, over six inches, the first good cover we’ve had in a while. My own snow yearning feels silly to me. Still, I dearly want it to come, longing not so much for added inches as for seeing the air quivering with snow magic, the shining of it coming down to cover the ground. It’s the sight of it that makes my heart leap. Becoming made visible.

That’s what it is. It’s not just the way the world is changed by the covering white: the shapes of things softened and mounded under the snow; surfaces smoothed; the colors of things not snow-covered altered by being set against such whiteness. It’s the way the transformation itself is visible in time. I can watch the flakes flurry and dance in swirling descent, can see them set the first skim-coat of white on the ground, lay successive layers on the first. Brightness falls through the air, makes earth shine with light rich and strange, and this wonder unfolds in the right time for my own eyes’ perceiving.

That’s what I long for: to be able to see re-creation occurring, to watch and marvel at its grace. Who wouldn’t want to be see glory coming? To tremble at its awful weight and to find rest in its wondrous love. To know — bone-deep — that the wheel of time is turning on towards redemption. That the years are not waste. That the losses are not the end.

‘And now, thus says the LORD — .’ God God-self speaking. God speaking to those who had passed through waters, had walked through fires [Isa 43:2]. God speaking even to those who had lost homes and livelihoods and loved ones to flood or flame, to war or exile. Name it Babylon or Gaza, Helene or Palisades, or the quotidian inequities still inadequately redressed. God speaks in these contexts. God speaks to us.

‘And now, thus says the LORD, the one who is creating you, Jacob, the one who is forming you, Israel — .’ Scanning the Hebrew, I recognize the participles, re-read the text as creation on-going, as formation unfolding. Jacob-Israel. Me-us. Becoming created and fully formed even as already we are called by name, already we are redeemed. The paradox of this juxtaposition: our redemption complete; our re-creation coming yet to be.

Oh, there’s a web of connections here! God who declares the LORD his name, who gives his glory (‘kabod’) to no other [Isaiah 42:8], calls being-created-Jacob, being-formed-Israel, ‘precious’ and ‘honored’ (‘kabod-ed’) and ‘beloved’ [Isaiah 43:4]. God speaks of and to ‘all who are called by my name’ [Isa 43:7] — a call-back to v.1, where God calls us by our names. Now, v.7, we hear that to call us by our own names is also to call us of-God’s. ‘To my glory (that word again, kabod) I created them, I formed them (more call-back to v.1), also I made them.’

A web of connections to unspool. But maybe for tonight, I’ll go back to verse 1. To the promise of that paradox. That already we are redeemed even as we are coming yet to be. That God’s own glory is bound up in our becoming, and that as the LORD will not give God’s glory to any other, neither will the LORD give us up to any other end but God’s own. I may pray to see the aim more clearly in my context, but meanwhile there is the promise of the text to ponder, and in its heart to rededicate myself, notwithstanding all that I cannot see.

Paul comes upstairs, goes to pull the window shade. ‘Oh!’ he says, ‘It’s snowing!’ For this, I scramble out of bed and hurry to the window. I lean near and look out and up to the streetlight, and in its brightness, I can see it! Fine stuff shifting down, each pinpoint mote distinct. The air moves and shines and already there is a fresh skim coat of glory on the ground.

Becoming made visible.