Tag: encounter

Labyrinth Progress

photograph (c) Katherine Brown

And the LORD said to Moses, ‘Go up to me on the mountain and be there. And I will give to you the tablets of stone and the instruction and the commandment which I wrote for their teaching.’

Exodus 24:12 [my translation], from Exodus 24:1-18 [NRSVUE] *

There’s a labyrinth in the woods where we walk. It doesn’t seem to be an official installation; no park signs herald its presence. We noticed it a few years ago, probably in winter or early spring, some time when the brush nearest the trail had died back enough that it could be seen. Stones are set in an irregular circle, within which a way is marked. The path starts at the edge, seems aimed directly at the center, then loops back and out, then in again. It’s a little labyrinth, really. Two or three wide strides would carry me entirely across it. Instead, I make my steps small enough to fit in its bounds. I follow the path toward the center, am carried back to the outer edge, then curve around in again. I walk a weaving back and forth, in and out. I hear the breeze rustle last season’s leaves and the creek run over rocks nearby.


Labyrinth progress, walking and reading: in towards the heart, then curving away. Overwhelming theophany, divine summons — all of this has happened before. Already the LORD invited and the people committed to do all which the LORD had spoken (19:1-8). Already the LORD came in cloud thick as kiln-smoke, in thunder and lightning and a trumpet that set flesh to trembling, and Moses, called, went up the mountain and talked with God (19:16-20). Exodus 24 reprises the antiphony of divine speech and human assent: the people promise ‘to do’ and ‘to hear’ (24:7); they are blood-bound in covenant (24:8); and the elders go up and eat and drink in the presence of a shining blue, smooth as pavement and clear as light (24:9-11). They have left Egypt; they are at the mountain. The act of encounter seems complete.


How, then, to understand the LORD’s further invitation to ‘Go up to me … and be,’ the promise of more to be given, instruction written on stone, purposed for teaching (24:12).

Chronological logic may suggest that this invitation is told out of order, came back before ‘all these words’ were declared by the LORD.** Yet maybe chronology is not the primary logic in the narrative. The looping back of the story may be a reminder that seeming completeness is not the same as complete. That Moses is — we are — summoned to further encounter, and encounter again.

The LORD says to Moses, ‘Go up to me on the mountain and be there. And I will give … ’ — promising Moses further gift. Summoning Moses to be in ongoing expectation.

To be in expectation is to recognize that what already is is partial. It is to resist the mistake of conflating our kingdoms with God’s, of claiming our constructions of power and identity as ultimate. To be in expectation is to know that all our going has not yet brought us to the completeness of it all. We suffer still the travails of empire and of wilderness, and we impose them on others and on creation itself. Crises continue, and none of them are new, and all our going has but led us back to the same ground, even the same trenches, newly named but familiar underfoot. It is not that we have never seen God flaming atop a mountain; it is that we mistook that flame for fulfillment. As if our own experience has already encompassed all that God has promised to work. The LORD’s invitation to go up, to be, to be given more reminds us that what is is not what is to be.

There’s also this: the LORD says to Moses, ‘Go up to me on the mountain and be there.’ God is not calling Moses to some divine waiting room (Moses flipping the pages of an outdated periodical till he is seen and handed the scrip for wholeness) but even in a state of expectation, to be in the presence of the glory of the LORD tenting on the mountain in fire and in cloud (24:15-18).

We’re not just waiting for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. We’re called to present ourselves to God’s presence even in this state of aching expectation of God’s further gift.

I walk the path towards the heart of the labyrinth, am carried back around the outer edge, then in again, and out until, having walked to the center, I pause, then step in faithfulness to the path’s guiding back out again. To resume walking on the woods trail, beneath the trees and beside the creek. Reminded to be in expectation, reminded — even in ache of brokenness — to persistently listen for the invitation to go up to God and be.

Labyrinth progress, walking and reading: in towards the heart, then curving out for further return.

* The lectionary lists this text for Transfiguration Sunday, the transition into Lent. I’ve been circling towards a center and away again, and continue weaving a way into the Easter season.

** Robert Alter translates Exod 24:1: ‘And to Moses, He had said — ’ using a pluperfect to suggest the slipping of the sequence. [Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: Translation and Commentary (W.W. Norton: 2004) p.455].

Leaf Candles

photo by Katherine Brown

“Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

John 20:30-31, from John 20:19-31, lectionary text for Sunday after Easter.

The dogwood is emerald-candled.  Its leaves are new and small, precisely shaped, slightly flared. Glowing green.  Each leaf-pair is poised at the tip of a slender branch.  The sun shines, and the leaf-cups appear each a lit glim held aloft.   The light seems to be radiating from the leaves themselves as if they, not the sun, are the source of their shining.  Then clouds pass across the sun, and the light dims, and the leaves are again leaves.  Just leaves.  New, small, precisely shaped, slightly flared.  Flat green.

Easter evening, Jesus came and stood among the disciples, and the disciples who saw him rejoiced (John 20:19-20).  Christ-light had shone, and I imagine them radiant in its glow.

Thomas, one of the twelve, had not been with them that night.  ‘We have seen the Lord!’ the others told him.  Thomas refused the news.  See the insistent shake of his head, the stubborn hunch of his shoulders?  Thomas recites the litany of the sparks necessary to kindle his belief:  he must see, he must touch.  Not his lord — the one they said they had seen (20:25), the one with whom he had been willing to die (John 11:16) — but the marks of the nails in Jesus’ hands and side.  As if the proof of resurrection is in the marks of suffering.  Only if Thomas can encounter the body that he knows was broken will he believe that his Lord has risen.

So obdurate is Thomas’s resistance to his fellows’ joy that I wonder at his presence when, a week later, the disciples are again in the house (20:26).  Thomas is with them.  He had seemed to feel their resurrection report of Easter evening was more injury than invitation.  In the face of their joy, he had insisted on his loss.  But the following week, he was among them.  Did he come because of the others’ witness or in spite of it?  Did they welcome him in hope their joy would spark his own or because all of them together, in joy or in pain, were Christ’s own?  Is it their welcome, even?  Or is it reunion, and Christ the welcoming host?

Is it about the leaves or the light?

A week after Easter, Jesus stood among them and told Thomas to see and to touch.  ‘Do not be unbelieving but believing,’ Jesus says (20:27).  Thomas is shaken out of the fixedness of his disbelief by this encounter with Jesus’ nail-marked body.  ‘My Lord and my God!’ he exclaims (20:28).  ‘You have seen me,’ Jesus tells Thomas, then Jesus tells all of us after, ‘Blessed are those who have not seen but believe’ (20:29).  John’s gospel continues Jesus’ address to us with a reference to its own body, the thing ‘written so that you may believe …’ (20:31).

A body pierced by nails, twisted on a cross; broken by the world to overcome the world.  A community still claiming more than it lives, striving to live what it claims, falling short and having to try again and again.  Things written in a distant idiom — vocabulary, grammar, imagery — that must be learned and studied and read again and again.  A world of bodies.  Each in some way marked, twisted.  None complete.

Don’t mistake the leaves for the light.  Don’t mis-order the priorities.  Do recognize the relationship.

The clouds pass away, and the sun shines full.  Again, the dogwood is emerald-candled, each leaf-pair lit from within, seeming to show its true self, its very life.  

The daylight lets me see the dogwood leaves.  The leaves make that light visible as it otherwise would not be.  The leaves let me see the light.

People; pages.  Inadequate bodies all around.  Yet somehow the proof of Easter shows through these bodies that together — written, reading, lit, radiant, alive — make resurrection visible.

Gracious encounter.  That you may believe and, believing, have life.