It started out as one of those little wins, a dash of serendipity to brighten the day.
Mom’s bi-monthly trip to the retina specialist ended without need for a strength-sapping eye injection, so we decided to celebrate by taking a field trip. We headed seven miles south to Union (the town where I grew up … and where she spent most of the years of her adult life) because we both wanted to see the beautiful new “uptown” park that had in recent years been constructed.
Things then took a mystical turn. The steeple of the Catholic church is visible from the park, you see, and this stirred in Mom the desire to “make a visit.” Ever the pilgrim, she insisted on walking the two blocks west … leaning on her royal-blue walker for sure support … while I drove ahead in my car, circling back to her on foot as quickly as I could.
All that put us in church, in the Presence, just before noon. It’s a beautiful time to be there – in that sanctuary – bathed not in artificial light, but surrounded rather by the cool blue gentleness of stained glass. Jesus welcomed us from the tabernacle up ahead. And when we turned up the nave to depart, I had a moment. I noticed, as if for the first time, the full-arch window at the rear – a stained glass image that I must have seen hundreds of times before.
On this encounter, though, it was backlit by the noonday sun. Its gorgeous, even luxurious, light drew me in … so that I started to see the image more deeply. Which turns out to be a bit of a mash-up, scripturally: Mary, celebrated in her Immaculate Conception, being overshadowed by Gabriel at the time of the Annunciation, all (presumably) setting in motion the Incarnation … to save us from Original Sin.
That’s a lot to unpack. And as art, I’m not sure it’s entirely successful. But my own personal moment came when I studied the pane depicting the Garden of Eden.
I instantly recognized the shame Adam felt in his moment of sin. But the image of God it depicted seemed foreign to me: Dispassionate, calculating, aloof. Truly disturbing, it was, to the realize this is the image of God I’d grown up with – literally and figuratively. God as Accountant, tabulating all the credits and debits I’ve accrued along the rocky road back to Paradise.
Later that same day, an entirely different image of God blessed me, out on the golf course. I noticed – poking up through a patch of thick green trouble – three stalks of prairie grass that had formed seed-heads. A verdant Trinity, as it were, watching over the woe below and offering a glimpse of hope.
Adam might never have recognized God’s promise in this moment, but I do. Salvation has come! And I – we – have been given the grace to see God present … Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier … even in the day’s most ordinary moments. Even in the seemingly ordinary forms of bread and wine.
This is what ought to feed us, not the shame of sin. And this is why Jesus says, “Do this in remembrance of me.”
Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.
IHS
With Us Still 