Sunday, October 22, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
And then … no thing happens
The gospel did not come to you in word alone, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with much conviction.
I sat beside the labyrinth in Urbana’s Crystal Lake Park. I sat beside my friend, and we sipped coffee from Einsteins. Saturday’s sunlight poured over us, into our eyes, onto the tops of our heads, over our bare arms. What day in which year does late October feel like this?
That would be today.
We talked about intense world theory, and imagined how it applies to autism, where overstimulation shuts me down, and attention deficit disorder (ADD), where I overstimulate myself and my thoughts, until they spin and I spin and we all spin together. In either case, the “intense world” can quickly become dark and threatening.
So then I came home and read a short piece by Willa Cather, writing about Nebraska I suppose, but it felt to me like she was writing about Prince Edward Island, home of fictional Anne of Green Gables and many land-lubbing, sea-loving men and women for at least the last thousand years.
As was the case for Anne, this young person arrived from elsewhere, carried by the magic carpets made of steel, rockin’ to the gentle beat …
I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning. Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping.
There were big yellow pumpkins, heavy on the ground and unprotected by their withering vines. But the light air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.
Grandmother swung a bag of potatoes over her shoulder and walked down the path. She turned and waved at me. I was left alone, and I sat down in the middle of the garden, feeling light and content. The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground.
I heard the wind humming, and I could see the tall grasses above me wave. Giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, danced on the dried vines. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers.
I kept as still as I could.
Nothing happened.
I did not expect anything to happen.
There were the gophers, and the grasshoppers, and there was grandmother, and there was the girl, brand new to all this world. These quiet noticings turn my head too, as I sit and write, as Illinois’ homecoming happens all around us, as the football game is not yet decided.
My quiet friend sipping coffee said, “I would like not to be in such a hurry all the time.”
And when he said it … no thing happened. Just as we hoped.
Except that the sun covered us with grace and peace. Willa surely sat there too, in her own world a hundred years ago.
I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
 – from My Antonia, reprinted in Plough Magazine.
Sitting beside the labyrinth in Illinois, the late morning sun poured over us. I took a few deep breaths, closed my eyes, smiled.
Grace to you, and peace. We give thanks to God always for all of you, remembering you in our prayers.
(Isaiah 45, Psalm 96, 1 Thessalonians 1, Philippians 2, Matthew 22)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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