August 28, 2005

To Turn Aside

by Julianne Stokstad

The newspapers and TV announcers have it down. They seem to know what captivates our interest-- violence and conflict. It takes shocking and big dramatic events to grip our attention. I don't know what it is in human nature that makes us so interested in events beyond our control and over which we seem to have little control, rather than the sweet stories of human compassion and hope. Even in the Bible, God most often makes appearances in very dramatic ways. God comes down to earth in pillars of fire and smoke, with earthquakes and in whirlwinds. Maybe this is because it takes this kind of dramatic action to get our attention.

Moses saw a bush on fire, blazing with red tongues rising up to the sky, yet as he watched, it was not consumed. He noticed and must have thought, this is not the way things work. His curiosity got the best of him and he had to go and check it out. We all remember the two year olds incessant and tiring whys, but it is out of that curiosity that human knowledge has been gained. Out of curiosity, science and religion were born. It is out of curiosity, out of the question why that the aliveness of the minds and souls of humans are grown.

I've seen the burning bush at St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai desert. We all chuckled at the earnest tour guide, not believing his story for a moment. It looked like any other bush to me. Yet if I look closely at what the bush is doing, it is taking in the sunlight energy, special molecules absorbing it, then passing the excited electron along a chain of molecules like a hot potato and finally changing that very light energy into chemical energy, into sugar. All plants are incredible energy transformation machines. We don't usually think of bushes as doing that, but they and all plants are, right before our very eyes and we don't even notice.

We don't know what Moses saw, but what is important is that he turned aside to investigate. Moses was not seeking God out there in the desert, but his curiosity got the better of him. When confronted with something new we, humans, have two responses: one is to take it as a matter of course and the other is to look with wonder and curiosity. How are we formed, informed, deformed or reformed by our education, by our culture, by our faith?

Why don't we notice more often and turn aside like Moses did? This is an important question which makes us look at our lifestyle here in Marin. First of all, everyone is too busy. There are just too many demands on us. We rush around with a "To do" list a mile long, even the children are so highly scheduled that they have precious little time to sit, reflect or to notice anything. In fact, few know how and often whine, "I'm bored" when nothing new is planned. We are caught up in self-absorption because of the many demands on us. With over abundant information, we are familiar with too many things. There is a pressure to seek out new and more exciting information. It is easy to think just because we've heard about something, we know all about it. How many bushes had Moses seen?

We need to slow down. Environmentalist Rachel Carson tells in her tender book A Sense of Wonder how she took a child to the beach and together they were inspired with new seeing and understanding. Clement of Alexandria, a church father, said "Look with wonder at that which is before you." Our separation from the natural world takes away from us many opportunities to see things in new ways. As a biologist, I found that the more I learned about how the natural world and the human body worked, the more wonder and appreciation I had. Anthony of the Desert, one of the 4th century monks who fled the cities to find God in the isolation of the wilderness said "My book is the nature of created things, and any time I wish to read the words of God, the book is before me." Seeing God in nature for us is always one of the great sources of inspiration. In fact all nature seems to us in moments of insight to be what it was for Jesus, a primer of the ways of God. It is essential for us to stop and turn aside.

There is a story about the child of a Hassidic rabbi who began to go off into the woods each day for a long period of time. At first his father let him wander, but then he began to worry about all the dangers out there. So he called the child to him to discuss this. "My child, I've noticed each day you walk into the woods. I wonder why you go there."

The boy said to his father, "I go there to find God."

"That's a very good thing," the father replied gently. "I am glad you are searching for God. But, my child, don't you know that God is the same everywhere?"

"Yes, " the boy answered, "but I'm not."

We see in Exodus that God has a dwelling place in nature, in mountains and bushes and fire. God knows all that is happening among men and cares. God hates injustice and he comes to Moses and works together with him to fight the injustice and suffering. There is great mystery in God's name and mysterious power in God's presence. Moses had to take off his shoes and cover his face, both signs of great reverence. Reverence is the response of body and soul to great mysteries, deeply felt and only partially understood.

Moses understood how awesome, frightening and even dangerous it is to approach the boundary between the divine and human experience. Moses took time to turn aside, as we must. And even then it wasn't a done deal. Moses argued, resisted and only reluctantly agreed to do God's bidding. You see, my friends, God needs a human agent to do God's work. God didn't promise Moses it would be easy. God promised that God would be with him and God let Moses choose the response to God's call.

In America so often hear people say, oh I'm spiritual, just not religious, I have a relationship with God, but I don't know about church. Moses was called back to his community in Egypt by God to help the Israelites as a community move out of slavery into freedom as God's people.

Christian community grew out of this call to live collectively and peacefully together as God's people working for justice and freedom. It is so not easy. After all these years, we haven't yet got it down how to do this. The Apostle Paul gives us advice on how to live in community. The secret is to live our lives together in response to God's grace as Jesus did. Because we are God's people, loved by God our life together needs to be shaped and formed in response to this. Because we are first loved, love becomes the secret of Christian conduct. We do not love to earn God's grace, we are simply loved, we cannot help but love in response.

How do we experience God's call to us? We can take time in smaller ways to turn aside to God. Our scripture tells us we too must first notice. This time of quiet and reflection is an antidote to the stress in our lives.

Annie Dillard writes: "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead--as if innocence had ever been---and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves, unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been."

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