In my mid-20s — half an age (mine) and still nearly nil on maturity ago — I noticed a thing that at the time was massive but in retrospect, as such immensities often are after the time, obviously is something millions of others have noticed through all their times.
At least one hopes.
I noticed it all fits; pulled together, that things entire do not need to be pulled together. They just need to be noticed, which is really what all things, and non-things like people, want, too.
[What’s true is that we’re all already noticed so we’re more returning home than coming onto some new land, but that is a much bigger (longer) (or perhaps shorter) thing to say and still it requires we work so let’s get to one small part of it.]
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It wasn’t much longer after that I heard Eugene Peterson half-joking that Christians shd not have Bible Study groups but rather Bible Do groups, spending about 10 minutes reviewing a passage and the rest of the scheduled time wd begin when they said, ‘Right, OK, then — let’s go do it.’
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More recently, come to realize things don’t just fit but are fearfully and wonderfully made; in this case a thing we’re more aware of being asserted for non-things like people but which like things and non- and noticing, also applies to everything.
Best stuff we make is, worst stuff isn’t, and most know it when we see it and when we don’t.
God made it, it’s the former, even sorrow and yak snot, though p’raps yaks make the latter.
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So as with scripture, which — turns out, who knew, blah blah — is as pulsing, powerful, and perfect as his bicep, as exquisite, intricate, and delicate as the way her smile curls up on one side, that edge, in the corner, just one, and you’d do anything with the bicep to get that smile.
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Which is really what all this is all about any ol’ways.
Image:
My visual, mostly from Peter Kreeft’s
Three Philosophies of Life, Ignatius 1989