Despite another late night, I am awaken early today by a couple of sets of thoughts that perhaps I just need to get out of me and down on paper. The thoughts revolve around the proximity of relationships with members of my family and the magnitude of mass humanity represented last night in the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic games. As I roll out of bed in anticipation of another beautiful rise of the sun, my nose is full of a tingle coming from an expectedly cool August breeze and my heart is full of my humanity – a humanity that is so limited and one in which I am aware that I want so much more. So full of want and finitude that I feel crushed by the weight of my longings, my wonder, my fears, and the things I feel I must get done.
Oh, God, you and all that you have made are so beautiful and so much larger than all of my understandings…though I can’t sleep enough in the physical world, how can I rest in you?
As I watched the opening ceremonies last night with my family, I heard one of my kids mutter something to the effect that massive use of people in the production of the many scenes was creepy. One of the commentators used the word intimidating. I wonder about what appears to be the deep differences of our cultures. Ours, informed by the beauty we perceive in our own individuality and the Chinese, informed by the beauty of the masses of ‘people’ as one. As the drumbeat of 2008 performers in unison illuminated the stadium simulataneously with both sound and light, my mind couldn’t help but anticipate heaven. It seems true that something inside us all longs both for our participation in something much larger than ourselves and for our own rightful and right-sized place in it all – one of many drummers, so to speak. Each time I see masses of people doing something intentional in unison, I am deeply moved internally. The opening ceremonies did this to me; worship does this to me more. I want both to be a part of something like this, and I want to lay down the weights that I normally carry around with me as I try to do so many things myself. We all want to part of something, something bigger than ourselves, something good, something that is aimed at a kind of glory that attributes to God what is due him.
Even as I consider this magnitude that I want to be a part of, I also recognize that I live much of the time so far away from the 4 or 5 individuals who are right around me. We live in proximity to each other. We share intimacies from time to time. But often, we live as if our very own skin, the thing that symbolically we so long to have touched by another person, were a wall that separates us from each other, even as we lay or sit together closely. There is so much inside us that we long to have reached into, that we long to reach into, that we just can’t find a way to do. And, so, even in our closeness to each other physically, we often feel far away. Perhaps this is why something big, something involving the masses of people, something that becomes the object of our shared attention together is appealing to us – because we hope that it will bring us into something, into each other in ways we often have great difficulty doing in the ordinariness and simplicity of our daily lives. And perhaps this is the soil out of which faith grows.
After such an early awakening, the sun has now risen on another day, one again full again of anticipation of the great hope in each one of us that we might participate in the beauty of each other together and each other personally, whose weight is only lifted by the same love that lifts that sun each day.
Oh, God, you are so beautiful and, thankfully so much larger than all of my understandings…I can rest in the warmth of your day, today.
