Dappled Things

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on The Last Sunday After the Epiphany by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

The human mind is very well-practiced at dividing things up into pairs of opposites: clean and unclean, rich and poor, insider and outsider, friend and enemy, winners and losers, self and other. Jesus’ birth, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension induct us into a new way of seeing and being in the world where those kinds of divisions fall away and we see things just as they are without our usual habit of imposing conceptual overlays. 

Paul’s metaphor of the body of Christ–where we are members of one another in a mutually-supportive, non-competitive and interdependent relationship–is a pointer not towards some idealized, future state of things, but to an ever-present reality, here and now. Moses’ turning away from the beaten path to take off his shoes at the burning bush where he perceives the always and everywhere I Amness of all things in God and God in all things, is not some “peak experience” reserved for a spiritual elite, but the normal state of affairs for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Moses, after all, was a tongue-tied murderer filled with self doubt–hardly someone with the Holy Bona Fides one would expect.

The Feast of the Transfiguration takes place at the exact midpoint of Mark’s gospel, and some commentators read it as supplying a kind of spiritual sustenance for the disciples as they follow Jesus to and through the cross. In this way of figuring the Transfiguration, it stands out as a mountain top experience far removed from the bland, hum drum banalities of daily life. And, certainly, there are aspects of the story that reinforce this picture of specialness. Jesus, James, Peter, and John go apart. Jesus leads them up the mountain. They leave behind the workings of the plain and see Jesus in all his glory–bracketed by Elijah on one side and Moses on the other shining with an otherworldly brilliance.

But the trouble with this picture is that it tends to chop our life up into good bits and bad bits, holy bits and profane bits, pristine mountain tops and grubby plains, bits we like and try desperately to hold on to and bits we dislike that we try to ignore, or distract our way through. The trouble with mountaintop experiences is that they tend to be preserved like holy flies in amber and turned into a possession to be visited in memory only. We return like a moth to a flame to our remembered idea of the experience–while the daily transfigurations of our grace-soaked and God-saturated ordinary life skate past unnoticed. We tent them up, like Peter, in a misguided attempt to possess and control the uncontrollable wideness, wildness, and utter ordinariness of God’s presence in our lives.

We end up with what I call the “Sunday Morning Syndrome”--a life where holiness and the sacred is reserved for 90 minutes on a Sunday and the rest of our life lived as a footnote to the Great Amen we pronounce at the end of the Eucharistic prayer. The whole purpose of the Eucharist, of course, is to help us to live Eucharistically. Yes, we affirm the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but only there, I wonder? Rabbi Abraham Heschel–friend and fellow worker with Dr. Martin Luther King in the Civil Rights Movement–writes in his book Man is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion:

The ineffable inhabits the magnificent and the common, the grandiose and the tiny facts of reality alike. Some people sense this quality at distant intervals in extraordinary events; others sense it in ordinary events, in every fold, in every nook; day after day, hour after hour. To them things are bereft of triteness; to them being does not mate with nonsense. They hear the stillness that crowds the world in spite of our noise, in spite of our greed. Slight and simple as things may be–a piece of paper, a morsel of bread, a word, a sigh–they hide and guard a never-ending secret...

Christ’s presence in every fold, every nook. Nothing trite. The blazing I Amness of every moment shining forth when what Heschel calls “nonsense”--our thoughts, judgments, requirements and demands about how things should be–is noticed for what it is. Just thoughts. Clanging cymbals compared to the symphony of love that erupts and envelops us right here and right now.

Heschel tells us, in good, practical, rabbinical fashion how to “practice” this way of coming prodigally to ourselves (“Sleeper Awake!”) when he continues–

Part company with preconceived notions, suppress your leaning to reiterate and to know in advance of your seeing, try to see the world for the first time with eyes not dimmed by memory or volition, and you will detect that you and the things that surround you–trees, birds, chairs–are like parallel lines that run close and never meet. Your pretense of being acquainted with the world is quickly abandoned.

Leaving behind preconceived notions (or letting them be overshadowed if you like in the imagery of the transfiguration), releasing the habit of knowing in advance what we’re looking at, refreshing our capacity to see as if for the first time (like a little child as Jesus counsels) we see things–ordinary, everyday things like birds, trees, chairs–as they are: infinite. A cigarette butt mashed into a sidewalk crack, a skittish squirrel with half a tail, a snowflake that can't decide whether it’s drifting up or down–each of them icons–windows opening to the inconceivable immensity of God.

Transfiguration, then, not as something special that happened to Jesus 2000 years ago in some far away land, but a way of seeing and being into which we are invited even here and even now, when we learn to just see. Behold, the lilies of the field. No really, behold the lilies of the field. Or the sidewalk maple stippled with cinnamon buds. Or the face of a stranger. Or the face of a loved one nearing death whose eyes flutter open and hold us suddenly clear. When we behold, the veil of preconceptions is lifted, torn asunder from top to bottom, and we see things as they are beyond thoughts of pure and impure, like and dislike, sacred and profane. What shall I call it? Surely, surely God is in this place and I did not know it.

More often than not, it’s the poets who point the way for us. They practice the way of attentive, unburdened seeing, of delighting in what is for its own sake. A way of seeing that is, like the disciples asleep and awake at the same time. Asleep to our habitual, mechanical  way of navigating and awake to the presence. Poets notice what’s “Close to the nose” as William Carlos Williams says and come to see that the God for whom we’ve been seeking has been here all along. Closer than close. Near than near. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over plopped right in our blessedly oblivious  laps. You might remember Gerard Manly Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty” which passionately exhorts us to open, receive, perceive God not just on the mountain top, in the whiter-than-whiteness of the so-called sacred, but right in the midst of everything that’s dappled, brindled, blemished, a little off-kilter, and downright wonky. Right, in other words, in the very midst of what we experience in our daily life:

Glory be to God for dappled things – 

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 

                             Praise him.

Strangely, it’s when we resist the Boy Scout temptation to “be prepared,” and pack up our tents, set down our heavy packs of preconceptions, and let ourselves arrive naked, poor, and without agenda, He does indeed father-forth in the most unexpected of places. And from that fathering-forth we serve as a fed and sent people, poured out of this place as the one who pours Himself out for all. The mountain-top shining forth in the midst of the market place and each of us (as ordinary, brindled, freckled, spare, and strange as we indeed are) as God’s very hands, feet, eyes, and voice for whomever we meet–those children of God right outside these doors daily mauled and daily seized by the demons of hunger, poverty, racial injustice and oppression. We look. We see. We become what we behold, and give it all away to this dappled, couple-colored world.