I am drinking coffee, eating cereal, reading Worship Arts—an article that calls the parables “upside down world.”
(So much to record—so much in so few minutes!)
I consider what the woman preacher-author says about the Parable of the Sower, looking not at the kinds of soil but at the farmer, whose liberal (some might say “careless” or “wanton”) dissemination connotes, for her, largesse and an openness to possibility.
(She speaks of brainstorming in that connection: when “all things are considered possible.” All things . . . possible.)
Then, I read in The Sun a story that, parable-like, also upends expectation. The reader-writer describes stealing potatoes in Germany during WWII—when her family was hungry, when she was a child—and again at a reunion years later—for fun and nostalgia when they were not hungry and she no longer a child. Having remembered the taste of fire-roasted stolen tubers, she and her family re-enact the thefts, for the joy! for the possibility! for the taste!
I am weeping as insight floods me: the potatoes do not belong to the farmer. The joy of these thieves—one a preacher—eating their potatoes and reminiscing about a time when need drove them—completely surpasses the value of the potatoes themselves. Joy and community redeem the trespass.
This is transcendence.
(THIS is a MasterCard commercial!)
Flooded with the tears of amazement, I look up to see Jesus, MY Jesus—a small, brightly painted Mexican crucifix on the front door. He is transformed through devastation, transcending death by filling with All that is. Above his head, a dove—sky and spirit. His arms, so painful in death, now stretch wide in welcome, palms uplifted. His robe, bright yellow, displays and contains the universe He embraces: the sun, a great orange flower, opens at his heart. Two humans, male and female, stand beneath, then white homes like migrant cabins below them in the skirt. And then, the vegetal world: a tree and plants just above the soil into which he has deeply planted his bare, pristinely white feet:
Jesus is All the World to me
THIS Jesus, who literally descends, who binds together, sanctifying transgression to the Glory of God, subsuming worldly good and evil in a bounty of blessing overwhelming to our meager human hearts.
