Dripping with Holiness

August 10th, 2010 § 3

“Christ above me, Christ beneath me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.”
~ from St. Patrick’s Breastplate, 5th century

My head is still reeling from this past weekend’s conference hosted by artists who are Christians. I have a notebook full of scribbling and a full heart, too. My cup was running over. In fact, as my dear friend, L., said, it was like “drinking water from a fire hydrant.”

It got me to thinking… too many things to ever hash out here. But there is one theme that has been echoing through my mind for the last year. The beauty of it breaks my heart. And yet it’s so obvious: God is everywhere.

Most of us learned that in Sunday school when we were four, I know. But somewhere along the way, without even realizing it, we forget. We deny. Or we fail to see.

We are not living in a Godless age. There’s no such thing.

Church folks like me love to complain about the culture and the latest trash it deposits into print or TV or the movies. Surely, there is little offered that is noble, pure and good in its entirety. But what about all that good defeating evil? What about characters redeemed? What about the lump in the throat that comes from a lovely or poignant scene in a film?

What about the power of story? Jesus spoke in stories almost exclusively.

Story speaks to us and is sometimes saturated with that which is more real than any how-to manual or biography. Madeleine L’Engle writes in Walking on Water, “Is Jane Eyre not true?”

I can be moved to tears by words I stumble across in novels by George Eliot, who renounced her faith. A new friend ventured this weekend that sometimes it’s the artists who protest the most against God who unknowingly allow the truth to seep into their work, like a leak they can’t stop. If you look around, he said, “Everything is sort of dripping with holiness.”

Why would we want to miss that? Why do we blind ourselves behind a veil of self-righteousness or arrogance or folly, telling ourselves that only fellow believers can be vessels of God’s truth? Why would God limit himself that way?

L’Engle writes, “We would like God’s ways to be like our ways, his judgments to be like our judgments. It is hard for us to understand that he lavishly gives enormous talents to people we would consider unworthy, that he chooses his artists with as calm a disregard of surface moral qualifications as he chooses his saints.”

She says later, “To be truly Christian means to see Christ everywhere, to know him as all in all.”

Grace and wisdom and compassion can come in strange packages. I was reminded of this when I read to my youngest, for the four hundredth time, Are You My Mother? before her nap this afternoon. The Snort seems an unlikely hero, but he saves the day—and the baby bird. Is the Snort Aslan? Is everything an allegory? No, but, somehow, all stories are a retelling of the great story of our redemption.

So, God is everywhere, not just in the creation all around us we are so privileged to behold. He’s in the creators he created, and he picks and chooses through whom he’ll shine his light. Another great gift, there for the taking.

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