H,
Psalm 16:5
 “All which I took from thee I did but take,
  Not
for thy harms,
But
just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.
-Francis
Thompson “The Hound of Heaven”
It is hard to get the full
idea of God’s idea of love. How do we know what it means in any real way? It is
common to start this by mentioning all the suffering in the world and proselytizing that there is no sense in thinking up or of some sort of deity. Yet
when we say this what we really mean is that He or She has not been true to us.
It is not that God has let the world suffer, it is that He has let us suffer. It
is okay, I guess, to make the basis of our approach personal but private
emotions and private adventures cannot explain the nature of reality. What happens
to us is vital to how we perceive the high and low plains of life but it is not
conclusive proof for or against the presence of a benevolent or malevolent Spirit
governing the universe. Could it be that atheists and deists sometimes make the
same mistake? Do both groups perceive that if there was a being it will matter
much how we can sense such a thing or person and which of our senses we use?
 Anyway, I digress. I was trying to talk about
God and disappointment. The sort that the Israelites must have felt when they
crossed the red sea and saw the miracle of leaving their old oppressors only to
start a long trek in the desert. Is it our destiny to move from the miracle to
the mundane? The heights of the divine to the murk of the human? This seems to
be the constant struggle. The life after the defining event. The day to day up
against the moment of epiphany. It is that sense you get, if you are lucky
enough to ever have it, of climbing to the mountaintop and seeing things from
the perspective of the sublime. All troubles look smaller. This is until we
come back down and realise there is still the business of the thing before you
and it is not as small as it looked when you were flying above it.
Or let me put this another
way. The common problems of living make all of us common. We do not want to be.
We have been raised on the idea of exceptionalism and competition. Our enjoyment
is tied to the lack of others. Our winning is tied to the losing of someone
else. But we are not winning every hour and we are not enraptured by joy in
every minute. We have the downtimes where life comes to us exactly as it is: a
collection of Sisyphean acts that have no staying power.
This may seem bleak but this
is where Christianity speaks. This is the hunger that the Gospel answers. This is
the thing that puts joy in the mundane and wholeness in the ordinary. This is
the thing that tells you that the epiphany was pointing to larger things and
that the mountaintop was just a stop and not a plateau for the whole experience.
“Blessed are those who have not seen but still believe”, Christ said of those
who do not need to see evidence of things beyond evidence. He is trying to make
us the sort of Christians that are not for signs and wonders but for love, hope
and faith. He is trying to make us into eternal beings not moved by the
temporal ups and downs of life on this side. He is trying to show us that all
our inheritance, all our fullness of joy and all our truth of living is found
in His arms and there alone.