Hidden

Dear Eugene,

What is there to speak when the truth chooses to remain elusive, anonymous, silent?  What is a preacher to preach when God chooses to not show up?  Can He?  Of course, don't you think?

"Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known," thus says the Lord who created heaven and earth.

But what if the problem is not His?  That we think we are calling on the name of the One True Lord but we aren't?  What if we were just seduced and deceived by the "sweet poison of the false infinite," as C. S. Lewis puts it, and thought we were tasting the real thing?

What if God doesn't show up because He wants us to wait?  What if the moment He asks for our waiting happens right in the middle of a sermon, at a tight or even dangerous cross-section where we would rather get out of asap?

It's been a year since Leonard Cohen passed away.  (I am still surprised you've made no mention of him in any of your writing.  But then you also didn't know about U2 until your students told you about their great admiration of your work...)  Since then not a day goes by without a fragment of him finding a new home in me and my urge to set it free.  This sounds like poetry but I am telling it literal.

Yesterday I was again watching his 20-city European concert tour started on March 18, 1972, precisely three years before there was me.  On the last night of the tour, in Jerusalem, he walked off the stage and insisted to send the audience home with a refund.  He said he wasn't "there," the truths in the songs were not coming through, and he could not persist in "cheating" people.

"It says in the Kabbalah...Unless Adam and Eve face each other, God does not sit on his throne. Somehow, the male and female parts of me refuse to encounter one another tonight, and God does not sit on his throne. This is a terrible thing to happen in Jerusalem."

I was in tears when he said that.  Of course I was already in tears a few times before this final revelation.  And I thought, When was the last time I witnessed such nakedness coming down from a pulpit, coming out between a truth-seeker's lips, bleeding out of a human heart?

 

Your letters, they all say that you're beside me now
Then why do I feel alone?
I'm standing on a ledge and your fine spider web
Is fastening my ankle to a stone

Yours,  Alex

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