Our December Hearts. Anne McConney

they became for me a small corner of freedom at a time when very little freedom seemed available. It was a time when I prayed for the right job, and then for a good job, and finally for any job at all, a time when worry became my work. In those days I explored what it is to be unfree, not by political tyranny or by act of another, but simply by the hard reality of the world.

      Eventually, of course, I found a job, though it was not one I wanted or would have chosen; it took me a long time to realize that it was a good job, and even longer to discover that it was, in God's wisdom, the right job, one that led me to places and thoughts I would never have known without it.

      All that is past, yet I remember the geese and the gulls, the ducks and the cantankerous swan: the wild creatures who were no longer wild.

      I remember them because I think we are so much like them. We too live our domestic lives, build our nests and raise our young. We walk the round of daily chores and receive our handouts, earned and unearned. And in the midst of it, by some uneasy whispering of the soul, we also know that we are wild and free, that our destiny lies beyond the park and the world and all the troublesome small exigencies of life.

      The soul is a wild goose, flying free in the sweet clean air.

      DECEMBER 5

      GAZING INTO THE MYSTERY

      Gaze too long into the abyss,” says Nietzsche, “and you will find that the abyss is also gazing into you.” The same might be said of the mystery of God, except that the mystery of God is not emptiness but a vast overflow of life, and what gazes back is a love too deep to comprehend.

      There are moments, rare and brief, when we may see this, when the largest thing that can ever happen to us may, as British writer and theologian C. S. Lewis notes, find space for itself in less time than a heartbeat. I remember a hot summer afternoon when I had decided to walk to the grocery store for a few forgotten items. It was the sort of day that folks in the plains states call a “weatherbreeder,” and it lived up to its reputation; in the half-hour I spent in the store, the sun went under, the clouds came up, and a stiff wind caught me as I came out the door. By the time I was halfway home, the tornado-warning sirens were whooping and bellowing.

      I was terrified, of course (one does well to fear a tornado, a tricksy, dangerous wind capable of bulldozing entire neighborhoods). I ran home—not far, but up a rather steep hill—and arrived on my back porch panting, heart thudding, shaking with alarm and exertion.

      A scientist or psychologist might perhaps say that it was my own stressed and edgy state that triggered the great calm that came then and enfolded me in warmth and comfort. I was suddenly aware of the universe around me, largest star to smallest atom, moving in a joyous and noble dance. And the universe was a living thing, enclosed within a great love that held it in being. I had come all unexpectedly into a place of perfect safety. The tornado might or might not kill me, but I knew with utter certainty that it would never remove me from the sheltering of that enormous love.

      Clearly the tornado did not kill me (nor anyone else that day) but the moment that was too short to measure marked me forever with the sigils of awe and knowledge. I have tried several times to seize that experience and bind it in words on paper, but I never succeeded—nor have I succeeded now.

      If I were to put a name to that surrounding love, I think it would be Logos, the eternal Word begotten of the eternal Dreamer, the Son by whom all things were made and dressed in their beauty. This is the mystery into which we will gaze for all eternity and never be tired. This is the life of the Godhead into which we have been linked by the incarnation of Christ.

      The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel has written that we always tend to think of mystery as something “out there,” something we reach for but can't quite grasp. Perhaps, he says, the mystery is too close for us to see; we cannot understand it because we are standing in the middle of it. We speak, for example, about the mystery of love; we don't understand love, we can't explain it, we don't know why it happens, yet every one of us has experienced it.

      So it is, I think, with God's love. We stand surrounded by mystery we cannot define or comprehend; it lies beyond us and within us; it whispers in our brains and sings in our blood. Perhaps the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us so that we might experience God's love in the same way we experience human love, so that the unimaginable might become for us real, solid and touchable.

      It remains, of course, no less a mystery; if it were small enough to comprehend (as has been said many times), it would be too small to be God. Mystery is not meant to baffle us; it is meant to delight us, to remind us that there will always be new explorations and new wisdoms and new adventures of the mind and spirit.

      We gaze into the mystery and the mystery gazes back with love.

      DECEMBER 6

      MAKERS AND SHAPERS AND TELLERS OF TALES

      God is the first and great mystery but the second—linked to it and like unto it—is the mystery of humankind. These strange and baffling creatures not only insist that they are indeed made in the image of God, but they then proceed to demonstrate that image over and over again.

      Wherever we find evidence of human habitation, we find not only human artifacts but artifacts made with care and beauty. A flint arrowhead is not only efficient—it carries the deadly elegance of a lethal thing. The cave paintings of southern France may have served some unknown ritual purpose, but they are also filled with intentional truth and exquisite grace. If God is the Creator—as all religions seem to agree—then human beings live into the image with passion and a certain fervent abandonment, as if some pressure of the spirit could be released in no other way.

      I recently read of a study that had rated 95 percent of preschool children but only 5 percent of college graduates as “highly creative.” At the time I was properly appalled; today, more pragmatically, I distrust the study itself. Perhaps the definitions were too limited, the criteria too strict; I see too much creativity exploding all around me to believe it is being produced by only a small percentage of the population.

      Enough people write to keep a small industry busy filling their needs. Not everyone can be a Shakespeare or a Dante, but some will be skilled enough to keep the bookstores overflowing.