God Is . . .. Wesley J. Wildman

For joy is premised on peril. One can dance amongst the brutal teeth of the dragon in ignorance, or with the wise awareness of how great the danger is. Only in the latter case will the anxiety of the dancing and singing give way to ecstatic joy, which is delight.

      We delight in God because God is Holy Mystery. We have no protection from the divine wildness, so we need have no inhibitions. There is no higher court of appeal with which we might attempt to tame the divine capriciousness, so we celebrate in our naked surrender. We are not obsessed with absurdly constructing ourselves like so many Lego blocks before the divine throne, so we are free to dance with the angels, those crazy unknown dancers whose innocence was never weighed down by the load of our existence.

      We can sing, too. We can sing out the clumsy words of our liturgies, the fractured concepts of our theologies, because we know how inadequate they are to the Holy Mystery they seek to express. Those who take their prayers too seriously, or the contents of their own belabored minds too literally, risk being turgid grumps in the presence of irrepressible divine joy. To be sure, we need to use our language about God with the utmost care, but the first step in being responsible is to recognize that we are negotiating with Holy Mystery, and that our ideas of God are but an unstable, makeshift lattice above a vast chasm. The recognition of the inadequacy of our theological language is the first step toward intellectual responsibility. Delight is one of the most serious emotions we creatures can experience, because it is premised on the true awareness of the pointlessness of resisting or cooperating or negotiating with the divine terror.

      And then to see this God, this Holy Mystery, come down from the lofty throne, to dance among us as a child, first alone as if unsure, and then holding hands and whooping up a joyful hullabaloo under the stars, dancing through our history, destroying and transforming. . . . To see this same one riding on a white horse, with eyes like blazing fire, dressed in a robe dipped in blood, armed with a sharp sword coming out of his mouth with which to strike down the nations. . . . To see this is wonder and awe, love and transforming power. We fear this one, even as we love, recoil in horror even as we are fascinated.

      We forget the divine Holy Mystery at our peril. Our broken world dances anxiously amongst the teeth of the dragon, its future unknown. Too often the church sings its dreary songs there, too, having forgotten that the divine is too expansive even for the gospel to capture, foolishly infatuated with the comforting assurance of salvation. To learn to dance with honest terror, with simple wisdom, with disarming delight—this is to live. And what is more important—and profoundly, joyously pointless—this is how we show our love to the Holy Mysterious One in whose terrifying, tender hand we are held.

      God Is . . . Friend

      Readings

      See, my servant shall prosper;

      he shall be exalted and lifted up,

      and shall be very high.

      Just as there were many who were astonished at him

      —so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance,

      and his form beyond that of mortals—

      so he shall startle many nations;

      kings shall shut their mouths because of him;

      for that which had not been told them they shall see,

      and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate.

      Who has believed what we have heard?

      And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?