This is what it was all about, then, wasn’t it: the Rev. Canon Bryan Green preaching persuasively and movingly about “a speck on a speck” and the speck was the planet earth and the speck was me. I find it so easy, from gazing at the stars before dawn, to glancing down at this artist’s image circling a tiny section of our Milky Way galaxy
to see perfectly clearly that we are out of our minds. Not J, who was not writing theology but poetic irony, someone said perhaps even a children’s bedtime tale, always entertaining, mischievous, sometimes capricious, at points frightening, even leave the light on scary. But P, especially P to trounce the mythologies of Babylon and the nature gods that those left behind picked up from their Canaanite and Palestinian friends and neighbors during the Exile. Nevermind and not to mention E and D, all merged and meshed into an alphabet guidebook for normative Judaism by R the Redactor and the rabbis. So I think P had it right with the Speaker, though speaking loud, louder, loudest beyond what P imagined; and then J, with the elohim delightedly spotting a livable place among the stars, having J’s eyeh coming to play in the mud and coincidentally getting things started and in love with us ever since. More than agápe, love that is a feeling after all, even storgē, he dotes on us: could I believe that of one who said to me in the night, “I AM speaking to you, Tom Weller.”
If I want it to be so, and if faith is deciding to accept the evidence of things not seen no matter how implausible, I reckon I can at least let that much light shine in to my darkness.
TW
The Reverend Canon Bryan Green (1901-1993) was a foremost British evangelist who preached to us at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Harrisburg the spring of 1980.
And with apologies to self for constant repetitive use of the Milky Way image, which I just can't seem to shake off and be shed of.
