From Mud to Mystery - Part 2
In the
beginning, God made us in Their image – male and female, They made us. The how
of it involved dust being formed and then the breath of God’s own
life was breathed into the human form. “Then the LORD God formed man of dust
from the ground [earth] and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;
and man became a living being [soul].” (Gen 2:7 NASB) For dust of the
ground/earth to be formed into anything, there must be water, or some such
liquid, added. This material we know most commonly as clay. Hold
that thought.
In the first
part of this post, I skimmed from the creating of humans out of dust, over the meaning
of the “Fall,” and on to the salvation and undoing of the “Fall” through the
death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. We landed on the mystery of Christ in
us, the hope of glory. Our title is From Mud to Mystery, so let’s
dig down (as it were!) into what the significance of “dust” is, the transition
to clay, and the marvellous mystery of how God reconciled us to Themselves in
Christ, and now dwells in us in a new way, offering us the ability to be
transformed “from glory to glory,” until we all attain the fulness of the
stature of Christ!
I am not “house-proud”
in the way some people are, but while I don’t fastidiously wipe every surface
after use, or exercise my tendency towards OCD behaviour and align every object
obsessively, I do like tidiness and cleanliness in general. My house is very
small: one bedroom, one shower room/toilet, one kitchen/diner/living room. And
I have a lot of clothes and books! Somehow, I must manage that space
efficiently, or it would quickly be a dump of place to live in.
Dust, though!
I do try to
keep the surfaces in my house wiped and dusted fairly regularly, if only
because I like the shininess! On darker days, I reflect on the accumulation of
dust as physical evidence of my changing physical self! There is a popular myth
that dust is made up from our shed skin. An article in Live Science
corrects that assumption: “There's a myth that house dust is mostly human
skin, but luckily, it's only a little bit true. Skin cells are part
of the makeup of house dust, but there are a lot of other components in that
layer on top of your ceiling fan blades. These include paint, fibers, mold,
hair, building materials, pollen, bacteria, viruses, insect body parts, flakes
of skin, ash, soot, minerals and bits of soil…”
Nevertheless,
the idea that the matt grey powder on all my shelves, tables and assorted
objects contains even a small percentage of my skin is disconcerting.
As part of
my daily prayer practice, I use three Psalms: 103, 51 and 139 in that order. Some
relationship trauma, and bad church experiences, have formed a deep distrust of
my own thoughts and words, making me suspicious of my extemporary prayers. I am,
therefore, grateful to be rediscovering the liturgical tradition of both
Judaism and the Anglican church, and that it is not considered “cheating,” or
simply mindless rote-praying, to use the written prayers of my brothers and
sisters, either in our time or from the very distant past. What it subsequently
has allowed me (allowing myself, that is) to do is then talk to Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit about things that matter to me, inspired by the lines in the
Psalms. We’ll see an example, shortly.
Psalm 103:13
-14 tells us, “Just as a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has
compassion on those who revere Him. For He Himself knows of what we are made;
He is mindful that we are dust.” There is something reassuring in this - as
well as humbling - as we are put into perspective! The dust, though, was
fashioned with liquid to make clay and the resultant material became the human
frame. Job, perhaps sarcastically, chides God, saying: “Your hands fashioned
and made me altogether, and would You destroy me? Remember now, that You have
made me as clay; And would You turn me into dust again?”
(Job 10:8-9, NASB)
Paul takes up
the theme, echoing Isaiah: “On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers
back to God? The thing moulded will not say to the moulder, ‘Why did you make
me like this?’ will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay,
to make from the same lump one vessel for honourable use and another for
dishonourable?” (Rom.9:20-21. See also Isaiah 29:16; 45:9; and 64:8
- But now, O LORD, You are our Father, we are the clay, and You
our potter; And all of us are the work of Your hand.)
In his second
(or maybe third?) letter to the church in Corinth, Paul weaves the themes of
clay, pottery, earthiness and the indwelling presence of God in us all,
when he writes: “For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the
One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory
of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels,
so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from
ourselves…” (2 Cor. 4:6-7. NASB)
Doesn’t that
put us in such a wonderful place! In all our clay-ness, all our earthiness, our
flesh-and-blood-ness, God has chosen to make Their home in us through the
victory over sin and death and consequent reconciliation that comes in Christ
Jesus.
Psalm 139 is
such distilled wisdom and deep, deep perception, so that when it says, for
example, in verse 6, “such knowledge is too wonderful [marvellous, awesome,
mind-blowing] for me; It is too high [way over my head] I cannot
attain to [grasp, get my head around] it,” just to think about some of
the issues presented in this Psalm is to be left open-mouthed with amazement
and gratitude.
“My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
Skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth;
Your eyes have seen my unformed substance;
And in your book were all written
The days that were ordained for me,
When as yet there was not one of them.” (vv15,16)
That takes
me all the way back to, “In the beginning…”! My personal meditation of this stanza
shows me that I was in the Father’s mind’s eye as the Holy Spirit hovered over
the void; then He formed me/us out of the dust, and, because we are outside of
our physical timeline here, Jesus, the Lamb of God, is slain before the foundation
of the world, who then, rising in resurrection power, drags me, and all creation
“up” with Him. That inspires me to dare to voice my own thoughts,
confidant in Their grace and love and mercy!
Maybe, God
willing, I will write some thoughts on praying from the Psalms later.
Dust. Clay. Divine Breath.
Living soul-being. Godman.
Christ in us. Church-Bride.
Mystery, Mystery,
Mystery.
"Say I am You
I am dust particles in sunlight.
I am the round sun.
To the bits of dust I say, Stay,
To the sun, Keep moving,
I am morning mist, and the breathing evening.
I am wind in the top of a grove, and surf on the cliff.
Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.
I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.
The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark of a stone, a flickering metal.
Both candle and the moth crazy around it.
Rose, and the nightingale lost in the fragrance.
I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,
and the falling away. What is, and what isn't.
You who know Jelaluddin, You the one in all,
say who I am. Say I am You."
- Rumi -
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