13 Oct He is telling us who He is
This experience was introducing my mother to the language of correspondences, the language God speaks. Her circumstances, each arranged in its own order, began to speak to her—as each of the elements took its place, the known explaining the unknown.
Gripping the rail of the boat, my mother knelt only inches from the buoy, rolling with it in the giant swells sweeping in from the open ocean. Tears streamed down her face in response to its persisting haunting clang. She felt safe, found. It was a moment of epiphany when she suddenly saw the correspondences. The bell buoy—it corresponded to The One using it to call her to Himself. The dense fog—it corresponded to her oblivion, which cut her off, giving her a distinct awareness of how ultimately alone, lost and vulnerable she was without bearings. The bell sounding across the water and through the fog—it corresponded to the deep signal sounding in her now, the transmission sent. Its placement in the channel—symbolized the prior intent that it should serve exactly the purpose it was fulfilling now. My mother was overwhelmed with the sense that all of this had been initiated for her to find.
Looking hard at the buoy’s bold black “22” my mother was struck by the collusion of inner thoughts and external events.
The seen was playing back to her
the unseen of her own hidden thoughts.
My mother realized that her thoughts lay open to The Only One who could be observing them. As she deciphered the language of correspondences, she understood deeply and personally that He not only knew her thoughts, but He wanted her to know that He knew them. She was not an inferior inhabitant of the landscape to be brushed aside or ignored out of contempt. He was telling her that He not only knew where she was, but He also cared.
* * *
Dragged pretty much against his will to see Jesus, Nathanael was filled with skepticism that there would be anything special about the young rabbi from Nazareth. Jesus greeted him with astute observation, wryly calling him an Israelite, “in whom there is no deceit!”
Nathanael, unmoved, silently wondered how this stranger so quickly sized him. Challenging Jesus back, he half taunted, “How do you know me?”
Jesus answered, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” Jesus plays back to Nathanael his own hidden thoughts, from a hidden moment only God could know.
As the revelation breaks in him, Nathanael cannot help himself… it makes no sense, but he exultantly cries, “You are the Son of God!” (John 1:46-51)
* * *
Lord, I am determined to be tough-minded, not giving in to fairy tales or fantasy. But neither do I want to miss the wild delicious wonder that explodes in my being, each time I find You, beyond the shoreline where my reason alone cannot take me.
Open my eyes to those correspondences that drench the moment where our two minds meet.
Having been at this for so long, my heart goes out to those who are just beginning, for whom this sounds part madness, who ache to be included, but have not yet had their doubt answered, who can go no further until they hear personally and deeply that You know where they are, and You care. Play back to them their own hidden thoughts, so they recognize You. Help them decipher the language You speak. Sound across the water to them, so that their oblivion, no matter how dense and pressing, cannot dim the signal. Encompass each one in Yourself, wrapping them in what streams from beyond the galaxies. Take what I have written and breathe white fire into their understanding. Animate that in them, which alone can respond to You.
Prepare for Yourself a people who understand what You are saying to them.