Grasping at Thy Mind

Grasping at Thy Mind

As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?

(Psalm 42:1-2)

Full reading: Psalm 42:1-2; John 6:48-51

‘Tis here we look up and grasp at thy mind, ‘tis here that we hope thine image to find;

the means of bestowing thy gifts we embrace; but all things are owing to Jesus’ grace.

(“Because Thou Hast Said” – a hymn written by Charles Wesley, 1748)

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, July 1, 2007

Volume 2, Number 2

First United Methodist Church, 605 West Sixth, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

We begin today where we ended our last sanctuary Holy Communion service, the Wedding Gown concluding my sermon series, Try THIS on For Size! Having examined different articles of clothing worn in the bible, we ended with the vision of Revelation 19 in which the church is adorned in the Wedding Gown, at long last united with Christ. I ended that sermon by explaining a very ancient Christian symbol, the mandorla, the almond shaped area formed by two overlapping circles (mandorla being the Italian word for almond). Supposing the two circles to represent any opposites, the overlap – the almond -- becomes Something Other, a Third that both merges and transcends the pair of opposites.

If that’s confusing, let me offer an example. Suppose the two circles to represent God and humankind. Who, then, is able to occupy the mandorla, both divine and human? This persone would be the bridge, the threshold, the gateway for the divine to partake of the human nature and the human to partake of the divine nature. Jesus is, of course, that God/man, that Transcendent Third. In Christian symbol, Christ alone sits in the mandorla.

Last month I stood behind the altar and traced out two intersecting circles – one spanning from heaven to earth (the divine) and the other reaching up from earth to heaven (the human). The overlap, the mandorla, is right in front of us, on the altar. The altar becomes the intersection, the threshold between the Immortal and the mortal, suspended, as it were, between heaven and earth. Here, in these elements of bread and wine, we experience, and become, Something Other.

Speaking of becoming Something Other, the 1985 film LadyHawke is a magical story immersed in Christian imagery, a story based on a 13^th century European legend of two lovers and their suffering, Captain Navarre and Lady Isabeau. These lovers suffer, cursed by an evil bishop who, in his jealous rage for Isabeau, uses black magic to make certain that if he can’t have Isabeau, they will never have each other. Navarre and Isabeau are cursed to eternal Apart-ness. How does he accomplish this? They become Something Other. Captain Navarre becomes a wolf by night and Isabeau becomes a hawk by day. Both live half-lives, but opposite halves, so that they are never able to behold each other’s face. At dawn, as Navarre is transfiguring into his human form, Isabeau is becoming a hawk -- a cycle endlessly repeated at dawn and dusk of each day.

Ah, but in those twin moments of dawn and dusk there is the tantalizing taste of sheer ecstasy, an enchanted moment when the two lovers glimpse each other while on their journey to Something Other. One of my favorite scenes in the movie is quite extraordinary -- it is dawn, the sun rising above the hills on the horizon, and the camera moves back and forth between the wolf as it morphs into Captain Navarre, and beautiful Isabeau as she transfigures into the hawk. Yet, for a split second which the camera slows for us, both of the lovers, in that twilight moment, are in human form. Beholding each other’s face, they re-discover their love.

In that moment it is as if they step outside the flow of time, their sense of one another becoming alive. Isabeau, just before she becomes a hawk, holds her hand up and the first rays of dawn rush from behind her, streaming through her fingers. It is as if she is trying, however futile the task, to grasp the flow of time, to make it stand still at that glimmering, cherished moment of union. She is grasping, not merely for time, but for Navarre. And just as their fingers, shimmering with dawn’s pristine light, are about to touch, the inexorable flow of time moves them past this moment of shining, and their lives of sorrow, bearing heavy this curse of Apart-ness, continue. As the hawk flies away, Navarre lunges, reaching for the Isabeau whom he loves, the one whose image is now hidden in Something Other, LadyHawke.

I must tell you about one other moving scene, when, at dusk, the boy nicknamed Mouse (who had befriended Captain Navarre and his hawk, sees, for the first time, the woman. He asks, “Are you flesh? Or are you spirit?” Here we have the two circles, a pair of opposites. What is she? Which circle does she occupy? She replies, “I am sorrow.”

She lives, you see, inside the mandorla, which is necessarily a place of tension, of sorrow. I said earlier that Jesus is the God/man, the divine/human connection. Can it not, then, also be said of Jesus? Of course. Did Isaiah not tell us of this Suffering Savior, “He is a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom others hide their faces, he was despised . . . surely he has borne our infirmities and carries our diseases, yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, upon him was the punishment that made us whole.”

Yes, had the disciples asked Jesus, “Are you flesh? Or are you spirit?” he could have replied, “I am sorrow.” Suffering is the human condition, and God chose to take upon himself the form of a human, to join our suffering. Through suffering, we learn to behold the face of God, who suffered for us in order to behold our face. In this union of suffering, we discover, inexplicably, joy. Interesting that the chalice of wine on this table represents both – Wine as Joy, but the wine symbolizing blood also signals suffering. Joy is the Something Other within suffering.

My title is “Grasping at Thy Mind,” words inspired by Charles Wesley in a hymn he wrote about the sacrament of Holy Communion:

‘tis here we look up and grasp at thy mind,

‘tis here that we hope, thine image to find,

Reading those words, I thought of Navarre lunging, grasping with intense desire to find the image of Isabeau hidden within Something Other. Are we not, in the experience of Holy Communion, possessed with a desire to discover the Christ within the Something Other? In this sacred moment, in this sacrament, we step outside the flow of time and seek to discover the very face of God. “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?”

Sometimes such sacred moments come upon us inexplicably – reading, meditating, driving, walking, listening to music. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, we sense Peace and Joy, a unique sense of the Presence of God washes over us. It seems the function of ritual to prepare our minds and hearts for such sacred moments, to seek them and ready ourselves to receive them as Means of Grace. Whether planned or spontaneous, our lives are enriched by such sacred moments of recognized Presence, the Presence of Something Other, as there washes over us a deep peace and inner stillness, a shimmering Presence surpassing our own. Like Isabeau, our reflex is to catch the flow of time in our fingers, to grasp it and hold it as it rushes by.

But we cannot. And the poet within us knows that such glimpses of the divine are always exactly enough and never enough. Like the manna in the wilderness, it is enough for one day, but never enough for two. And so it is that this place of Holy Communion is always exactly enough but never enough, casting our eyes to that vision of Revelation 19, when the church at last is united with her Christ.

Grasping at Thy Mind

Because thou hast said, “Do this for my sake,”

the mystical bread we gladly partake;

we thirst for the Spirit that flows from above,

and long to inherit thy fulness of love.

‘Tis here we look up and grasp at thy mind,

‘tis here that we hope thine image to find;

the means of bestowing thy gifts we embrace;

but all things are owing to Jesus’ grace.

(“Because Thou Hast Said,” Charles Wesley, 1748)