An Adequate Blessing

"...."Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer."

"Every way I've tried to express this through the years sounds lunatic," says Reynolds Price's character Roxanne Slade, "so I've told nobody but I'll try again here. What I slowly felt sitting there [on the bank of the river]...was a wide sense of privilege. Wide and tall with no roof on it and no side walls. When I asked my mind to name the privilege--what was I being given?--the answer that came was something as plain as Being alive here now this moment. When that seemed common and insufficient, I asked again and then understood that Life, in the world I occupy, is an adequate blessing--whatever pain may bear down on me from the skies or elsewhere." Life, in he world I occupy, is an adequate blessing. The pain which did bear down on Roxanne Slade, page after page, was unrelenting: a first love drowned that very afternoon in the river on whose bank she now sat in gratitude...a husband unfaithful from the beginning...a family beset with illness and addiction...her own paralyzing depression.

Nevertheless, she will conclude in retrospect as she did in prospect, that life is an adequate blessing. Which leads me to ask you this morning as, over what is left of this season, you will sit on the bank of a river or the edge of an ocean...as you may sit on the side of a mountain or the stern of a sailboat...as you sit in the midst of a forest or in the back of your familiar yard, will you be one given grace enough to name the privilege...to understand that life, in the world you occupy, is an adequate blessing? Or will you, by way of complaint, miss the gift, something as plain as "being alive here now this moment?"

The biblical experience I want to reintroduce into our summer days is the experience of blessing. When the Hebrew people asked their minds to name the wide sense of privilege which had chosen them and accompanied them, upheld them and governed them, the name of this reality was the blessing of Yahweh.

On the surface, blessing to the post-modern eye could be construed as luck or good fortune. Those blessed by Yahweh were those who had power and wealth, good looks and success...on the surface. But beneath the surface of these ancient characters' blessed lives, we uncover stories of tragedy and brokenness, of disappointment and astounding grief, of pain bearing down from the skies. Think of David who, on one hand was King of Israel, mighty in battle, powerful over all who opposed him, yet David who led with lust and lost the infant son born of desire, whose grown son turned traitorous and thus was slain by the king's men, leaving his father only to cry "Absalom, Absalom my son, my son," in grief too great to bear. Nevertheless, David rose again in strength, such that there was no more blessed character in all of scripture than this shepherd boy become king.

What, then, is this thing called blessing, if it is more than meets the eye, and what has it to do with the world we occupy? In the first place and according to the biblical witness, to be blessed is to be a person with whom God abides. In fact, when the Bible says of a person, "God is with him...God is with her," it is the same as saying that one has been blessed. The catch, of course, is that God's presence guarantees very little in life, save --no matter the pain that bears down on you--God will be with you...you will be accompanied by One who will not let you go.

To wit, Reynolds Price, writing in another book about his own desperate illness, speaks of a "reliable presence": I'd lie alone in my bed in the dark and sense the presence, just to the right in my mind's eye, of a patient listener behind a screen....I never asked myself who it was, from the gallery of possible hearers....It never spoke a sound but only heard me out as I worked at discovering my minimal needs and feasible hopes. I never asked it, point-bland, for answers....Its reliable presence seemed only to say that I had somehow to build my life on radical uncertainty, knowing only that I was heard by something more than the loyal but powerless humans near me."

To be blessed is to be one who is aware, here now this moment, no matter the circumstances, that a reliable presence listens, that you are heard by One who is more than the powerless human beings near you. I am sure God's reliable presence is available to any who would turn thus, in a bed of pain or a field of dreams (Come unto me all ye who are weary), and speak both the woes and life's wonderment to this One who hears. But how often we do not turn and believe ourselves not blessed but cursed by God...how often we rail against the slights of any given circumstance rather than rejoice in the meanest of situations because God is there too! Life, in the first place, is an adequate blessing because God is with you, listens, will not abandon you, even and especially in the midst of whatever pain bears down upon you. There is not a one of us here who is not thus blessed, only those with backs turned and up against the God who accompanies you here now in this moment. But there is more. For in the second place, to be blessed is to prosper, says that Bible. We, of course, presume prosperity's root, and much of the Old Testament confirms such a direct correlation between blessing and prosperity, riches, success. There is, however, a theological nuance to such prospering which turns more on the notion that one who prospers is one who is living the life given that one to live: "the carrying out," says Johannes Pedersen, "of that for which one is disposed."

So again, if we push beyond mere appearances, and turn to the most obvious of New Testament takes on blessing, we begin to suspect, by way of the beatitudes, that one is blessed by being the person one was created to be, spending one's unique self on the world one occupies, living--moment by moment--in response to the God who not only accompanies you, but directs you, calls you to be the person you must be. In other words, the meek are not blessed when they finally stand up and assert themselves, but the promise to the meek is, in being meek--in carrying out that for which they are disposed by the God who created them--they shall prosper ...shall inherit the earth. So also for the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers.

To be sure, the world we occupy would drive us, for the sake of prosperity or success or acclaim, to be what we are not in order to be tangibly blessed. But God's blessing comes rather in the form of, I would say, an inner strength of character, a perseverance nevertheless, a gratitude under fire, a purposefulness that no amount of failure can foil. "Fit as I'd always been to be pleased by the smallest good luck, the briefest meeting or an unblemished leaf that fell to my lap from any tree," says Roxanne Slade, "something at the heart of my seeing..., breathing the air of a perfect day, seemed to show me the point of my life hereafter. I would be a person who worked at proving, to however few doubters through the hardest of times or easy days, that the actual world is worth all your strength. Never hold back a cent of all you own and bear inside you, spend it all, die empty-handed." This is how the blessed prosper!

Then finally, though not exhaustively, to be blessed is to be a person, according to the biblical witness, of wisdom, of understanding, of insight. The understanding of which the Bible speaks, from a human perspective, is not so much an understanding as to the how, and especially not an understanding as to the why, but simply an understanding that God has things in hand...that, no matter what, God's creatures may live in a large trust--wide and tall with no roof on it or side walls...that, inspite of the pain which bears down, God is finally in charge here. In other words, to be thus blessed is to trust that the God who accompanies and the God who directs is also the God who governs the world we occupy.

"Mostly," writes Price of such understanding in the face of unbearable pain, "I listened to the high baroque orchestral masters. I'd spent my college and graduate career immersed in English baroque poetry, and I'd studied baroque sculpture and architecture on numerous visits to Rome; so the intricate complexities of the age, twining as they did round one central cause--the praise of God and his creation--had plainly met an old need in me to confirm the order which I'd always trusted was present behind confusion and chaos."

To be blessed is to understand, at the center of your existence, that God is sovereign over all creation, that God's grace is always greater than any given sin, that God has a purpose far finer than all the pettiness which daily would do you in, that God's promises finally will not be denied. To live with such a grand understanding of life's essential reason, in the midst of life's daily brokenness and pain bearing down, is to be greatly blessed. For thus is one's little life placed in the context of a great and gracious governor whom alone we may fear and love.

We have known those who are thus blessed, you and I. We say of them that they possess a calm in the midst of the fray, a strength despite the ravages of disease, a courage in the face of every mean threat. But we must say more. For if we ask our minds one final time to name the privilege by which we know we are accompanied and directed, are upheld and governed, the name is Jesus Christ. To follow him is to find, whatever pain may bear down from the skies, that we are not alone but accompanied. To love him is to discover the person we were created to be and so, by grace, to be no other here now in the moment, spending it all, dying empty-handed. To know him is to understand our lives ordered by a gracious governor whose redemptive purposes will triumph in the face of our every confusion and chaos. This is God's providence toward us in Jesus Christ, say the theologians. This is God's blessing, says the Bible: wide and tall with no roof on it and no side walls.

"With all the pain and waste I've known in my own life and the lives that touched mine," concludes Roxanne Slade toward the end of her ninety some years, "--not to mention the horrors of this whole century, one slow bloodbath--I've never been able to shake that knowledge that came with my childhood....However hard I've slashed away in my bad times at what I knew, I haven't succeeded in felling the trust of that certainty that came into the world with me....If I lie in my own bed in the dark and look straight up at nothing at all beyond the ceiling, I can almost always start to feel again that calm first fact from my childhood. And then the whole great hoop of whatever is, gorgeous or dreadful as it may be, starts turning in the night sky above me bearing everything that has ever been or is....Once I've glimpsed that for the length of one more night anyhow, I can tell myself that the only axle which matters is turning with all its weight of trees and waterfalls, plagues and fire storms, souls in torment and me in some surviving shape no doubt huddled out toward its rim holding nothing in hand but my strong memories and the hope to keep breathing as long as I know my family's names and can smile when they touch me. The hoop itself may never fail. If I'm dead wrong them I'm no more than dead. And by the time I'm numb and cooling,...I'll likely be tired enough for sleep, though if what's called for us music and dance, I estimate I'll be prepared, if only to hum and sway in place." "Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer." Held fast in the love of Jesus Christ, our lives are surely an adequate blessing. Amen.

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