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Joining Heaven and Earth
I began my writing life as a medievalist when I came to Cornell to do graduate work in the history of art. The Middle Ages had been a passion of mine for years and as I had a healthy intellectual curiosity I chose an academic path. I benefited from taking that path in many ways and do not regret it but I could not fail to notice how rarely the ‘book learning’ touched the passion. What I loved – and wanted more of – was the sensation of walking through a heavy, padded door from the sights, smells and sounds of the street and into the quiet, mysteriously-lighted space of a medieval church. I wanted the flickering of candles against a painted Madonna and Child, the feel of stone that has been cool for hundreds of years. These sensations became pathways for me, doorways between heaven and earth.
This came to mind as I was reading Craig’s post Icons and Idols. For me the sensual components of medieval spaces are icons. They are a language God uses to speak to me. It is tempting to stay there, in an experience learned when I was a teenager, and say only there do the doors open, only in that language does God speak to me. If I did that, the icon would become an idol. The lesson instead is, this is how it happens; when earth and heaven are joined, this is what it feels like. Go now and find it in other places. Find it wherever you are. Make it happen for others.
Suddenly it begins to happen at the most unexpected times – you come to church and hear the familiar words you have heard so many times and suddenly something about the way the words are said, or the way the light falls on the Table, or a particular gesture gives the ritual a meaning it never had before.
I was at Eucharist at Holy Cross Monastery one morning and the priest lifted the host at the consecration and then extended it forward and from side to side toward all of us who were gathered before the Table. Suddenly I felt myself caught up in a four-dimensional matrix created by the gesture – the joining of earth and heaven. The sensation lasted for several minutes and though it faded I did not forget it.
It happens again and again in the natural world, in community, or when story opens up landscape. These moments are precious but they are also abundant. God strews them about generously. We have only to see.