In wilderness I drove the flock to mountain great I came and there a lowly bush appeared that filled itself with flame That I might see I turned toward fire The spirit then round me came In flame the cosmos opened wide I told God “Here I am” God called my name I lost my shoes I hid my face in fear He knew my kin I felt his breath But I could not come near In rapt attention there I stood The flame would be with me Then I got bold I asked his name “Will be what I will be” My soul was free my heart was whole I stood on holy ground For then God spoke of many things and turned my life around
Reflections and Connexions
In the Sinai Desert is the Monastery of the Burning Bush, built there in the fourth century. Bruce Feiler visited there for his book Walking the Bible. He noticed just to the side of a door into the monastery a fire extinguisher. It was old and rusty, had been there for some time, and probably didn’t work. (I found out it’s been replaced by a newer one – See photo.) It might have been placed there as a joke, but I think it also serves as a warning for our tendencies in the modern world. That is, when God calls for our attention from the fire, we tend to put out the fire rather than listen to the voice or experience the encounter.
Recently on Facebook I came across an article in The Atlantic addressing the question of why millions of people have left the church in the last decade. I only could read the first two paragraphs of the article because I didn’t have a subscription to the magazine, but I very much enjoyed the many Facebook responses to the article. Mostly the comments seemed to be from people who had been the ones leaving the church or from people unchurched in the first place, and only a few from those who thought they knew God well and their atheistic counterparts who “unbelieved” in the same small God. No one commented on their experience of God or the sacred though a few mentioned following Jesus or finding community, and they didn’t seem to need the church for that.
Our collective social world (social imaginary) seems to have lost any sense of the sacred. This is not just a problem of the past decade or so but of the last several centuries. We live in a secular age. God has become a concept, one thing among many things. Whoever God is, whatever the sacred is, it cannot be caught in the web of language and is not a thing. God or anything sacred has to be experienced. You have a soul for just such experiences. Your soul is not a part of you separate from your body as in Greek philosophy but perhaps your body is part of it. The soul is not your ego either. So deep is its logos that you will not find its limits whatever way you travel. If you want to recover what is sacred or your own burning bush, attend to your soul. There are so many ways.
Witness courage or selflessness of another; dance or move in a flowing game like soccer; experience music; find a meaningful ritual or religious service; read a story or a poem; experience the death of a loved one; review your dreams in the morning; review your day in the evening (Often we only sense God’s presence in memory.); find your own sacred geometries; have an epiphany; walk in a natural setting – that’s what Moses was doing when he found the burning bush. But there are many ways. Perhaps this poem will remind you what you might be looking for.
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