To Be Baptized

Photo Credit Ryan Roth-Klinck

This essay first appeared in the Wisdom for the Way as a part of the What Holy Mystery Incarnational Study found here.

“Blessed are those in awe of God.”

-St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, p. 67

“As theistic naturalists will insist, it might well be the case that the natural world always and already exists in active relationship with God; they argue that a naturalism that excludes God’s active presence is not a full naturalism at all.”

-Sarah Lane Ritchie, Divine Action and the Human Mind p. 206

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him.

Matthew 3:13

“Come in! Come in! There is a fire in the grate,” the bustle of the elderly couple brings a grin to your face. It’s not cold, but the fire is welcoming. There is an overstuffed chair in a bay window ten or so paces from the door, deep enough that you know, just by looking, that, once you settle in, your feet won’t reach the ground. The walls are so dark a color that the fire seems to glow out of warm chocolate. “We have been waiting for you.” Her voice is friendly and frank. Perhaps it is her tone or the comfortable way she fluffs the pillows on the couch facing the fire, but you don’t feel that she has been put out by the wait. She has been waiting, but it hasn't been a burden. She knows very well how to keep herself busy.

You bend sideways to set your basket just inside the door, and upon straightening, feel your lungs expand in delight. The walls aren’t dark, they are books. Wooden shelves line all four walls from and around to the doorway where you entered. The books are punctuated by six enormous windows through which one could look out on the spill of sunflowers to the south. In daylight this is no gloomy repository of wisdom, clotted with dust and formality, this is an adventure through the minds of time. They are all there: attesting, protesting, wondering, instructing. 

You turn to the right, away from the windows, letting your finger trail along the middle shelf of books. As you bump along the spines of the books, you can feel the pull of Blake and Tennison, Tillich and Tolkein. Here are the collected thoughts of millenia. What do they point to? What did these people sense as they sat and scribbled? Could there be more than violets and dandelions pressed between the pages of these books? 

You bump against a table. A simple rectangle, uncarved, made of oak, stained cathedral-brown. On the table rests a lamp, a notebook, and a pen. Just the right weight by the look of it. 

This room burns with energy. It begs one to step in deeper, explore, ask, wonder, implore.

What could be? 

What could become?

You pass in front of the fire. The old man and woman sit on the couch, comfortably waiting. She sipping something pale out of a china tea cup, he whittling something out of pale wood. They are not discomfited by your silence. What words need to be added? In the far corner, opposite the writing table, facing the wall of windows is a piano, grand in size but not in sheen. It is an accommodating instrument, one that could get a wonderer through a lonely night.

Behind the piano the shelves are bare. You peer at them, looking for the scuffs and scratches that would indicate that there had once been books shelved here, but there are none. These shelves are empty. Empty as echoes. The light seems to fail in this corner as if it were not welcome here.

Truly, there are places where words fail, where light fails, where even music fails.

There could be pain here or grief or halting joy.
There could be prayer here or laughter or a tender embrace.
There could be awe here or fear or love.

These are things which lie beyond words.