Waiting for the Fire

Frustrated lately.  Borderline choleric.  Going through one of my periodic existential crises.  Reading this bit from Buechner on Exodus 3:1-6 stirred things up for me tonight.  How I would love for this to happen (at least I think I would).  For the time being, I'm a bit too impatient to keep my eyes and ears open to try and experience the madness for myself.

"Like Moses we come here as we are, and like him we come as strangers and exiles in our way, because wherever it is that we truly belong, whatever it is that is truly home for us, we know in our hearts that we have somehow lost it and gotten lost.  Something is missing from our lives that we cannot even name -- something we know best from the empty place inside us all where it belongs. We come here to find what we have lost.  We come here to acknowledge that in terms of the best we could be we are lost and that we are helpless to save ourselves.  We come here to confess our sins.

That is the sadness and searching of what church is, of what we are in a church -- and then suddenly FIRE!  The bush bursts into flame.  And the voice speaks our names, whatever they are -- Peter, John, Ann, Mary.  The heart skips a beat.  "YOU! YOU!" the voice says.  Does it?  Does any voice other than a human voice speak in this place?  Does any flame other than a candle flame on Christmas Eve ever leap here?  I think so.  I think if you have your ears open, if you have your eyes open, every once in a while some word in even the most unpromising sermon will flame out, some scrap of prayer or anthem, some moment of silence even, the sudden glimpse of somebody you love sitting there near you, or of some stranger whose face without warning touches your heart, will flame out -- and these are the moments that speak our names in a way we cannot help hearing.  These are the moments that, in the depths of whatever our dimness and sadness and lostness are, give us an echo of a wild and bidding voice that calls us from deeper still.  It is the same voice that Moses heard and that one way or another says, "GO! BE! LIVE! LOVE!" sending us off on an extraordinary and fateful journey for which there are no sure maps and whose end we will never fully know until we get there.  And for as long as the moment lasts, we suspect that maybe it is true -- maybe the ground on which we stand really is holy ground because we heard that voice here.  It called us by name.

Is it madness to believe such a thing?  That is a serious question.  Is it madness to believe in God at all, let alone in a God who speaks to us through such obscure and fleeting moments as these and then asks us to believe that these moments are windows into the truest meaning and mystery of the cosmos itself?  It is a kind of madness indeed."

(From 'Secrets in the Dark:  A Life in Sermons', by Frederick Buechner)