Invisible Things

November/December 1994

    And there are invisible things. Like the light behind the earth that casts a shadow of it, a shadow we call night ... like the sap that runs with some wildness of life in the veins of trees that we see as dead ... like the impulse behind the act ... like the silence inaudible behind the noise...

    Like all the beyond—too great to be fit into the lenses of our high-powered telescopes and microscopes, as close to us as the ocean is to fish, too present to be discovered (or even discoverable), a thing of which we are a part and apart from which we cannot be ourselves—invisible things...

    Things cut off from our senses like Eden was barred from our first ancestors—guarded, hedged in and away, things of the Spirit—angels, the will of God, God Himself, His Kingdom (the place where His Spirit lives and reigns), love ... things we dream of and imagine that we remember, things we parrot and kill in that parroting—things we yearn for and curse and deny and yearn for again in spite of ourselves—as if a part of our true selves belonged to a true world and not the one our lesser selves have settled in and surrendered to ... or would surrender to if not for the persistence of those invisible things...

    Those things that the visible world hang from, point to, cannot quite reach, cannot quite escape. And just when our smug, agnostic loneliness settles into some comfortable, almost manageable despair, something that goes "bump" in the night or "whir" in our hearts sweeps us up out of the numbness and into that longing, that anger, that unquenchable hope that we would just as well live without, if only life was possible without it...

    If only life was not part of those invisible things—winds moving leaves, temperatures that we can measure, that affect the world, pasts, futures ... invisible things.

    He is the image of the invisible God. He is incomprehensible to our wester minds—as He was to eastern ones. He came from that beyond that no human mind as visited. When we try to squeeze Him into our systems of thought, He vanishes—He slips through our grasp and then reappears and (in so many words) says, "No man takes My life from Me. No man forces his will on Me. I am not yours to handle and cheapen. You are Mine to love and make holy."

    In Him the fullness of the Godhead dwells. In Him all things are held together. In Him we see what love is—that it originates in God and is energized by Him.

    And so, we thank God for all we see. For beauty and for the miracle of sight, for music and wonder of hearing, for warmth and the sense of touch. But we thank Him more for Christ, without whom we would be deaf, insensitive and blind to the invisible things, and there are ... invisible things...