Someone asked me today why I had stopped writing. If the myths supporting the Biblical canon are to be believed, God Himself neither said anything nor dictated anything to be written for about 400 hundred years. (and when He started talking again he sounded so different, you could hardly recognize character continuity.)
So while it is evident that we have “so much things to say” seasonal silence (and character reinvention) should not be surprising ….after all, I was made in the image of God.
And this brings to reflection a recent conversation with my sister…the only person with whom I have been talking in this season – meaningful conversation requires talkers and listeners. As the God of silence and sound knows too well, not everyone has ears to hear, and sometimes you have to wait for an appropriate audience….perhaps even for a couple hundred years, before comprehension can be facilitated.
This conversation invariably focused on visions of the future (I have the most amazing collection) and we were beginning to contemplate the survival of the fittest when she inquired about ‘my’ vision.
I’m still seeking to build vocabulary to describe it, but then the first thing I recognize is that while I can call it ‘my own’ (like in ‘my mother’ or ‘my planet’), ownership does not connote authorship or even control…..simply belonging.
In fact my growing vision vocabulary is an amalgam of dreams of a diverse multiplicity of dreamers, often unaware of their connectedness or coherence outside of their distinct dream walls.
The Bible did say, there is time enough (and space too) for everything under the sun. And since my language is already suggesting it, let me openly confess my identification with God- also the subject of our conversation – The extreme reluctance of church theology to repay the Creator’s compliment who first identified with man…..even though that, for all intents and purposes, is the very reason and intent behind his (from our point of view) condescension.
We glibly aspire to the imitation of Christ and identity with His God, but are coded with a primal fear of doing so…and that paradox for me is best explained not by a low and faulty self image …..but a low and faulty God concept. The God concept if not inherited then interpreted from Hebrew Scripture was terrifying….to use the biblical word ‘terrible’. Terror, both then and now, seen as perhaps the most effective mobilizer of human beings, was not an attribute for common consumption. The fewer, with the gift, the better, and best to have only one Terrible God and a few henchmen in every age with enough gall to make the claim.
The Beautiful God, worthy to be appreciated and loved, is still hardly conceivable with Old Testament software. And the psychological confusion emanating from the inter- Testamental theological babble litters our modern institutions….from family to systems of jurisprudence, politics and education.
This God demands description….and since this God is not the creature of imagination, but its creator, we expect a time and space appropriate to both beholding and describing His Glory. But now is the devil’s season. One of the reasons to maintain silence. Anything you do say wont matter anyway.
So, even after a 500 word blog, mi still naa se notn at aal. Mi no av notn fi se.
YeKengalé 