Some are on candlesticks, most of us are not

 

Book 2, Chapter 1

-Part 5, Continued-

We have looked at obscurity from the point of view of its erasure of meaning from life. Indeed, if it is as bad as all that – and in one form it is – then we would expect our religion to rise against it and put it away.

Were that the case, then we would hear no more stories about believers who anxiously go through some of the previously-mentioned experiences of obscurity. Obscurity is a form of loneliness, or fear of loneliness, and the presence of our faith does not make it impossible to experience the “covered over” life.

Rather than remove the threat of obscurity, God has sanctified it and transformed it into something that he can powerfully use for the good of life.

After his birth, Jesus was introduced to this kind of obscurity. His birth was significantly marked and celebrated, of course, but its meaning was still left to be unfolded. Mary, his mother, it is said, “hid these things in her heart.”

After finding the boy Jesus in the Temple, we have no biblical knowledge of Jesus until he showed up at the Jordan River to be baptized by his cousin John. It is interesting to me that none of the gospels contain an interview with Jesus about his doings from, say, age 12 to 30. We really have only one word to help us fill in those years of his life: “Carpenter.”

This gap has left space for quite a few illusory liars to write ridiculous tales of Christ’s childhood and his young adulthood.

Under a positive, theological light, obscurity is understood as an aspect of spiritual humility. We sometimes see it referred to as “the hidden life.” This is the life that is not noticed, or seeks no notice for itself. In the Gospels we see Jesus sometimes saying, “Tell no one.” He lived in the same dynamic tension that we see in the Old Testament, between God as one who reveals himself, and God as the hidden, unsearchable one.

Jesus said to the woman at the well, “I who speak to you am He.” Other times he spoke in parables. There was a divine humility about him.

The kingdom of God has only a few known names in it. Once we add all the major players in both testaments, all the saints proclaimed by the Catholic and Orthodox churches, all the great men and women of history in the Protestant tradition, and the well-known evangelists, writers and speakers from within the faith, we may have only peopled a small town. The vast majority of those who belong to God are in the unheard-of masses.

As Cassaude puts it, there are some among the faithful who are placed by God “on a candlestick.” He goes on in this short section, to say:

_{“There always will be, as there always have been,  saints like these as well as an infinite number of others in the church who are hidden, who, being intended to shine only in heaven, send forth no light in this life, but live and die in profound obscurity.” (Page 49)}

Whereas before we looked at obscurity as a threat to a meaningful life, here we see obscurity as something that is good for our spiritual well-being and pleasing to God. This is certainly not the only occurrence wherein God takes something painful or awful and sanctifies it to his people as something enriching.

I was once called upon by a young friend whose father was on the third floor of our local hospital. The father was a gruff, weather-beaten sort of man. He was a guy who had a hard personality. He was likeable for all that. He had lived and worked hard all of his life, and he hadn’t had much room for anything religious in his life. Now he was living out the last days of his diagnosis – terminal cancer.

“Dad wants to talk to you,” his son told me.

This father wanted salvation, and he was asking for directions. At this point in his life, all he needed was an invitation. After I gave voice to this invitation, the man responded in faith and took on a life of belief that last only for another seven days.

I remember telling him that he was “lucky that this is about grace, because there is nothing you could do right now to earn it.” He was physically helpless, tucked away in a room in a community hospital.

He had told me he wanted “just another couple of years” of life, but it turned out that he had to settle for just one more week, during which his lucidness came and went.

The morning he died, his son called me from the hospital. I drove up there in a few minutes to be with him and his mother. I was not expecting to be escorted into the father’s room where his body was bent a little oddly under the covers. His mouth was wide open, his head tilted back, and his eyelids half open.

The three of us sat on the radiator next to his bed and muttered soft things. One of my less-profound musings came out as, “Well, this is weird.”

All of the faith, hope, love, laughter, pain and death that occurred in that little room were known only to a handful of people – had happened in obscurity. The unseen witnesses to all of this could be numberless – the angels watching; God himself knowing, present and involved; and unknown other beings who saw this man flicker alive in spirit just a matter of hours before his body gave out.

The obscurity under which all of this took place was a small, humble event. We can call it a routine event, as it happens in hospital rooms all the time. Its smallness and its commonness did not keep God from involving his entire self in lifting this man into an abundant and eternal life with him. Obscurity does not go unnoticed by God.

_{“We should note that there are souls whom God wishes to keep hidden, little in their own eyes and in the eyes of others. Far from bestowing striking qualities on them, his design for them prescribes obscurity. They would deceived themselves if they tried to walk by any other path. If they are sufficiently instructed, they will know that their part is fidelity in their own nothingness, and their lowliness will be their peace.” (Page 60. . . More on this in days to come. T)}

There is nothing that threatens to cover over or obscure a person’s life as much as death. In the small Wyoming cemeteries where some of my relatives and friends are buried, I walk past row upon row of people I have never heard of – people whose lives never intersected with mine, at least not to the point where I caught their names and made some mental note of them. In some cases, everyone else who once knew them is dead as well. Nothing is second to death as the big, final obscurer.

Whitman called cemeteries “the final democracy,” where all are equally covered by a nice lawn. Even one headstone larger than another doesn’t mean all that much.

Death’s prime undertaking in history was to obscure the life of the man who said he was the king whose “kingdom is not of this world.” He was punished as a criminal, killed between two thieves to further obscure his dignity and his position in the history of mankind. By his death Jesus took away death’s power as obscurer, and replaced it with his life.

We need no longer fear being hidden away in life or forgotten in death.

“Where can I go from your spirit?” asked the psalmist. “Where can I flee from your presence?” (Psalm 139.)

         In the “nothing much” which our lives often are, God is neither absent nor idle. Obscurity will never be a condition that separates us from him nor the life to which he has called us.