Letter #4: Life Story
Did not our hearts burn within us?
Dad,
It’s my literal job to digest complicated literature, and I cannot for the life of me understand that story about why I’m called Wigwam, despite having read it several times. Fragmentary Greek inscriptions about Epicurean physics? No problem. Klavan family lore? Inscrutable. Some mysteries are fathomless. Apparently Mom is one of them.
Speaking of fathomless mysteries, at the end of last week you brought us onto the road to Emmaus. I think that’s right where we want to be. We were talking about how you learn to meet and recognize God in the real world, the one where we actually live. And one brilliant thing about the Emmaus story is that the disciples are only really able to fully experience it in retrospect, in memory. They have one moment of perfect clarity at the end, the fusion of their everyday existence with a vision of the divine: they break bread, they know Jesus. Then it’s over, and he vanishes. At which point they realize the entire experience was like that: a normal or even a dismal afternoon, but God was there. A stranger on the road.
T.S. Eliot has an amazing passage where he talks about “the point of intersection of the timeless / With time.” He says that to apprehend or recognize eternity incarnate in the present is “something given / And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love.” But most of us only catch glimpses, “hints and guesses, / Hints followed by guesses; and the rest / Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.” Our rituals and routines are like preparing the ground, maybe, like setting the table for that moment of revelation in the breaking of the bread.
The disciples go back over the whole conversation in their memory and see that not only their own lives, but all of Israel’s history, all of world history, has been the same way: “Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked with us on the way?” God was written onto every page of it all. But most of us, most of the time, can only read the story backward from those moments of recognition.
This is why sometimes I think the stories we tell about our lives are actually even more true in some weird way than the moment-to-moment experiences we tell the stories about. It’s in remembering that the heart shapes and selects, giving form and proportion to raw life so the face of God can be seen. Still don’t get the story about the Wigwam though.
Love,
Spencer
 | A guest post by
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1) The Creator blinded the disciplines to conceal the presence of the Lord
1a) When Yeshua left, the Holy Spirit revealed the meaning of their experience
2) We exist only in the moment; that is all we comprehend in real time
2a) The Creator reveals what he wants us to know in real time
3) When their "hearts burned" it was the Holy Spirit teaching them.
Reading this articulates why I go to my church. I am Italian and my grandparents took me to church. I prayed the rosery with my nonna. When I was a teenager, I walked to church by myself, because my parents were just trying to survive. It was my special place. I even listened to bible cassette tapes on my Walkman while running. But eventually I stopped going to Mass. I went here and there, and it felt special, but I never "felt" what the priest was saying. In 2016 a friend brought me to a Christian church that is very bible based. Each week I learned what the bible was saying about my life and how I could live a better life if I follow the Word. I also saw the members DOING things - we have a very active Celebrate Recovery ministry, they asked for prayer for those in need, etc... As a runner, my first ministry was to work with a road race that raised funds for wells in Africa. And the biggest gift was my husband of 33 years eventually joined and was baptised. He is a retired police officer and believing in Christ has healed him in ways I could not. He is there all the time helping out - especially using his gift of cooking. I love reading the letters and comments that breath life into what Jesus is teaching us. I look forward to more to come!