To be a Christian is to be a traveler. Our situation, say the Greek Fathers, is like that of the Israelite people in the desert of Sinai: we live in tents, not houses, for spiritually we are always on the move. We are on a journey through the inward space of the heart, a journey not measured by the hours of our watch or the days on the calendar, for it is a journey out of time into eternity [1].
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There’s a couple of dreams I keep on having once or twice a week. I’ve been keeping tallies on the whiteboard in my room as a means of keeping track. I’m not sure why they keep coming back to me, but they do, as if something is nagging at the back of my mind.
I awake on my bed in my apartment. At least, I awake where my bed ought to be. It’s all but timber now, made brittle from the dry, cold air. It’s always the wind which wakes me, rattling the remnants of the shades in my room. What light is there is an unfeeling, blue-gray hue which colors the world around it.
The glass of the windows has been shattered – what remains is but shards which haven’t managed to fall out of place. The paint on the walls has long been stripped away by the elements and blasted by the sand which has appeared from somewhere. Exploring the apartment yields a similar result – a fraction of the door hangs on its hinges, the bolt long gone. The furniture is splintered. The lights, unworkable.
The sand seems to have gotten in here as well. I can hear it crunching beneath the soles of my feet into the threadbare carpet. No one has been here in quite some time.
Outside, I can see dunes where once grass-covered hills and roadways were. Off in the distance, the buildings which make up the campus of my university have been reduced to ruins. Only shadows inhabit the depths now.
I walk about the campus. The wind is my only companion, whispering among the skeletons of the trees which covered the place once with their leaves. Now, their dry fingers stretch for something, anything of mercy. Not even the sun seems to care.
The world, it seems, is quiet,
I wander the place for some time before waking up, back in my room. I make a tally on the whiteboard. I pace. I go back to bed.
Rinse, wash, repeat.
But why?
Honestly, I’m going to leave an exact answer to the psychoanalysts and the mystics among us, But, after pacing the length of the living room for a few nights now, I believe part of the answer lies in some curriculum we’ve been covering.
In several of the classes I’ve found myself in, we’ve been hammering away at the notion of hospitality and the stranger, or ger (גֵּר). In the Old Testament, the stranger was to be considered a neighbor, since the Israelites had been in the same situation once in their own story as well. In that circumstance, God loved them and brought them into their own land, their own promise. As Christians, these stories, these principles, are also passed down to us as our story and our principles as well.
In other words, we love, because we were first loved.[2]
Even still, as these principles come passed down to us, we also find that we experience themes and motifs like those which brought about the Israelites’ stories and principles in the first place. In this way, I think, we come to identify and own those stories as our own, too.
At one point within the Exodus story, we find that Moses named his firstborn son Gershom, for “‘I [Moses] have become a foreigner in a foreign land.’”[3]
I’ve started to wonder, especially as I walk the ruins in my dreams, where we find ourselves foreigners in foreign lands ourselves. It’s easy to buy into a false sense of comfort quickly once a rhythm is established. A quick change of scenery may reveal how unfamiliar a seemingly familiar place is.
For me, a coast-hopping Yankee who spent the last four years in Los Angeles and must figure out whether Atlanta is that strange at first glance; for everyone settling into the pace of the semester and yet still looking to be known; for those of us who move about so frenetically that we have become a foreign land in and of ourselves to ourselves, remind us of our wandering state so that we might comfort those who wander among us.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayers.
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[1] Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way. Revised Edition (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 7.
[2] 1 Jn 4:19, NIV.
[3] Exod. 18:3.
From Silence 