Chartered Waters
“No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.” I Corinthians 2:7
The past is a foreign country; sometimes so is the present. Ah, the orgastic present. An amplification of sorts, a reawakening of existential and pragmatic reality. Golden crowns glisten upon the pent up jasper sea off the Mediterranean coast, glowing with the creative energy of God. Mighteous waves beat in from the allure of azure horizons, ethereal expanses of shining sand at once quotidian and crystalline. And then there is the sunlight, as efficacious as an Evensong prayer. Igniting unforeseen possibilities, purveying happenstance; renewals of experience apart, we remain unacquainted with neo and pseudo.
In What Are We Doing Here? (2000), Marilynne Robinson originates, “And yet the beautiful persists, and so do eloquence and depth of thought, and they belong to all of us because they are the most pregnant evidence we have of what is possible in us.” Keeping it surreal, through an interrogation of the Rogation, doxological precepts acknowledged, spangled heavens approaching, Tel Aviv stretches forth in vital immediacy under an ever-luring sky. Encountering beauty through the iridescent glow of an evanescent world, sidestepping the modish while fleeing material status, in a reordering of hierarchies, we sew the tapestry of our simple joyful lives.
Marilynne Robinson again: “We have looked into Melvillean nurseries, and glimpsed the births of stars that came into being many millions of years ago, an odd privilege of our relation to space and time. Properly speaking, we are the stuff of myth.” Our late afternoon stroll along Frishman Beach after dropping down from Independence Park (a hilltop fairy land of three hectares) proves singular and providential, echoing a strange efficacy, a special instance of the matrix of being. She muses, “There is something irreducibly thrilling about the universe … a reality whose astonishments we can never exhaust.” The Very Reverend Canon Richard Sewell told the congregation at St George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem, “The universe is stranger than we realise and is stranger than we can realise.” Wonders unto many, we are magnified and tainted by elegiac projection, poignancy and beauty. Today is the beginning of always.
“He told them, ‘The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables.” Mark 4: 11
(Extract with alternative imagery from the bestseller SABBATH PLUS ONE Jerusalem and Tel Aviv).
