Cross Ways
Google, anticipating a slowdown on the Interstate ahead, suggested I take an exit. It put me on a narrow road that went, slowly, past trees and farm houses. Such roads are surprisingly different from the main highways that are, true to their name, “high” ways that speed above and beyond the low and narrow. I’m going slow enough to take in this shady section of life that was hidden away from the high way. Then the road took a bend and there appeared before me an overpass, and going at its own speed, a freight train. All I could see were three or four cars of the train at any one time; trees blocked the view of any more than this little segment. So I could not tell how long the train was; I could only see it, a bit of it, lifted above my road and passing from my left to my right.
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I have written before about reality having layers to it. An adult, you return to the bedroom that was yours as a child. You find some old mimeograph papers; they are the high school newspaper. You hold and read them and for this moment you are much younger, you are the high school boy who didn’t fit in and wrote some rather obnoxious things. You are the boy and you also are the critical adult looking back at the boy and somehow you are both at the same time.
Or take the layers not in time but in space. You are walking on the White Rock Trail north of the lake and you come to that swampy section. You’re in the midst of the urbanopolis yet you can see nothing but trees and some grass and a stream and mud and the winding trail. You can hear cars—the city’s sounds are all around—but you only have eyes for this patch of wet nature. Then the trail turns a corner, and overhead is a sleek concrete pillar that supports a train track that runs above you. The elevated track crosses your trail from one side to the other then disappears from sight. It is too smooth, too light and ultra-modern to be track for a freight train; this is for the “light” rail. You have probably been on that rail sometime. But there is no path from the ground to the track; the walking trail and the highline train cross but never meet.
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Our lives are full of intersections where we cross others’ paths but never meet them. A busy sidewalk; a store full of customers you don’t know; people in their cars; trains that cross over us; airplanes that cross in their own space. And there are those temporal intersections. The boy does not know the adult who, fifteen years later, looks back on what he was writing, yet the adult is present to the boy. These layers are, I think, not accidental. They are baked into reality from the moment of creation.
What Adam does with that piece of fruit is an event present to all the billions of people who come after him.
What the Old Testament says is not prior to what the New Testament says, but present in the New. Abraham is very much present to the disciples who hear that their teacher is going to be sacrificed.
All of us on our various Caminos that cross one another without our comprehension: we are nonetheless constituted by the whole picture of all these relations.
It is as theologians like Robert Jenson often say: Your individuality is not in yourself but in the multitudinous ways that cross over (under, through, before, after) your path.
Each of us is made of relations: and the secret at the heart of all relations is the cross.
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Out & About: This Sunday, May 18, I will be preaching at St. Barnabas Church in Denton, Tex., at the Eucharist at 10 a.m.
Later at 5 p.m. on May 18, there will be a seminar on what I think is a deceptively simple children’s book,The Dolls’ House by Rumer Godden. The dolls have their own life, but it hangs on the actions of the children who play with, or neglect, them. We meet from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, Dallas; anyone who reads the book is welcome to the discussion.