Canter Bridge

‘Can a miracle happen?’, we ask of this or that broken relationship. We linger over the corpse of what was once love and wonder whether there is resurrection or just a bucket of lime to take the edge off the stench.

A key link in the chain of trust and conduct that we call biblical spirituality is the cultivated ability to believe in miracles. To hope in the darkness is not, for the soul shaped by life with YHWH, a mere spitting into the wind. It is the substance of life, death, and the dynamics that link the two, as these things are experienced in that open system that, again, is life with YHWH.

Tables do in fact turn. Prayer may not change things, in spite of bumper sticker reassurances to the contrary. But YHWH can and, from time to time, he does.

For the psalmists and other biblical realists, there is no denying that the night is very dark. Indeed is is breathtakingly so. The night sometimes veils in its unsighted obscurity a pain so deep and nauseating that mere physical agony seems a relief by comparison.

Yet joy, we are told in one of those dense biblical clarifications of how things truly are, comes in the morning:

For his anger is but for a moment;
his favor is for a lifetime.
Weeping may linger for the night,
but joy comes with the morning.

Faith lies just here, in the choosing to believe that anger, nighttime, and grief’s private bitterness are penultimate. Faith resides here in the stubborn but quite accurate contention by the man or woman who like Jacob wrestles with God—vowing not to release him from this nocturnal mano a mano until he leaves a blessing—that morning might come. Or that it should come, or that it must. Or that the rosy fingers of dawn suggest themselves there on the horizon even this very moment. Though it might be a sullen moon’s deception or a neighbor’s too-early car lights, it might also be morning.

And morning may arrive with company.