May 24, 2009    John 3 (selected verses)

    This past week I read several essays that reminded me that God’s love spreads out before us like a mysterious landscape that is recognized in the heart and in the soul in ways it cannot be recognized in any other way.   Gayle Boss writes about growing up on the shores of Lake Michigan and describes it this way.  She writes,  “It is wide and deep and infinite shades of blue.  I was born on its shore, its rhythms ever present and intricate and taken for granted; a heartbeat.  Every day as I grew, its substance touched my skin, some days so gently as to leave no impression, some days so insistent that things with weight and shape - houses and friends, trees and animals - faded into ghosts.”   Gayle Boss moved away from Lake Michigan as an adult and its deep and infinite shades of blue, though not completely forgotten, were packed away in the recesses of her mind.  But at some point she felt again its incessant pull and packed up her family and moved back to this place where her children could come to know the mysteries of this landscape, too.   As an adult, looking out beyond the dunes at the vast landscape once again, she writes, “Two hundred fifty feet below me waves innumerable, from the horizon to shore, rise and fall, each wave replaced by another in endless succession.  They wear rocks on the lake bottom to sand, shift the sand already on shore.  Gently, and not so gently, beauty is made and re-made.  The elemental work of the universe is laid out here for anyone to see and hear and smell and taste and feel, as it is in distant mountains and prairies, deserts and rivers and bogs, or in the tangled meadow at the end of my street.  The same force, with all its up swellings, erodings, scourings, and re-shapings, is at work on the landscape within.  There, in that wild place, its name is grace.  There, too, its action is inexorable, and its end, beauty.”