Like Corn

As I read over her words, there is an echo of a quenched soul. The lines are like hefty drops of water dripping rhythmically into the empty bucket of the heart, resounding with a gentle splash and a truth-filled thud:

For Christianity is not a pious reverie, a moral system or a fantasy life; it is a revelation...

My heart leaps because I know its true. The kind of concurring of the soul that results in some kind of physical lifting, a warmth. Evelyn Underhill continues,

it is a revelation, adapted to our capacity, of the Realities which control life. Those Realities must largely remain unknown to us; limited little creatures that we are. God, as Brother Giles said, is a great mountain or corn from which man, like a sparrow, takes a grain of wheat: yet even that grain of wheat, which is as much as we can carry away, contains all the essentials of our life. We are to carry it carefully and eat it gratefully: remembering with awe the majesty of the mountain from which it comes.

God as a mountain of corn. I close my eyes as the coffee steams and the kids squeal and I remember how the combines and trucks and tractors would come up close to our little white house, rolling toward us on the paved country roads like the mechanical creatures from Star Wars.

The parade of metal at such a scale provoked otherworldly awe. An invasion.

We would sit on the front porch watching all the huge machines, the kids and I bundled up under a big fleece blanket. After a row or two the combines would pour out the magically harvested corn kernels into the bright green tractor trailer, who would then dump them into the semi-trucks lining the road and field. One by one, they pulled away, loaded and heavy from one thousand bushels of the smallest dried corn kernels.

It brings me joy to hear Underhill’s word, looking out the front bay window of the parsonage, past the stockings and garland and flickering candles, and out to the vast cornfield where the toppled stalks are ablaze in morning sun.

And I consider God in the vastness of the sky and fields aglow, in the blinding sun, in the penetrating cold of the wind. How He hovers over waters and exhales stars and abides in dimensions and ways that are beyond my wildest dreams and hopes. The glory of God.

And then I imagine all that power and all that beauty mysteriously compacted, gathered up in a single kernel. God revealed in small things, in daily moments, in matter graspable so we can see Him. Glimpses that sustain and settle us. The mercy of God.

As I hold Underhill’s Advent reader and take in the exuberant toddler song wafting around the lit tree, I am reminded of this mercy: our God, the greatest and truest Reality, incarnate. In a child.

And not just in the delivered, fully formed body of a baby; in a single cell. God, at five weeks, the size of a sesame seed. And the other prophet baby, filled with the Spirit, leaps at this Divine presence. God separating and multiplying in the womb.

The majesty of the mountain within a teenage girl’s swelling bump.

One cannot help put ponder the grandness of such a thought. To touch one’s own skin and imagine God within us, too. Is there anything more hope-filled, anything at all more wonderful?

God as the Greatest Reality.

God with us.