look up
It’s evening here, where our feet beat a path down a dizzying urban road that smells like sunbaked asphalt and motor oil and sweat, like jasmine perfume and donuts and bitter coffee, where stars blink on the buildings as well as in the sky, lighting the night an inky crimson black. The intersections pulse with signs, with guiding lights, and the roll of tires, the smack of feet, the honk of horns, the murmur of human voices combine to make the thoroughfare hum with humanity.
I read through the blur this morning, as a sharp sliver of light cracked the cocoon:
Your steadfast love, O LORD, is as vast as the heavens; your faithfulness reaches beyond the clouds.
I slipped on my glasses—sky blue, like delicate wings born to fly, picked up a pen, and wrote the words in my journal, thinking of an elegant observation made by a character in the novel I’m re-reading, the one sitting now on the nightstand beside me, that for years she’d only observed the world from about four feet off the ground, or the height of her children’s heads. I thought about how easily I adopt a similarly finite perspective, how it can feel as though life leaves little room for looking beyond, and yet, without fixing my eyes above the ceiling of my life, I miss extravagant Truth.
Who can imagine a love as vast as the heavens, a faithfulness reaching beyond the clouds, who can begin to, without getting swallowed up by a wide-eyed view of higher things?
This I also wrote, pen dancing over the curves of the letters, wondering, with a kind of gasping awe, as I sat there in my pajamas with my knee jutting out from under the sheets, about a love so high and wide and long and deep that I need power to understand it, about how I might respond if I grasped even a single magnificent mile of it. The feeling had moved me up, over to the floor-to-ceiling windows that make up one whole wall of our hotel room, had made me want to draw back the curtains, as I’d seen Adam doing ever so quietly this morning, light suddenly flooding, just to peek around the veil and stare at that wide, boundless sky from eighteen floors up.
Your steadfast love, O LORD, is as vast as the heavens…
And now it’s evening, and we walk down Chicago’s glittering Magnificent Mile, and it might as well be Oz and us a haphazard crew of seekers shedding bits of straw and drops of oil, hungry and navigating new, our eyes glinting with wonder. We skitter—Kevin, Riley, Josh, Adam, and me–across crosswalks with crowds, pass a corner where a larger-than-life ape dances to music flooding the sidewalk from a Bluetooth speaker, and I look back to silently count my young adults, to gather them in with my eyes. Even though my people are too old and aware now to wander off, we could get separated by the rushing pace, the swinging arms, the distraction of a giant ape, say, dancing on a sidewalk.
It’s funny how we humans change the words we use over time, how the constant shape of them in our dusty mouths can flatten them with familiarity, so that even an extraordinary word like magnificent, which hundreds of years ago meant exalted and glorious, those being God’s words—belonging to Him, I mean—now means impressively beautiful or extravagant, at least to us. This happens, maybe, as we stop seeing beyond ourselves, as we start believing in our own definitions and assessments, or at least, as our words bounce off the ceiling of human perception. But there is magnificent and then there is only magnificent, I’m thinking, watching the ape’s halting pause as the music buffers.
Wondering what Adam thinks of that ape, my lean and tender boy-turned-man, who still sometimes shrinks from insects smaller than his thumb, if he’s afraid to walk past its mechanical jerks, I turn to catch his eye, to reassure him, if need be. But he isn’t looking at the ape at all. He looks up instead, all the way through the towering hulks of skyscrapers bordering the bustling street, to the broad, light-throwing sky, and he gasps, planting his sweet, vulnerable hands flat in the middle of his chest.
Immediately, I know this as the posture of Isaiah’s woe to me, for I am a man of unclean lips, right before the prophet fell to the ground, arrested by a vision of God. Woe to me, for I am small and insignificant and unholy, and you, O God, are nothing short of magnificent.
Adam’s face, pale as awe, looks almost pained, overwhelmed with the humble recognition of his own diminution, dwarfed as we all are by those buildings I haven’t even bothered to trace all the way to the top, by that sky they rise toward—up, up, up—like straight roads of metal and glass. If I could, I’d run the length of them and jump right into that starry landscape, those moon fields sown with light. As it is, I have, in fact, up to now only experienced what I can see of the skyline without craning my neck, which is too stiff, really, for that kind of range of vision. I don’t even really entertain the idea anymore of looking that far above me. I am living proof that stiff-necks corrupt perspective; that we can feel right self-assured by what can only be seen at eye level, when we are lulled into believing everything fits (or could or should) within our own limited understanding.
I reach for Adam, meaning to soothe him with an outstretched arm, but he shrugs me off, the touch an affront to his already captivated body. Even with all I know of sensory overload, it’s hard for me to imagine how completely Adam experiences this place. At the moment, he can’t look away from the magnitude of everything above him, from the incomprehensible beauty of the light, like blinking stars, like gemstones twinkling, speeding up, up, into that extraordinary sky. I can see the will, the need to hide, bubbling up inside him, in the bloodless press of his hands over his racing heart.
Your steadfast love, O LORD, is as vast as the heavens; your faithfulness reaches beyond the clouds.
Beyond those skyscrapers. Beyond the stars.
I follow Adam’s gaze, thinking again of the Word scrolling through my journal, of Christ, as a prayer. Looking from 4, 5, 6 feet up, we don’t really want to believe that the fear of the Lord has anything at all to do with experiencing His love. But then, we’ve flattened that word love, too.
With effort, Adam tears his eyes away from the sky, checking to make sure we’re all still beside him, then casts them to the ground, gluing his gaze on our heels.
As we cross another street, I can’t help glancing back, can’t help watching as Adam keeps in step, humble head bowed low, until, carefully he pauses, slowly lifting his gaze again, peeking up—he can’t resist just a glance—toward the sky. Again, the gasp, the hands flying up unbidden to his heart, the palms pressed flat, as I believe his face might also be, if space allowed for falling on the crowded sidewalk.
In the Bible, people who see God–people who see Love, because God is love–always fall and press their faces to the ground. Maybe as a posture of love, as a response to love, that feels extreme. Sometimes, I read God’s response to Moses—Moses, who pleaded to see God’s glory, who whispered, let me look—God’s no one can look at me and live, and I wonder how such striking immensity fits with the idea that Moses, a man, spoke to God face to face, as a friend. How does intimacy actually happen between an omni-terrifying, shockingly beautiful God and a small, grungy child like me? And if God would have me know Him, not just about Him, how can it also be that the wisdom that opens my heart to Him also begins with fear? Perfect love casts out fear, or so another scripture says, and none of this would make any sense at all except those Biblical languages had more than one word for fear, one referring to the dark black horror of dread, the fear of harm and abuse and pain, of mistrust and fleeing, and another, the pure pale awe that acknowledges holiness.
If I, mortal and small as I am, experience the magnificent, otherworldly, universally transforming, all-things-enduring love that is God, if I glimpse even a mile of Him, well, my first response should probably be a bit more like Adam’s as he takes in the startling height, the depth, the length, the width of the Chicago skyline, of that incredible, terrible, unending sky, spreading out beyond. God’s love should make me gasp, make me press my hands to my chest, make me borrow the words of David, who am I that you should be mindful of me?
I see that Adam isn’t afraid of harm; he’s not cowering or running away, but every time he looks up, each time sets his mind on things above, takes in the sheer vastness of the view and all its glittering—that magnificence, first, it takes his breath away. That view stops him still, overwhelming his senses, capturing all his attention–body, soul, mind and strength, and then, it changes how he moves. He walks looking carefully at the backs of our feet, because even though he’s looking down, he’s still holding that sky in view. Perspective changes everything. And so, in view of God’s mercy, the apostle Paul once wrote, offer your body as a living sacrifice. What exactly, I’m thinking as I watch my son, am I usually holding in view?
So carefully now, I lift my eyes, following Adam’s lead, the whispered words of this morning’s first prayer lingering on my tongue again, with a gasp, at close of day.
Your steadfast love, O LORD, is as vast as the heavens. Your faithfulness reaches beyond the clouds.
