Seedsower Music:: Now-You-See-It-Now-You-Don't

God's creation plays hide and seek with us. It gives us a beautiful sunset for a moment to enjoy, and then removes it. Thunder lasts only seconds, but it is a glorious moment nonetheless. And we wait on tiptoe for the next peek at earth showing off.

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George Herbert on Prayer Meetings
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Happy, Happy, Happy
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"Ouch!!"
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Spiritual pride is hard to detect. Jonathan Edwards gives some tips. The process can be painful, but necessary.

Now-You-See-It-Now-You-Don't

February 18, 2009

Does the hawk take flight by your wisdom and spread his wings toward the south? Does the eagle soar at your command and build his nest on high? He dwells on a cliff and stays there at night; a rocky crag is his stronghold. Job 38:26-28

God here is putting Job in his place, in effect saying, "So Job, do you know how to guide the hawk south? I do." And so on. There is nothing in all creation that God is detached from, even to the minutest detail.

Anne Dilliard in her Pulitzer Prize winning book PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK wonders over and over at the astonishing creation all around her. The bible says that the whole earth is full of God's glory, and consciously or not, she does her best to explore that truth with words.

Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-y-see-it-no-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven, the brightest oriole fades into leaves.

These disappearances stun me into stillness and concentration; they say of nature that is conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision that it is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who form my eyes only flings away her seven veils. For nature does reveal as well as conceal: now-you-don't-see-it-now-you-do.

For a week last September migrating red-winged blackbirds were feeding heavily down by the creek at the back of the house.

One day I went out to investigate the racket; I walked up to a tree, and Osage orange, and a hundred birds flew away. They simply materialized out of the tree. I saw a tree, then a whisk of color, than a tree again.

I walked closer and another hundred blackbirds took flight. Not a branch, not a twig budged: the birds were apparently weightless as well as invisible. Or, it was as if the leaves of the Osage orange had been freed from a spell in the form of red-winged blackbirds; they flew from the tree, caught my eye in the sky, and vanished. When I looked again at the tree the leaves had reassembled as if nothing had happened.

Finally I walked directly to the trunk of the tree and a final hundred, the real diehards, appeared, spread, and vanished. How could so many hide in the tree without my seeing them? The Osage orange, unruffled, looked just as it had looked from the house, when three hundred red-winged blackbirds cried from its crown. I looked downstream where they flew, and they were gone. Searching, I couldn't spot one.

Anne Dillard
PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK