The Stoplight

continued

What if our new-opened eyes saw in every bush the radiant world that permeates our own! What if, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, its only our inattention that misses it?

And he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, “I will turn aside and see this great sight" (Exodus 3:2-3 RSV). It's the turning aside that makes the difference. Moses stops, he looks, he interrupts his daily activities. And only then does God reveal the sacredness of these seemingly commonplace surroundings. When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush ... "put off your shoes" (Exodus 3:4-5 RSV).

What if I could learn to see this whole earth as holy ground? What if wherever I looked I saw a ladder at my feet?

I've known people who do. Father Brinckerhoff was one. My friend Molly Shelley was another. Most of her life, Molly admitted, she hadn't been good at seeing even in the ordinary way. "Would you believe," she told me, "that I never used to see trees? Really see them?"

Till the age of forty-two, Molly had been caught in that same perfection trap that lures me too into focusing on my performance instead of God's. She was busy trying to be the perfect wife, the perfect mother to her six children, the perfect Christian, always at church or Bible study, taking on every volunteer job in the parish.

Then in 1981 Molly was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Activities curtailed, she became aware of a voice that, she suspected, had been calling to her for years. Come out in the yard with me, she heard God say. Outside, trees were in their summer green. Green?

"Why, green wasn't a single color! I counted eleven separate shades that till that moment I'd simply called 'green.'''

And if the physical world was glorious, the spiritual one was more so! It was a visitor to her hospital room, an elderly man she scarcely knew, who introduced Molly to a world even closer than her own backyard. The old man stood at the foot of her bed and wept. She couldn't ask him what the trouble was because of the tube down her throat, so she asked God. And God said,

He's crying because he loves you.

"But I've never done anything for him!"

He loves you because you are lovable.

Lovable? Just ... by being? Just ... lying in a hospital bed accomplishing nothing? For Molly that old mans tear-streaked face was her burning bush. "All my life I'd tried so hard to earn love - starting with God's. I was taught as a child that if you were good enough, you'd go to heaven when you died. Now I know its not a question of how good I am, but how much God loves me. Why, I'm in heaven right now!"

Molly knew she was dying, and she knew she didn't have to wait till then to enter Paradise.