Chapter Nine - Trembling

Chapter Nine

Trembling

“As the sun angled, the buttes and coulees, the cliffs and sculptured hills and ravines lost their burned and dreadful look, and glowed with yellow and rich browns and a hundred variations of red and silver gray, all picked out of coal black. It was so beautiful that I stopped near a thicket of dwarfed and wind-warped cedars and junipers, and once stopped I was caught, trapped in color and dazzled by the clarity of the light.”

John Steinbeck[i]

Our family was visiting the zoo in Heidelberg, Germany one sunny Saturday morning. The two older children were grade school age, and our youngest, Lukas, whom we were pushing in a stroller was perhaps a year old. Zoos are where picture books come alive. Our children delighted in seeing the monkeys race flinging themselves from tree to tree in hot pursuit of one another, a mother bird feeding its young in the nest, penguins propelling themselves like torpedoes in the turquoise blue water. All beautiful, magical, serene, peaceful.

We were approaching the lions’ habitat when suddenly a male lion let loose with a deafening roar. The deep turbine-engine-like shock waves were so forceful they seemed to enter our bodies. Lukas was terrified and showed it by letting out his own piercing cry and then began sobbing. Indeed, we were all shaken. A ferocity of such magnitude, totally unexpected, frightened us. Though we tried to tell him that the strong iron fence kept the lion secure in his cage and unable to harm us, Lukas was not having it. We had to take him up from his stroller and pull him close to us for him to begin to calm down.

What is more fearsome than a lion roaring?

God is.

“I, the LORD, will roar like a lion. And when I roar, my people will return trembling from the west.” (Hosea 11:10 NLT).

Blessed are those who have heard and felt God’s roaring, those who are in awe of him, people like Blaise Pascal.

Blaise Pascal was a seventeen-century French mathematician who is credited with inventing the digital calculator (to help his father in his tax-collecting work), the syringe, the hydraulic press, and the roulette wheel. His contribution to the sciences was inestimable. Sadly, he died at the relatively young age of 39.

After Pascal’s death in 1662 his servant discovered a small handwritten note sown into the lining of his favorite coat. What was on that piece of paper spoke of his conversion to Jesus Christ. It records Pascal’s trembling, the awe of God that catapulted him into the arms of Christ.

Monday, 23 November, feast of St. Clement, pope and martyr, and others in the martyrology.
Vigil of St. Chrysogonus, martyr, and others.
From about half past ten at night until about half past midnight,

FIRE.

GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob not of the philosophers and of the learned. Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace. GOD of Jesus Christ. My God and your God. Your GOD will be my God. Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD. He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel. Grandeur of the human soul. Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you. Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.

I have departed from him: They have forsaken me, the fount of living water. My God, will you leave me? Let me not be separated from him forever. This is eternal life, that they know you, the one true God, and the one that you sent, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ. I left him; I fled him, renounced, crucified. Let me never be separated from him. He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the Gospel: Renunciation, total and sweet. Complete submission to Jesus Christ and to my director. Eternally in joy for a day’s exercise on the earth. May I not forget your words. Amen.

Learning humility has much in common with learning to be in awe of God and the fingerprints he has left behind the majesty of creation - God’s advertising agency.

The crisis of our age is that of boredom. So much of life is predictable and under our control. Thus, we vicariously seek excitement in sports, music, sexual activity. In our digital, leisure-soaked, airconditioned, therapeutic world we have lost the gift of awe. Indeed, we have insulated ourselves from the terrifying, the wonderous, the out-of-our-control forces of wind, storm, hail, and earthquake. They make us feel small and vulnerable. Vulnerability is not what we deem to be the good life, but it is for those who want to make advances in the virtue of humility.

[i] John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America, New York: Bantam Books, 1962, 156.