Cultivating Place is a column considering our relationships to the varied places we have been planted. As followers of The One who became flesh and made his dwelling among us, who wept over the earthly Jerusalem, we will explore the unique opportunities each of us has to seek the good of our place, wherever that may be.
“Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment.”
― Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son
2004 AD Tibet. The roof of the world. I am lying on the ground at Everest base camp, 17,000 feet above sea level. Above, in the deep, unspoiled darkness, the cloudless sky is fretted with burning points of light. At unfathomable distance, the Milky Way arcs in a great band through the heavens. Around, high silhouetted ridges circle to join the vast mass of the great mountain itself, the snow-capped summit suspended almost 30,000 feet up, glowing softly in the starlight. Ahead—or so I thought—were decades of climbing mountains such as these, lungs ever gasping through thin atmospheres towards the next summit, legs and arms casting the ground away beneath me, urging me up and ever up.
2025 AD. England. An upstairs bedroom in an unassuming 1960s end-of-terrace house. I am lying in bed, 12 feet above the ground floor, from which I have crawled ponderously on hands and knees with a cup of coffee. From my window, a suburban roofscape opens out onto the gentle, green curve of St. Catherine’s Hill, a mile to the east. The sun is beginning to rise, streaks of pink and gold catching the high, wispy clouds and silhouetting the little copse of trees at the hill’s summit. In previous years, on mornings such as this, I would have been out climbing the 200 or so steps that curve up towards the treeline. Today, this little undulation, rising barely 300 feet above sea level, might as well be a 30,000-foot peak for all my hopes of scaling it.
Of late, my right knee has weltered down in arthritic inflammation. Old injuries have conspired to infuse pain and stiffness into this once limber joint. Walking on the flat is uncomfortable. Walking any incline is painful. I have become a valley man, the unwilling student of gravity. And so I lie in my upper room, lost in a rut of self-pity. As I sullenly drink my half-spilled coffee, I am largely oblivious to the majesty unfolding outside my window: to the crack of compressed light flaming on the edge of the hill, the murmurations of migratory birds sweeping across the gleaming gold of the sky.
My world has narrowed down to a single hot, heavy pain: a bonfire of present joys and future hopes. I feel hemmed in, not only by gravity, but by the dimensions of time. I am unwilling to dwell on the joys of a past which seems only to mock the present. Nor can I stomach a future which seems to hold only the certainty of accelerating entropy: the promise of deeper pains to come. Only the present remains, where humiliated at being brought so low, I tend towards disembodiment and distraction.
And so, while the glories of a spring sunrise explode outside my window, I am not really here.
As my little girls run laughing into the room clutching their favourite stories, and nestle down next to me to read, I am not really here. As I drink in the rich savour of coffee, grown in the rainforests of Colombia, picked, roasted, ground, flown half-way around the world, and infused now for my pleasure, I am not really here. Robbed of the planned life, and rejecting the given life [1], I have fallen into the crevasse between the two, and I do not want to get up.
32 AD. Another room, 12 feet up from ground level. A Passover meal. Jesus is seated with His closest friends. In a few hours, one will betray Him, and the rest will scatter in denial. Before the evening is through, the flesh will be scourged from His back. Before the sun sets the following day, He will be gasping his last breath, nailed hand and foot to a cross. Yet, in this upper room, in the brief calm before the coming storm explodes upon Him, Jesus takes bread and gives thanks [2].
Jesus gives thanks for bread. In the presence of those soon to betray and deny Him, He gives thanks for bread. As the hours unreel towards the weeping and abandonment of Gethsemane, He gives thanks for bread. As the black shadow of Golgotha tracks inexorably over the ground towards Him, He gives thanks for bread.
There is an absurdity to this moment, to such singular focus on the smallest and humblest of things when cosmic battle is about to be joined and Satan’s age-old machinations dealt the mortal blow. There is also, on my part, incomprehension. I—for whom impending pain so readily eclipses all goodness in the present—can barely fathom the grounded self-awareness of the Son of Man.
At the epicentre of His Passion, He is undistracted, able to notice and be grateful for such a thing as bread.
Jesus gives thanks for food He will not have digested before He is nailed to a cross. In doing so, He testifies that the impending possibility—even certainty—of future pain does not negate the goodness of provision in the present. He models the gratitude due for the smallest of provisions, even in the midst of great trials. Given my natural inclination to see only a zero-sum game, in which a single inescapable hardship can negate any number of gifts, it is a reminder I sorely need. My stubborn refusal to recognise God’s goodness to me today cannot render tomorrow’s sufferings more tolerable, but over time it might very well desiccate my heart.
But Jesus’s thanksgiving is more than a model, it is a moment of revelation. As He focuses His disciples’ attention on bread and wine, these humble elements are transfigured into sacrament. An everyday meal draws back the veil on Jesus’s impending self-sacrifice, revealing amid apparent defeat the very means by which many sons and daughters will be brought to glory. Jesus in the upper room demonstrates what we so often refuse to see: that in the creation—the great theatre of His glory—there is nothing trivial, nothing coincidental, nothing that is not intertwined in myriad ways within His sovereign purposes.
Much in this creation is unexpected, much unfathomable, much perplexing, but all of it is part of what C.S. Lewis calls “the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic reality in which we all live” [3]. Jesus in His upper room sees what I—sulking in mine – fail to see: that all things—bread, wine, sacrifice, birth, atonement, friends, betrayal, climbing mountains, even arthritic knees—are bound up together in the same grand story of redemption, linked in mysterious ways, and all playing their unique roles in revealing The One to whom the arc of this great epic bends.
It is gifted to me to live in the truth of this reality: that I live within a story majestic beyond all imagining. Yet it is majestic on terms often alien to my fleshly intuitions. As Thomas Howard puts it, we
“[walk] daily among the hallows… carrying on the commonplace routines of our ordinary life in the presence of mighty mysteries that would ravish and terrify us if this veil of ordinariness were suddenly stripped away” [4].
This hallowed world, and my life within it, hold dimensions of meaning and purpose beyond my present understanding, dimensions to which my definitions of “gift” and “blessing” are sorely inadequate, being so tightly constrained to the axes of physical pleasure and bodily health.
I falter daily in receiving the invitation to become more truly alive, to grow in the love and knowledge of God, to be led higher up and further in to participation in both the life and death of Christ. And yet it is gifted to me to follow in His steps, who was fully present in each pleasure and pain: in prayer, in wilderness, in valley, in laughter with friends, in beholding the flowers of the field and birds of the air, in healing the sick, in weeping with those in mourning, in breaking bread, and ultimately, in bearing His cross. What I wanted—what I still want—is mountaintops, where I might know my strength and feel the world at my feet. Yet I realise it is for now in the valleys of shadow that I am being called to lean on my Lord, to know Him, perhaps even to become like Him. I pray that this morning, in my own upper room, with a day of pain before me, my eyes, my mind, and my heart might be opened more fully to the Father’s gifts, revealed in such things as this cup of coffee, this watercolour sky, these nestling daughters, and His Son, faithfully walking His pierced steps before me, extending His arms, and calling me to follow Him deeper into life.
[1] Wendell Berry, Sabbath III, 1994
[2] Luke 22:19 (ESV)
[3] C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald. An Anthology, 1947
[4] Thomas Howard, Hallowed Be This House: Finding Signs of Heaven in Your Home, 2012
The featured image, “There Must Be a Door,” is courtesy of Jordan Durbin and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.
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