Cultivating Calling and Pilgrimage is a meandering column documenting the pilgrimage of faith. It’s an occasional letter arriving in the mail from that shabby, wandering uncle you only see a few times year, describing the odd bits and bobs of books, songs, stories, people and places that have struck his fancy, put a lump in his throat, or kept him putting one foot in front of the other toward the Face of Jesus, that Joy set before us all.
The lake is a lake no more. Dry gravel crunched as I pulled off the main road and tipped over the rim of the bowl whose bottom once held a fishing hole surrounded by campsites. Last time I was here, water rippled and glittered in the sun, and as the night arrived, the sky did the same under moon and stars, the Milky Way rising to stretch through the dark like warm breath frosting into puffs across the coolness of the cosmos.
It’s strange to expect one thing and arrive to find a familiar place so changed. What had been a great fishbowl is now a grand meadow. What had been floating docks are now toppled old bones sunken in tall grasses. The depths are laid bare, revealing a hundred variations on green and leaf and branch. There may be no waters to send up something like goosebumps under a gust, but there are shrubs and fronds a-plenty to shimmy in the singing airs. Still, I admit I was looking forward to sitting next to the lake. I like the lapping music. I like, in the night, to lie flat on my back on the rickety picnic table, search the starlight, and hear the lake-lull whispering lightly all around me. All those unimaginable tons of water just lying there so near to silent, seeming weightless, keeping some hidden life of their own, swimming in calm mystery.
The night sky is its own kind of strange lake. A lake we and our world bob upon like a cork. A lake of unfathomable depth where, for all we know, spirits and angels dip in and out, swimming in the deep places of Creation. Who knows what galactic flowerings they’ve witnessed, watching the fronds of some fabulous fern unroll from the burning kernel of a dying star? Who knows what gardens grow beneath the spangled surface of this lake? Only God knows. God, who tends these gigantic places where we may one day walk together. Where, breathing (with)in the Spirit of God, we may be fitted like fish to live in that liquid depth that is not dark to Him (and won’t be to us), to speed among the stars, playing catch-me-if-you-can with their light.
Someone said it takes a few thousand years to become who God has in mind for us to be. Is that all? I feel so far from even where I have in mind for myself to be, much less where God dreams of. But “you can’t hurry love,” the song says, and things take whatever time they take to grow.
Leaning in the breeze now, the grass where the lake was seems to have leapt up overnight. But, of course, that’s not the case. I just wasn’t here to watch it rise, nor would I have had the patience to keep watch if I had been here. I am impatient about my own growth too. I’m stretching my spine, tongue to one side of my mouth, the flat of my hand crowning my head to get the measurement against the ladder of marks climbing up the kitchen door jamb. I’d welcome a growth spurt, but until then, no reason to re-mark my name there. No reason to write a new rung for a new year just yet.
But maybe I’m being too hard on myself. If the ladder we’re climbing is Jacob’s Ladder, and, as Jesus told Nathanael, He Himself is that Ladder, it shouldn’t be surprising to feel ourselves getting shorter in our own estimation, even as our stature climbs. Maturity is to become more a child of the Father.
I just read this morning in Numbers how the Levites had to be shaved from head to toe, bathed, and dressed in fresh clothes before they were ready to serve in the Tabernacle. Hairless as babies, washed and swaddled. That’s the way to be made ready for what’s next. We won’t drive up to the old campsite and find things just like we left them. The lake may have risen from the ground to the sky! We may find the territory expanded, where the old Tent can unfold in a constellation of new ways. The fish may have scaled the trees and be swim-swinging like monkeys up in the leaves of sundried kelp. I don’t know whether fish are all that they are meant to be yet, either! (And there are already flying fish carving through the current of our current world, aren’t there?)
All that to say, I don’t comprehend fish, the growth of grass, myself. Jesus called us to be fishers of men, and I am one of those slippery creatures I’ve not yet managed to catch, netted though I may be in the hands of God Whose ropey fingers wove and are woven about my body.
The wind is coursing through the redbud tree, every little heart-shaped leaf quavering, the sun sneaking in and out among the foliage, casting toss-about shadows on this worn-out picnic table where I’m writing now. I remember hauling this very table up the bank to this shady spot last time I was here. Maybe a year ago? It’s heavy, and the rusty red paint is just a suggestion at this point, a most threadbare coat of a single color. The table was especially hard to haul because its frame, made of metal tubing, had rusted clean through and broken free in one or two spots at the feet. It was a little like hoisting a hundred-pound Slinky with a barn door bolted to it up a hill. The thing kept shape-shifting.
Yesterday evening, arriving after a long drive, I took a walk around the no-longer-lake to stretch my legs. About thirty feet below the levee, well below where the water used to be, I noticed another old picnic table. Unless someone dragged it out there once the water was gone, I guess it had been under there all along. I doubt the fish knew what it was for. Maybe they considered its mysteries, conjecturing about its strange origins and ultimate purpose? Maybe they made pilgrimage to it, swimming out to this alien cathedral set amidst the murky depths, shrouded in silt, a sign and potential seat of some Architect from beyond the Great Fishbowl, who once descended from the circles of air and sun. “Now,” they’d whisper in their burbling, fishy voices, “the Thing is shorn of its blinding brightness, its winged feet stamped here in the mud of our world. Here it sits, sub-marine, the seat of a Sky-promise to come, when the surface of the world will be changed into a doorway: a basilica unto unimaginable life.”
As you can see, fish are deep. They are brimming with wonder. That’s why they have such big googly eyes—the better to keep watch, to take it all in.
I tried to take it all in, lying on the picnic table beneath the superb span of the Milky Way. Paul prayed that we might catch a glimpse of how wide, long, high, and deep the love of Christ really is. The arms of our local galaxy stretched and stretched. They did their best.
But I imagine Paul knew even the Milky Way could never manage to say, “This big!” I lift an imaginary pint glass in toast. “Ad Astra!” And Abraham’s twinkling kin, that innumerable astral cloud of witness, rightly reply, “To the King!”
On the way back from my walk yesterday, as I approached the van I saw a flash of bright orange through the front grill. I came close and, peering into the engine, leaned down to see what it was. The radiant wings of a flying creature were pinned against the radiator. Some species of moth, I think, still luminous in spite of death. The little thing was pressed hard against the metal, like a child against the kitchen door jamb. That is the way of slow things in a speeding, impatient world like ours. Even God felt the collision. Even the baby king, shorn of glory like a Levite, washed in blood, swaddled in Mary’s arms, might’ve felt it coming in those early days, then as He grew in wisdom and stature, then as He set His face like flint toward Jerusalem, playing a game of chicken with the Cross that He intended to lose.
Before the crucifixion, Jesus fed His disciples His own flesh and blood. After the resurrection, He took with the flesh and bone of His living post-death hands a piece of broiled fish, and ate that. The fish and the Fisherman take each other into themselves; they share the same picnic table, and the same Tent.
There will come a time, unhurried as love, when we’ll be borne out of this little lake, like a fish into the treetops, or a baby into the arms of sun and starlight. The Maker of the Star-gardens once dove headlong toward earth to be received by a womb in this world, and to those meek souls who receive Him still, He will make of this world a womb, bounded as a lake in the cup of His hand. But the lake will be no more. It will rise to mingle with the wind. Where it once lay, a Grand Meadow will flower, where the children might dart and play. And Our Father will laugh and say, “My, how they’ve grown!”
The featured image, “Merry Christmas Wrap,” is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and used with her glad permission for Cultivating.
Matthew Clark is a singer/songwriter and storyteller from Mississippi. He has recorded several full length albums, including Matthew’s latest project, “The Well Trilogy,” 3 full-length album/book combos released over three years. Each installment—Only the Lover Sings, A Tale of Two Trees, and Where the River Goes—is made up of 11 songs and a companion book of 13 essays written by a variety of contributors exploring themes around encountering Jesus, faith-keeping, and the return of Christ. You can find the books on Amazon and the albums on Spotify and Apple Music.
A founding member of The Maker’s Project and a columnist for Cultivating, Matthew’s essays reflect on faith-keeping and pilgrimage. Matthew travels as a touring musician and speaker sharing songs and stories in a van called Vandalf.
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