I walked into the kitchen last night to find Marigold perched on a stool, rummaging through a cupboard looking for something to eat. She turned around and called out those most dreaded words, “I’m hungry.” I told her there was a box of cookies on the second shelf, and she could have them if she shared. She climbed down and split the box and the packet open in the middle of the floor, and the whole wide world arrived, it seemed, to have a cookie. Well, really more of a digestive biscuit, less than 2$ for a whole box at Aldi.
“How do they taste?” I asked.
Wonderful, was the consensus, if a touch dry. What would make them better would be a glass of milk. The crowd drifted away but Marigold remained, balancing once more on the stool, rocking back and forth and spreading her hands over the counter, beginning to form a plan.
This is what always happens. Some new taste or experience is introduced, and if it goes well, the child does her absolute best to make it into a rule that will carry on forever and ever and ever world without end amen.
“We used to have milk at night,” she remembered. “We could do that again. We could have these cookies and some milk, every night. And then brush our teeth.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. So she repeated it five or six other ways, until I told her to get down off the stool and go away.
And, as usual, I felt that this Must have been what Peter and John and James were like on the Mount of Transfiguration. They see the amazing unveiled beauty of God, and they immediately begin to formulate a plan. “We could build tents,” they say, “right here, and we could live here for always with you in these tents. For always.”
I know we are no where near the Feast of the Transfiguration. We are down in the dust of ordinary time, ticking off Sunday after Sunday leading up to Christ the King. The gospel for today is Jesus irritating and insulting the crowds and the Pharisees in the temple. He isn’t shining in glory. He’s there, laying out the plain way of truth, so plain that no one around him wants to see it.
But every time, no matter the propers for Sunday, a child rocks back and forth on a stool, and begins to try to make a plan, I always feel transported to that low mountain, and to the shining glory of God.
Not because I love being with children that much, nor that their precious little lives, cough, imbue the very atmosphere with transcendent wonder. That’s not the kind of mother I am. No, it’s the plan making–we’ll do this, and then we’ll do that, and we will go on doing it forever and ever. I will never stop tasting this glorious cookie, living out this perfectly calibrated schedule, reaching for a spiritual consummation that must just be right within my grasp. Only this new plan will make me happy and ok. This reaching out for glory now, it feels like to me, happens a dozen times a day. And I do it too.
Something works. Something clicks into place. Some new understanding is gained, and I want to hang onto it, to institutionalize it, to have it be the thing that saves me forever. I want even, perhaps, in my zeal, to worship and adore it. Let me just pause and build a tent for this, I think, so I can go on like this forever.
But immediately that I have thought out and fixed the plan, the moment is gone and I go back down the mountain and into ordinary life, forgetting about the insight, the glimpse of perfection, the thing that would have made everything wonderful if only I fixed it and did it in that singular way forever.
It’s that I don’t like the unknown. I don’t want to face the anguish and sorrow that’s waiting for me around the corner. I want an easy safety, the law and the prophets, and really Jesus himself contained, managed, decanted into an easily recognizable earthly habitation that I can visit when it suits me. I don’t want to look at Jesus transformed and broken by suffering.
The symmetry and order of all the tents of Israel, arrayed around the mountain while Moses was up communing with God, that’s so safe and good. The fire stays up there, and so does God. Blink and there you are at the foot of the cross–no tent, and the fire is being been quenched by suffering, by God himself absorbing the consequences and brokenness of all our badly made plans.
Anytime I want to fix myself somewhere and not change, and not move, to try to hang onto the pitiful moment of glory I have in my grubby fingers, to turn away from and avoid the appalling glory of the cross, I’m, well, I’m no better than Peter and all the other disciples, which isn’t nothing, but isn’t that great either.
But Jesus drags us away from our plans, from our surety in the order and safety of the world, from our desire for things unchanging to be the way it is now, rather than fixing our changeable nature to God himself. We don’t get to see the glory yet, not in its fullness. We have to wait, to walk on through the valley of the shadow of death. And then, much later, when everything is as it should be, when God’s better plans have superseded our own, then we get to see the fullness that we yearn for now.
So stop teetering on the stool. Put down the cookie. Go to church.
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