A Brittle Crazie Glass

As the worst has blown over, we resume our normal transmission. I began this entry the Monday before Easter, and finished it today.

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THE WINDOWS.

LORD, how can man preach thy eternall word ?
He is a brittle crazie glasse :
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
This glorious and transcendent place,
To be a window, through thy grace.

But when thou dost anneal in glasse thy storie,
Making thy life to shine within
The holy Preachers, then the light and glorie
More rev'rend grows, and more doth win ;
Which else shows watrish, bleak, and thin.

Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one
When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and aw : but speech alone
Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
And in the eare, not conscience ring.
~ George Herbert

It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince
~ Herbert Zbiegniew in "Elegy of Fortinbras"

Man is a brittle crazie glass. We are unsound, liable to fall to pieces at any moment. And is that it then? My life carries no truth of its own unless God's truth is burned into me to bring that testimony into focus. My words mean nothing unless my colours are a witness to Christ's glory--unless I live in a manner that testifies to the reality of the love of an unseen God. An unseen God who allows pain, who allows dreams to fail, who is as full of wrath as he is full of grace. To quote a friend: "the problem of God has yet to be solved." If it had been solved, we would have moved on from God. If the problem of God can be resolved, then he is just an idea and we wouldn't really need him. Then he would just be a convenient scapegoat when life gets too difficult, or a prop, a kind of totem from which one may draw strength. I think after all this time, and all I've learnt, I still believe precisely because the problem of God has yet to be solved.

Speech alone, what can it do? My identity as a speaking being separates me so completely from another--even if speech forms the waterways of meaning. In the elegy, Fortinbras is guilty for speaking and surviving Hamlet, and having nothing to show for it. Every act of speech cannot escape the bubble of our self-interest. These words, what can they do? They cannot reach you as I wish them to reach you, because I speak for my own sake. Are we then born into a state of pathological self-destruction? Unable to love for the sake of another. Dare we believe that we can find a way to see beyond ourselves? If now I see as through a glass, darkly, will there be a time when I can look clearly into eternity and find coherence there?

So I'm looking for a word, the Word, that forms the guarantee for the meaning of all other words. So that they're not just empty words that fall to the ground once spoken. Like that guarantee God gives in Isaiah: My word will not return to me empty. Words that are doctrine and life, that batter one's conscience and that demand reaction. Words that speak not belatedly to the dead Hamlet, not useless words, but words that speak life. John Chapter 1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Jesus is known as the Word incarnate. Such a claim to guarantee all surely demands a reaction: you know me, thus you know the Father and thus you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. I'm looking for a guarantee, that at the end of it all, the pain wasn't worth nothing. Pain that makes life so inescapably real, it cannot be an illusion. Pain that demands a meaning. Pain that burns doctrine into life and life into doctrine, annealing it like colour is annealed onto glass to make the stained glass windows that shine gloriously in the light of the rising sun. So I'm looking...