The Gift of Suddenness

When our children were small, our nightly ritual always included tucking them into bed and reading them a story - Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series and later, Jack London. When in their pre-school play they pretended to read, we’d listen in on the stories that they would make up. Our daily routine would mix with whatever we were reading that week, like in a dream. But there was one word that they would say that would stir them to attention. It was always pronounced with more volume, and spoken bracketed between moments of silence: “…when SUDDENLY….” I remember watching them from around the corner. With that word, the “reader’s” eyes would open wide, looking at the “listener” whose eyes would open wide too, and that moment before the story continued suspended in that holy anticipation. They had learned that suddenness as one of the gifts of a story.


When lightning strikes, it does not hit the ground from the sky. It begins simultaneously from the ground and from the sky, following an invisible path of disturbed particles in the air. When the two lines meet halfway up, the spark ignites that path and crack! We are startled by the sound and the bright flash of light.

Parents are at home were catching up from a visit with their out-of-town son, having been treated to us to a gift of his presence for those three days, being with him in laughter and mutual delight. The phone rings and suddenly there is the voice of a nurse asking if they are the parents of.... Everything changes in the moment of suddenness; like lightning, there is a flash of illumination that reorients them. They stop what they are doing, become present to the emerged situation, considering possible responses. They are riveted on the reality of that moment, and despite their son's relieved "all clear" call a half hour later, it resonates in them the next morning. They have been changed by the suddenness.

In our Examen and in our Entering the Good Story, we may be given this gift of suddenness, these flashes of insight, these moments of awareness that blow us from our ordinary and snap us to attention, opening our eyes wide. We gain a certain quick kind of knowledge and growth during those times of concentrated attention and presence. As with lightning, we have been prepared by our lives for this flash. We have a trail of desire, need, memory, questioning that disturbs our air, invisibly breaking a trail for these moments of sudden insight. And the truest selves inside us long for the gift of presence with our ordinary, distracted selves, disturbing a path toward the laughter and mutual delight of union that we might call authenticity or self-discovery. The Examen and the experiences that we have in Entering the Good Stories simply ignite these paths.

We are each prepared by our subconscious longings for these flashes of vision. And like the Father of the Prodigal son that we will meet next Sunday, the God within us stands on the hill watching for the tiny speck of our approach on the path of our life’s disturbances, so that he can run down to meet us, and SUDDENLY….

But there is a complementary Gift of the Gradual, too. Perhaps this is one of the benefits of fasting. More on that tomorrow.

John
 


FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.