june 2008 newsletter...fire or fire?
I remember peeking out at the park behind our house in Delhi every October. As the community prepared to celebrate the Hindu festival of Dussehra, we would watch the annual erection of a fifty foot high effigy of the demon Ravana. The statue was crafted of papier mache and stuffed with firecrackers. On the night of the actual festival, someone playing the role of the god Rama would shoot a flaming arrow at Ravana to figuratively defeat evil for another year. A shower of fountains, cherry bombs, and bottle rockets would explode, hiss, boom out in every direction. From behind our glass windowpane, we would watch in fascinated terror as flames devoured the labor of several weeks in several minutes. The statue would sway, then collapse. In the morning, only a gray pile of ashes remained. I've never forgotten the shocking power of those fires.
As I prepare to board the plane for India tomorrow, I've been mulling over and over this concept of fire. T.S.Eliot was right: The only hope, or else despair, lies in the choice of pyre or pyre'to be redeemed from fire by fire. Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name behind the hands that wove the intolerable shirt of flame which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire consumed by either fire or fire.
We like to deem ourselves consumers but the advertisers know better. Fires consume us and we don't have the strength to fight them. Around and inside of us, flames of materialism, lust, bitterness, insecurity eat their way toward our core. In Mark 9, Jesus warns that it's better to cut off a hand that tempts us to sin than to find ourselves in eternal fire with both hands. He goes on mysteriously to utter this: 'For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.'
Over dinner last week, I asked a knowledgeable friend (she's writing her dissertation on a passage in Mark) about this passage. She pulled out a commentary that referenced the Old Testament command to salt all grain sacrifices. In this way, they would become a pleasing aroma to God. Hmm. Everyone will be salted with fire. The fire of judgment? Of persecution? Of Eliot's Love? That thought drove me to Paul's admonition to offer our bodies as living sacrifices. I want my life to count, to send up a pleasing aroma to God.
It's not a question of whether I am being consumed, it's a question of what or who is consuming me. I leave for India with a deep hunger for the fire of God to burn out all the other flames in my life. T.S. Eliot correctly named the fire of God 'Love.' I desperately want Jeremiah's complaint to be true of me: 'But if I say, "I will not mention him or speak any more in his name," his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.' Will you pray that this will be my experience in the coming months?
I also want to express my profound gratitude for all the beautiful letters, notes, and words of farewell I'm taking with me. I see increasingly how much this move and this new work are a joint effort. I will be praying for you, my friends, my spiritual family, that the fire of the Love of God will engulf your soul. May others see His flame burning in us and be drawn to its warmth, and may God receive glory through us all.
Your fellow pilgrim,
Amy