Christian Living
My wife and I were sitting around talking about the times leading up to our marriage 28 years ago. When we were first engaged she took off to New Jersey and stayed with a family member for a month. At the time I didn’t know why but later she told me that she wanted to get away and have time to think about the seriousness of the matrimonial move she was about to make. My wife is attractive and she has always had to rebuff the advances of men. Fortunately I’ve had the good sense to leave that to her to deal with as she sees fit. Jealously is an express lane to madness and I have enough natural defects to keep me occupied without adding the spiritual equivalent of crack addiction. But to move on…
As my wife (and this was not our first time talking of these things) described the guys who accosted her from time to time there was a particular guy who made a little headway. She never explicitly said that he did. But it was something about her description, some intangible element that, as I listened, completed a circuit in my mind. As she spoke I abruptly said, “You kissed him didn’t you?” At first she was a little taken aback that I had made this quick deduction. But I could also tell by her eyes that I had hit upon the truth. And she said “yes”. Then she explained that once she did she realized that she really did want to marry me, and that the reason she went to New Jersey was accomplished. She had to know if she really wanted to get married and this was her way of finding out.
The springboard I wish to use from this story is the importance of the intangible elements in life. Of course I do hope it doesn’t feel like too much of an anti-climax from what seemed to start out as an episode on the Oxygen channel. Sorry.
There is far, far more in life that is intangible than tangible. The great example of tangibility, the scientific method, is obviously very useful as far as it goes. But it is not what drives the heart of things no matter how much many would have us believe to the contrary. When the woman who stole another woman’s baby was brought to King Solomon to judge which woman was the rightful mother he was not guided by a strict interpretation of law. He commanded that the baby be cut in half with each woman getting a half. Solomon knew that the real mother’s love would cause her to give up the child rather than have this happen. So the woman who was willing to give up the child was judged the mother. This was wisdom - an intangible. We make judgments and assessments about people and various situations daily. The judgments may not always be right but that’s how it is. Those intangible judgments drive more of life than any calculated empirical approach ever did or will.
Astronomers do not judge whether or not a distant star has a planet circling it by observing the planet. The distance is too great. They observe a “wobble” in the star caused by the disturbance in gravity of an orbiting planet. They also say that most of the matter in the universe, otherwise known as dark matter, is not even observable. That’s a pretty big intangible. If you watch some of the forensic crime shows you see that often people are snared in a crime, even after years have passed, because of the intangibles - the things not seen with the eye. The “wobbles” in their well crafted alibis caused by the disturbance in gravity of truth coming to light over time. The things that are not seen are eternal.
We are losing the sense of importance of intangibility. Our lives are being incrementally filled with the calculated and the bureaucratic rule in an effort to control life. The effect is slow death. This morning I saw a spot on television about how the number of people in the military who are trained to blow taps on the bugle at the funerals of veterans who die daily is so low that they now have bugles into which a computer chip is placed that plays a digital rendition of taps while the ersatz bugler simply holds the instrument to his or her lips. Of course some will argue that they see no problem with that. In the interests of efficiency of course. Here I saw one more intangible, the glue that holds life together, become dry and brittle, loosing vitality like a waterless plant. Will we wake up in time before we have allowed all the sap to drain from the tree of life?
To allow the intangibles to be replaced with the rules of man is to lose the mystery of life and to be dominated by a very harsh and myopic ruler. It hastens the time when Eliot said the world would die not with a bang but a whimper. When I contemplate such things it is only my belief in God’s providence that provides a firm place to stand.
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