January 4, 2007 Ponder the Raven

I wonder if there was ever a moment when a cardinal sitting outside my window sat there in blazing splendor signifying nothing.

We benefit greatly from rabbinic commentary on all aspects of Hebrew Scripture and so too on the Burning Bush of Exodus though I do not believe any scholar has suggested that the Bush was in fact a cardinal sitting in blazing splendor. Rabbenau Bechaya suggests though that the Bush is a paradigm for all physical reality that being a spiritual creation of God is overwhelmed by a spiritual flow emanating from God, and that the Bush is not consumed is a sign of God’s providential sustaining of the universe: we are not alone.

It has also been stated that the Bush is a sign of humility, that God is present in the most trivial of things…a bush. And it has been stated that this was an early undeveloped exposure of Moses to God, later he could hear God directly absent the need of a visual structure unlike all other prophets of the Old Testament.

A theodicy, we are taught. Different from an epiphany, which is an insight, an idea made manifest; a theodicy is an experience of a god’s self-disclosure, that is it is a sacrament, a mediated experience of God. In the burning bush that was not consumed Moses experiences Yahweh’s total and infinite compassion, the God who remembers the people’s suffering and inspires the will of leaders to act on God’s behalf with the transforming power of God that saves without consuming: the Eucharistic wafer is eaten and there is no less the body of Christ, but the more of it in the world.

I sit before the window. The fires burn blue. Why this year for the first time do the blue birds come to the feeders in half dozens? The cardinal blazes in divine splendor, the blue bird simmers the sustaining and sanctifying truth of the divine superabundance available to eyes, ears, hands, and mouths of the blind, the deaf, the feeble, and the hungry. Ponder the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap....