Glimpsing Something More

It's been an interesting few weeks, and facing one of my fears allowed me to put it into perspective.

On Memorial Day I had the opportunity to go rock climbing.  Not on an artificial wall, on a rock face that has stood for thousands of years.  It's worth noting that I have a mild fear of heights.  I suppose it's not so much the height itself, but the fall and the splat that my tender meat sack would make as I collided with the ground below.

All the ropes were secured and the equipment set up by a guy who knows what he's doing.  I watched my wife disappear over the cliff edge and, several minutes later, heard her shout back up that she was done.  Now, I'm not exactly sure how far it was from the top of this cliff to the forest floor below, my guess is approximately 80 feet, but I could be wrong.

I hooked in, much more secure than my mind was giving me credit for and approached the edge backwards.  "Alright just lean back and walk over the edge."  Ha, easier said than done.  I took a few minutes to collect my courage and took a few steps over the edge and began descending the Limestone rock face.

About halfway down I was encouraged to turn around and take a look at the view.  I stopped myself from descending, which is incredibly easy to do (the physics used in climbing are simply fascinating).  I rotated myself around on the rope and looked out.

In front of me stretched part of Hocking Hills State Park, near the part where it becomes contiguous with Hocking State Forest.  I was sitting equal with the tops of some of the Evergreen trees, their limbs stretching skyward while their dead needles covered the forest floor.  I could see branches twitching with fauna activity.  In that moment I oddly found peace.  The fear that had existed before my first step off the cliff edge had faded away, thoughts of chemotherapy were fleeting, the interest accumulating on my student loans didn't matter, the medical bills that have been accumulated to keep me on the path to a clear outlook seemed insignificant. For a moment, the world as I knew it seemed to stop, and I had an overwhelming sense of "It Is Well".  I completed my descent and spent the rest of the day engrossed in that feeling.

Columbus Mennonite Church, my home congregation (that's an odd thing to say),  has been going along with an Eastertide theme of "Practicing Resurrection", which was kicked off with a reading of Wendell Berry's Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front .  The theme lead, of all possible places, to the concept of Jubilee,  which within context of this post also directly coincides with a specific translation of the Lord's Prayer.  The translation in question uses the language "forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."

One Sunday, the pastor announced that the church was going to create a Jubilee fund that would collect money, over and above traditional tithes and offerings, and then divide it equally among not just members but also regular attenders.  If you had any student loan debt (check) or any other debt that you consider burdensome (almost check), you were instructed to write your name on a slip of paper and place it in the offering basket as it came around.  I did, my wife did later.  Twenty-eight people total put their names in.

Without going into specifics, the amount raised far exceeded anyone's expectations.  I was stunned when I saw how much would be distributed.  The day the checks arrived in the mail I handed Renee's envelope to her.  We opened the envelope's together.  I knew it was coming.  I was so blown away by the generosity of the congregation, the belief in such a radical idea of Jubilee, of forgiving of debts, that I sat down at my table and wept.

I know, deep down, that I've witnessed something more fantastical than I have words to express.  I don't often talk about my faith, at least in concrete terms, mostly because I find it more of a journey of doubt and discovery.  Some of the more metaphysical aspects I've cast aside as literal happenings and treat them as part of a greater narrative.  But I know that God, whatever God is, calls humanity to be something more to (continue using the Lord's Prayer) create a place where, "you're will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven."  And to me, that means creating a society that is so alien to what we are living in now (with the demands of industry, oppression, fear, isolation, and scarcity).  I think I got a glimpse behind the torn veil, and just for a brief moment in time I saw, as my pastor affectionatley calls it, "the Kindom of God", and that's not a typo.