Saturday, September 20, 2025
Memorial of Saint Andrew Kim Tae-gĹŹn, Priest, and Paul ChĹŹng Ha-sang, and Companions, Martyrs
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Awestruck
Beloved:
I charge you before God, who gives life to all things,
to keep the commandment without stain or reproach
until the appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ
the King of kings and Lord of lords,
who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light,
and whom no human being has seen or can see.
Annie Dillard writes in various of her books, “We wake, if ever at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.… We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.… We miss the angels, we punch the clock, we fetch groceries, we drive, we dry the dishes, and we stub our toes on the curb. We stub our toes on angels.”
So begins an article by Rachel Pieh Johns in Plough Magazine’s autumn 2025 issue titled “The Super Natural: All That is Seen and Unseen.” She writes from twenty years of experience in Africa, “where miracles, angels, and the unexplainable are expected. The idea that the spiritual world intersects with the physical world is a given.”
In the same magazine Andrew Davison points out what should be obvious, but because we’re earthbound, we forget.
There is God, there is all that God creates, which is not God, and that is it. There is no middle ground, no intermediate hybrid (and that includes Jesus).
Coming at the idea of the supernatural from this perspective, by “nature” we would mean creation, and what lies above and beyond nature (the supernatural) is God. If that is what we mean by natural, then human beings are natural.
So are earthworms, and – significantly – so are angels and archangels, and even the most glorious of the seraphim. God created the heavens and the earth, and all things visible and invisible. God is God, and creatures are creatures.
Set out that way, only God is supernatural.
Andrew goes on to wonder about the way we as humans are – significantly, as he puts it – different from earthworms and also different from God. I can get confused as quickly as the next person, and I like to remember what Annie Dillard calls mystery – unknowns that remain unknown because we aren’t God, but that also remain fascinating to explore, because we aren’t earthworms.
Jesus said, “Seek and you shall find.” I don’t want to shorten the lifespan of any good question about life in our universe – not with Jesus’ promise in the back of my mind. But I also treasure the experience of awe as I notice when I “stub my toe on angels” and in that very moment, being struck in the spirit.
A negative way of being awestruck is breathless fear. Rachel remembers a friend in Somalia whose younger sister died.
Now, she was more explicit about her lack of faith. The problem with losing even the sliver of a sense she’d once had of being tethered to a benevolent, if absent, God was that fear replaced it. Where her sister had seen angels, Amina started to see dark beasts.
Rachel goes on to tell first of Amina’s transformative encounter with Jesus, “the man in white,” and then of her husband’s dream of Jesus, which changed him from the inside out:
One night he dreamed that he was trying to shut a door behind him, but it wouldn’t shut. He kept slamming it and slamming it, to no avail. He turned around to see what was blocking the door and there was Jesus, absorbing blow after blow with his body.
“Why not me?” Rachel asks. I want to be in the presence of Jesus as much as anybody, and know that I am, feel that I am, and be certain like Amina and her husband are certain.
Rescued from herself by her community, Rachel realized that those other folks’ experiences were just as much for her.
The dreams and visions of my husband and Amina are not for them alone. They are for the whole body of Christ. As I learn to welcome the stories of others into my life as part of God’s work in the wide, miraculous world, I am relearning how to wonder, to not insist on the literal and tangible. I am stubbing my toes on angels. God does speak, now in one way, and now in another. Do you not perceive it?
Now that is remarkable and inspiring. We are all in this together, and it’s wise for me to remember that every day. My eyes can then be open to watch for the goodness of God flowing into the lives of others, knowing that it’s for me, and you, and all of us … too.
As for the seed that fell on rich soil,
they are the ones who, when they have heard the word,
embrace it with a generous and good heart,
and bear fruit through perseverance.
Know that the LORD is God;
he made us, and his we are;
 (1 Timothy 6, Psalm 100, Luke 8)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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