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THERE’S A MYSTICAL congruity between this image on my computer screen and the view outside my office window. I can’t see beyond the surface of either. All visible reality is layered, filtered, limited. I can’t see the wind, the pollen it carries, or the molecules of air dancing within the breezes. The active insect world is invisible to my eye and within my inside world, I don’t smell the flowers drawing the bees or hear the goldfinches swooping down to the feeder.
Although the visible world beyond my window seems to be growing greener before my eyes and is humming with movement and life, there’s a flatness to it. It feels like a superficial skin, a portrayal of the thin outer surface of realities rich beyond comprehension.I’m keenly aware of the limitations of my human senses and wonder what it might be like to smell like a hunting dog, see like a hawk, or move through invisible realms like the angels.
That thought reminds me of a couple passages in The Book of Job. The language evokes a sense of great unknowns and forever unknowables. After describing the vastness of the heavens and power of storms at sea, the boundaries of light and darkness, Job says,
Indeed these are the mere edges of His ways,
And how small a whisper we hear of Him!
But the thunder of His power who can understand?
— Job 26:14
A few chapters later, God answers Job,
Who shut in the sea with doors,
When it burst forth and issued from the womb;
When I made the clouds its garment,
And thick darkness its swaddling band;
When I fixed My limit for it,
And set bars and doors;
When I said,
“This far you may come, but no farther.”
— Job 38:8-11
We can only know the edges of His ways—
This far we can go, but no farther—
How small a whisper—
What is the connection between these grand words from Job and my simple picture? The pretentious, almost grandiose ludicrousness of comparing my simple koan-like image and Scripture makes me laugh out loud; I hope it’s not blasphemous, but for what it is, here you are:
Both evoke the limitations of life on earth in human bodies in a space-time continuum. Thus far can we go, but no further.
