“When passions run high, all bets are off.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because I am quoting the opening line of my “Note” to you last week. I want to follow up on those thoughts of last week with thoughts about the proverbial other side of the coin. If last week’s consideration was given to the impact on our lives of the turmoil of negative events and negative influences, today I want to consider the impact on our lives of those events and influences that shake and maybe even shatter the boundaries with and within which we live day by day.

     Isaiah, Simon, and Paul are nearly incredible characters in today’s Scripture readings. They are bluntly truthful about their human station, life circumstances, and general unworthiness before God ...UNTIL God approaches them and the Spirit of God intervenes. They go from being speechless in the face of this new relationship and mission to being capable of speaking and acting as God directs them to do, well beyond the boundaries they had accepting or even created in their lives until then.
     
     Genuine beauty can stop us in our tracks. Whether at sunrise or sunset at the mountaintop or at the ocean’s edge, in a concert venue when the purity or an instrument played or a series of notes sung by a voice whose quality defies description, in the quiet of the hospital room where you gaze into the eyes of your newly welcome child or grandchild, or any setting where the eyes or the voice of the person before you shouts within you that love has a new messenger... we might tremble with joy but lack a place to go, a word to say, or a thing to do.

     It is written into our very being to be open to this manner of ecstatic response, for this is how we are called to be before God. When true ecstasy or its promise occurs in our lives, our human vulnerability leaves us open to its true good or to a perversion of that good. Genuine awe, appreciation, and even love are the better side of the coin from slavish submission or even addiction. What I see, hear, taste, touch, feel... do they lock me into a slavish craving and pursuit... Or open me to the wonder of the gift of God that is beyond myself and even beyond my imagining? Why and how does God do this? Love. What does God ask of us in response? Love. What does true love look, sound, and feel like? Christ.