A Moment, Like Any Other, Fraught With Destiny

February 1, 2008 by djackson.

Photographer Luis Draper crystallized the moment back in 1995. As a New York commuter slogged through the subway station at Herald Square, he crossed in front of a mural depicting Michelangelo’s creation scene from the Sistine Chapel. Draper snapped his shutter just as the top-coated, brief-cased toiler trudged into the gap between the outstretched fingers of Adam and the Almighty. (http://www.nytstore.com/ProdDetail.aspx?prodId=16489)

Now it hit me that here was a scene several steps diluted from its origin: God created humanity in a moment of unimaginable beauty; a genius painted it with masterful skill on the ceiling of a great cathedral; someone slapped up a copy on the grimy wall of a public transportation facility; a photographic artist snapped a black-and-white of it; I saw a photo of the photo on crumpled newsprint in the New York Times. It’s a long way from Eden to Corpus Christi, Texas in more senses than just geography and every step seems to be a descent.

Yet whatever moved Draper to aim his F-stop when and where he did, his photo spoke to me as a reminder that each of us lives all of our moments in the holy instant of new creation. When Paul writes in Colossians 1.17 that Christ “is before all things, and in Him all things hold together,” he paints his verb in the vibrant pigment of the Greek perfect tense and thus splashes that primeval past into the present moment. “Christ,” insists Norman L. Geisler, “is not only the One through whom all things came to be, but also the One by whom they continue to exist.” Thus Eugene Peterson renders it, “He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment.”

All of which means that my existence from one keystroke of this blog to the next, yours from the reading of one word to the one following, is no more on autopilot than was Adam’s between lump-of-clay and living being. We with our original ancestor have indeed fallen far from original innocence but have journeyed not one nanosecond from the conscious care of our Creator. Every instant pulsates with holiness in the lightning crack exchange of God’s life-giving power.

So what am I waiting for?

In class discussion this week my students sharply debated the value of time spent in menial - and perhaps meaningless - drudgery. A character in a novel devotes untold hours to illuminating a manuscript of a document he does not understand. Is this wasted days or the opus dei? The conversation crackled with insight and energy until one dedicated pastor of a dying church confessed, “I’ve spent the past several years drawing on a lambskin.” He lived small days of skinny service - slim enough to fit between those two outstretched fingers.

“It is the deep today which all men scorn,” claimed Ralph Waldo Emerson, “the rich poverty which men hate; the populous, all-loving solitude which men quite for the tattle of towns. HE lurks, he hides - he who is success, realy, joy and power. One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that everyday is Doomsday.” When, in one of the most famous scenes in all of C. S. Lewis, a character challenged with salvation seeks to put it off until “the first moment I can,” his surgeon-evangelist-tormentor insists, “This moment contains all moments.”

Now granted, this can be a lot to keep in mind when you have to blow your nose or do the dishes or shave your armpits. How is one to electrify such muddy incarnation with some sort of Shekinah of holiness? But you see that’s just the point: God does not require that we sanctify the moment; only that we recognize its inherent sanctity. It isn’t that I can never goof off because every moment counts, but rather that goofing off - if that’s really the calling of this present instant - counts already. A grimy toilet becomes an altar and I kneel before it not only because it’s the only way my brush can reach to back of the bowl but because genuflection is appropriate ergonomics for the work of worship.

God grant us grace to live our lives in the focused power of that photograph. We may be five - or five million - degrees removed from creation’s sixth day but we are not five millionths of a moment from the Creator’s care.

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