Abyss

From the music stand, a pastor sings today the following lyrics:

My desire to be like Jesus . My desire to be like You.
Your Spirit fills me. Your love overwhelms me.
In word and deed. To be like You.

And I feel. Oh. I don’t want to be histrionic. But I feel like the pastors in my church could care less. They could care less that this theology is a problem for me. That this theology is not there in the Gospels. That this theology is driving a wedge between us. A metal wedge that is descending through the grain of us. Through the heart of the tree that I imagined once was us.

He sings these lyrics toward the end of his sermon on worship. He sings these lyrics to demonstrate the exact song that 25 or so years ago brought him into an emotional relation—a spiritual relation—with Jesus and with God. The exact lyrics in which he learned God’s emotional nature first hand. The exact lyrics that redefined worship for him and made worship an opening of the heart to God. For him. And an opening of God’s great heart to him.

The exact lyrics that opened the Niagara Falls of his emotions. And after which he cried and cried. Cried a river. Cried a cascade. Cried a connection between the body of water that was him and the body of water that was God.

And so these are holy words for him. These are authentic spirit words for him. These are sacred God words for him. And so they are at the center of his theology. At the center of his understanding of what God has asked of him and at the center of how he responds to God. At the center of how God responds to him. Some words in a song.

And so I feel like now there is this abyss that separates us. An abyss that was there all the time but now. But now it is apparent. Now its great width and infinite depth are apparent.

And I feel like I am on a small island in the middle of the Niagara River. A few hundred feet above the falls. It’s night. The roaring fills my ears and my mind and my soul. And there is nothing but the dark and the stars and the white black waves the size of monsters everywhere I look.