Friday: No Cosmic Loom?
WEEK 2
FRIDAY
NO COSMIC LOOM?
Colossians 1:16-18
We considered yesterday the sixth pillar upon which the gospel rests: the Word become a total way of life—the kingdom of God. Humanity needs something to obey totally, so that through that obedience all life is brought into coherence and total meaning. Without this life is at loose ends and lacks drive, for it has no total goal. In sonnet cxxxvii, Edna St. Vincent Millay notes the chaos of an interminable stream of “unquestioned” facts that is “daily spun; but there exists no loom / To weave it into fabric.”
There is “no loom to weave it into fabric”—no cosmic loom on which these unrelated facts can be woven into the fabric of total meaning. Life lacks meaning. Hence our minds are uneasy. We haven’t found the ultimate It! We turn to the totalitarianisms of the day—Fascism, Nazism, Communism—to find something we can totally obey and thus find total meaning. But these half answers let us down and disillusionment sets in. For we are really looking for the kingdom, God’s answer to our total need. We are homesick for our native land—the kingdom of God—and don’t know what’s the matter with us. When we find the kingdom, we know instinctively that this is it! The quest is over. A businessman, who had spent a fortune on pagan psychiatrists but grew worse, when he heard the message of the kingdom, took it joyfully saying, “This is it! My quest is over.” And he rose to magnificent spiritual heights in following the way of the kingdom.
It would be a strange thing for God, who has put order and law in the atom and the cell, in fact in everything God has made, to leave humankind without plan and meaning and goal where we need it most—in our total life. To leave us at loose ends there would be a cosmic blunder. But God hasn’t left us at loose ends—God gave us the kingdom of God, God’s head-on and total answer to our total need.
O Lord God, we thank you that love provided for our needs and for our greatest need—the need of the kingdom. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: The kingdom shall be the cosmic loom upon which I shall weave all the facts of my life this day.
* Edna St. Vincent Millay, sonnet cxxxvii, Collected Poems (Harper & Row). Copyright © 1939, 1967 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis.