The other day in a session with a spiritual directee, our conversation led us to explore Divine punctuation. Gracie Allen once said, “Never put a period where God puts a comma.” We seem to endlessly edit God’s text. Maybe God’s story is meant to be the ultimate run-on-sentence punctuated with commas, semicolons and the occasional underscoring.
Make a fist and look at it… really study it. Your fist probably looks like a point, a dot, or a period, open your hand and it’s a comma; the former is closed the latter is receptive. God seems to turn periods into commas. Oswald Chambers once said, “Sometimes it looks like God is missing the mark because we are too short-sighted to see what [God’s] aiming for.” Think of the book of Acts in the Greek Testament, Jesus ascends to the Father… period? or comma? Christ’s followers are afraid cloistered in a room in corner of Jerusalem – period? Or comma? The fledgling community mourns the death of Stephen – period? Or comma? Peter is imprisoned, Paul is shipwrecked, the book of Acts itself comes to an end – period? Or comma and comma and comma; conjunction, conjunction, conjunction; and, and, and, and,
So how do to reconcile Divine grammar of the never-ending comma with our need or desire for closure? Might redemption ultimately look like re-opening the things in our lives we closed with a period? Maybe closure involves living into and owning our pain, hurts and disappoints? Maybe grace is living into God’s comma; and in so doing our story finds its rightful place and hopeful meaning.
In this way we may be correct is saying that life is pointless, it is without a point, without a period, without a fist. Life becomes open commas of relationality, conjunctive and connective in Godlove.
Peace, dwight
