Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

One of my favorite words in scripture is the word “manna.” Generally, we understand it as meaning something roughly synonymous with “bread,” and for good reason: scripture frequently refers to it as bread (“Man did eat the bread of angels,” Psalm 78:25; God “gavest them bread from heaven,” Nehemiah 9:15), and right out of the gate, God calls it bread throughout Exodus 16.

But that’s not what “manna” means. It literally means, “What is it?” It’s called “manna” because, as we see in our Office Reading from Exodus, the first thing out of the mouths of the children of Israel when they saw it was, “What is it?” And I think this shows us something deeply profound about the goodness God constantly desires to give us: we’re not always able to recognize it as a thing that’s desirable.

The context in Exodus for all this is a complaint—the newly-liberated children of Israel yearn for the apparent abundance they had in Egypt when they sat by the fleshpots and ate their fill of bread (16:3). They yearn, in other words, for a return to oppression…not because they’re keen on being oppressed (no one is), but because oppression has been familiar: they know all about it; it’s predictably terrible and terribly predictable; they’ve learned how to adapt to it; it’s the shape of their lives; it’s defined their expectations and informed their sense of what goodness is or is capable of being. While they’ve been physically liberated, their thinking, their being, their way of relating to each other and to God are all still bound up with those notions of the good that were completely informed by their oppressive circumstances. While the horizons of their becoming have expanded, they’ve been unable to expand with them, in part because the new world, the new way-of-being on which they’re embarking doesn’t look like anything recognizably good to them. Consequently, the invitation into a new life of expansive and liberating love has been met with some incredulity if not outright hostility…because this new life means an end to all that they thought they knew and all that they thought they were—which has been startling and painful and largely unwelcome.

They’re being asked, in other words, to receive a new imagination, a new mind, a new life. They’re being asked to walk by faith into a goodness that will remain unimaginable to them, even as it fits their imaginations, minds, lives to receive that unimaginable goodness, and (paradoxically, mystically), to become themselves recognizable instances of the unimaginably good.

I’ve mentioned or talked about this before (and I’ll probably be mentioning and talking about it for the rest of my life), but one of my favorite and challenging quotations from Simone Weil’s “Gravity and Grace” is this one: “Always, beyond the particular object whatever it may be, we have to fix our will on the void—to will the void. For the good which we can neither picture nor define is a void for us. But this void is fuller than all fullnesses. If we can get as far as this we shall come through all right, for God fills the void.”

Dear beloved Friend! So often, grace comes to us, the good comes to us, and we’re apt to say: “what is it?” And so often, the unknown good proves itself our bread.

Which is to say: God constantly invites us into the goodness we cannot imagine, picture, or define. And what we’re being asked to do is not to wrap our heads around this goodness or attempt to shape this goodness according to our expectations of what it might be or ought to be in order to make it graspable, but to allow God to imagine that goodness in us, to allow the goodness we cannot imagine to shape our imaginings and to grasp us. The opportunity before us, in these strange times of great uncertainty, is to walk by faith in, with, and towards the Goodness we cannot certainly define, but which is more certain than all of our certainties could ever hope to be.

It’s there, in the space we’ve discovered in prayer and silence, the empty space made by grace for grace to fill, that God will give us nourishment in any and every wilderness!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+