For my entire adult life, I’ve returned, again and again, to C. S. Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed”, usually to re-critique it from a subtle variation on the same basic complaint. In his meditation, Lewis observes a beam of light from the side, and has an insight that this looking at the beam of light from the side does nor reveal the light the same way that looking directly up into the beam does. My complaint is that maybe there are better things to do with light sources than examine their beams or stare directly into them. Perhaps I am just weird, but my preferred use for light sources is to illuminate spaces and the objects in those spaces.

I mean this both literally and metaphorically.

Today’s version of the complaint is no different, except today I want to suggest (or re-suggest) that this complaint I’ve been making is a Jewish one. And by “Jewish”, as always, I mean in accordance with Buber’s fundamental insight of I-Thou, which is the whence of my faith — the from-where — or to translate it into hippie, “where I’m coming from”.

Here is what Buber says in I-Thou, which I read as an expression of my complaint.

When you are sent forth, God remains-presence for you; whoever walks in his mission always has God before him: the more faithful the fulfillment, the stronger and more constant the nearness. Of course, he cannot attend to God but he can converse with him. Bending back, on the other hand, turns God into an object. It appears to be a turning toward the primal ground, but belongs in truth to the world movement of turning away, even as the apparent turning away of those who fulfill their mission belongs in truth to the world movement of turning toward.

It might be helpful here to re-quote Saint-Exupery:

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

I believe, with my entire stubborn Jewish faith that the famous Jew that so many people want to face, contemplate, love and worship, never wanted to be loved face-to-face in that romantic  way that lovers love, as they stare into each other’s eyes.

With Buber, I believe that this exceptional Jew very Jewishly wanted us to stand next to him in the light of creation, our backs warmed by his Father’s radiance, and look out upon a divinely-illuminated world with him.

Please do not hate me for saying these things, which I fully believe and consider of highest importance. I love Jesus, Christians and Christianity, but my love is a thoroughgoing Jewish love.

Hineini and amen.