Recently, I listened to the pastor at my church encouraging the congregation to recognize the "WOW!" in God's creation. This is something that I know that I have done my whole life. To put into words the way I view the world, I feel it important to share something that I read as part of a class while in in Belize as a junior in college. It was shared with me as an assignment, but it has continued to stay with me since and has deeply affected how I experience God's creation as I explore it and participate in it in my adventures. So here it is. I haven't requested the rights to replicate it, and don't know that I have the rights to post it, but because I found it online somewhere and I feel strongly about it, it is worth the risk. I hope you enjoy it and invite you to comment on it if you want. If you are interested more in the author, please visit his website at http://www.murraypura.com/index.html. Otherwise, enjoy!
TLaSS,
Joshua
The
Divine Game of Pinzatski
By Murray Pura (December 1988)
A
curious and entertaining game was played by Ellen Pinzatski and her
husband. They only played it once a year
and then only when they were camped far out in the mountains by a silent
turquoise lake they had named Infrequent.
The game consisted of one of them pointing out a natural object, say a
moss-swaddled cedar stump or a high voluminous cloud formation, and the other
stating, to the best of their ability, what characteristic of God was expressed
in that object. The idea for the game
had arisen from Paul’s statement in Romans, “Since the creation of the world
God’s invisible qualities, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have
been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.” No sort of score was kept, and there were no
rules, except that the person interpreting the natural object had to be able to
explain to the other, if it was not patently obvious, how they had come to see
a particular aspect of God’s being manifested in the stump or cloud or grazing
elk. The game would go on for hours,
days, weeks, as long as the two of them were able to stay in their tent by the
lakeside. Once they had retired – both
worked and they had no children – there was, of course, much more time for the
game. They never tired of it.
I first heard about the game when I was chatting with
Arthur, Ellen’s husband, after a church study group on the nature of God. Arthur explained how Ellen and he played the
game by Lake Infrequent every year, toyed with his
teacup as we talked about God’s various characteristics, and finally asserted,
“Abstractions are a poor second cousin to analogies. Analogies always get you closer to the truth. Never rely on an abstraction if you can get
an analogy.”
This coming from a professor of mathematics and
physics! I asked him why he felt this
was so. “Because abstractions establish
distance, cool, logical, objective distance,” he answered. “Analogies get you in close so you can smell
the sweat. They’re warm-blooded, make
you feel something. That’s why the Bible
is loaded with them when it gets down to talking about God.”
I mentioned the theory that the Bible was loaded with
metaphors and analogies because it was addressed primarily to an uneducated and
naïve peasant population. Arthur
snorted. “If you believe that,” he told
me, “you’ll believe anything.”
Perhaps it was this encounter that led to the Pinzatski’s
invitation to join them on a camping trip that August. I was purportedly and Old Testament scholar,
at least Princeton had said so, and they may
have felt I needed a good dose of the analogical to set my lecture notes
straight. I took them up on the invitation,
if for no other reason than to get out of the city for a week. I threw a pair of jeans into a dufflebag, a
bottle of insect repellent and a canteen.
They had been quite firm about doing all the cooking. “Think of it as spending a week at our
house,” said Ellen. “Would you bring
over your own plate and fork?”
The
drive out to Lake
Infrequent was long,
about nine or ten hours. Part of the
highway was out through pale desert, but the lake was situated high above on a
plateau, a good hour down a potholed dirt track that shook my teeth. The four-person tent was erected; Ellen got a
fire going, and Arthur started wrapping corn cobs in aluminum foil. I had just brought several containers from
the lake when Ellen said in a clear voice: “Ash.”
Arthur looked up from his cornhusking. “Ash,” he repeated. “I can’t believe we’ve never talked about that
one before.”
I set the water down.
The pair of them were oblivious to me.
Arthur took his time, rolled a few more cobs of corn into tight foil
bundles. Finally, he said, “The purity
of God.”
“How so?” demanded Ellen, raking white coals to another
area of the fire so they could be used for cooking purposes.
“Because God uses fire to burn what is unholy.”
“But God also uses fire to burn what is holy, such as
sacrifice, or he uses fire in order to make something holy,” retorted Ellen.
“All right,” mumbled Arthur, bringing a bowl of wrapped
corn cobs over to the fire and placing them on the coals. “But whatever God uses the fire for, ash
symbolizes something that has been consumed because the purity of God required
it.”
While they were eating the meal, Arthur pointed to the
ground in front of him as he was chewing.
“What would you say about that, Ellen?”
Ten or twelve ants were staggering off under bits of corn that had
fallen in the dirt.
Ellen laughed. “I
think we’ve come close to something like this before, but okay, I’ll go with
it. To me, these ants express God’s
desire to use what is apparently weak and puny to do those tasks which are most
difficult and arduous. God is rarely the
show-off. Most of the time he likes to
work at the big things quietly, operating from a person we’d least expect his
power to be present in. I think it also
has to do with God’s innate pleasure in surprises. It may also have something to do with his
sense of humor.”
“Good,” commented Arthur, sipping at his tin mug of
coffee, “good.”
When we were washing plates down by the lake and the sun
set in a line of bright green, Ellen asked, “And this particular sunset?”
“This particular sunset,” responded Arthur using a bit of
sand to clean grease off his plate, “expresses the peacefulness of God, that
inner tranquility represented by his use of the color green in the creation of
pastures and meadows and forests. In
fact, green is the dominant color found both on dry land and under the sea,
indicating God’s preference for it and suggesting that a great deal of his
character is bound into a correct under-standing of that color and all its
shades.
I could not believe the Pinzatskis took the game so
seriously and I told Arthur this as the two of us were putting out the
fire. Sparks glittered at our feet like a distant
galaxy. Arthur poked a large orange coal
with his stick. “Who is to say,” he
asked me, “which is the proper way of approaching God and the universe? As a child or with a pretense to
sophistication?”
The game got underway again the next morning after
breakfast while we were hiking along the lakeshore. Arthur mentioned the trout basking in the
sunlit shallows. Ellen said it had to do
with God’s pleasure in creating freshwater creatures who enjoyed a lazy moment
as much as any human did. In the
afternoon, when we reached an alpine meadow that was solid yellow with flowers,
Arthur said it had to do with God’s extravagance, what he called, “The
appropriate slaughter of the fatted calf at the appointed season.” On another meadow that was wind-swept and
barren of color, when Arthur’s hand inadvertently revealed a tiny, hidden
flower of a purple tint, Ellen declared it had to do with God’s frugality. I laughed.
“So a balance is struck,” I said.
“Of course,” Arthur responded soberly. “God is all balances struck.”
By the
third day, I was ready for the city. It
was not that the game was the only thing being verbalized. Far from it.
Arthur discussed his work in the field of physics quite freely and Ellen
was not adverse to debating the finer points of Shakespeare and James
Joyce. But I began to feel as if I were
starting to see the world as they did and this was a disturbing sensation. Ellen would point at something and I would
come up with an answer faster than Arthur, though I never vocalized it, and I
knew I was really in trouble when I began to mull over whether my
interpretation of the natural object was closer to the truth about God than
Arthur’s or Ellen’s.
On the fourth day, I was considering various excuses or
ploys I might use in order to get them to return to the city a few days
early. I could always tell them I needed
to revise some of my lecture notes because of our camping trip and that I
needed to do this before classes began the following Tuesday. We were hiking high on a ridge of boulders
and dead grey trees and I had decided to spring this excuse on them the moment
we stopped for lunch when an immense shadow passed over my face and an
incredibly violent beating of wings filled my head. I thought of death, ducked my head, threw
myself down on the ground.
“A golden eagle!” cried Ellen. “My God!”
I lifted my head and the bird was there, dark and light
and fiercely beaked, moving like a scythe across the sun’s arc. Arthur was the first to yell “golden eagle!”
It was obvious that they had never come across a golden
eagle in the wild before. Ellen, gaping
after the bird, did not respond. I got
to my knees, watched the enormous bird drop towards a white mountain, and I
spoke, answering Arthur.
“Freedom,” I said.
“God’s freedom to be God without a single chain, a single
restraint. His utter liberty to be the
wild God.”
The three of us stared after the eagle until it was too
small. Then we looked at one another,
smiled and continued our hike. I said
nothing about going back to the city at lunch.
A line had been crossed. I would
now play the game along with Ellen and Arthur.
The next three days were a brilliant collage. Nothing was inanimate anymore, but neither
did anything exist in terms of its own spirit as an animist would have it. Every rock and tree and bird became a flicker
of God’s fingers, a certain tilt of his head, a play of light and darkness in
his eyes. Doors to God were springing
open throughout the entire cosmos and I gazed as a child gazes at his first
thunderstorm. I peered at God through
flames, through water, glimpsed him in the visage of a doe. His laughter rang out of the throats of
birds; his shout was in the waterfall; I heard him whistling to himself as the
wind scoured the cliffs and deadfall. At
night, I did not sleep under stars but under God.
This was
not the only camping trip I took with Ellen and Arthur. Over the next six years, I joined them each
August for a week by Lake
Infrequent. I actually did revise my lecture notes, not
once but four or five times. And our
three imaginations became virtually inseparable.
The final night we ever camped together, Arthur and I put
out the fire once more. Sparks whirled as Arthur stirred with his
stick.
“Man is born to trouble,” he quoted from Job, “as the
sparks fly upwards.”
“Meaning what about God?” I challenged him.
He did not hesitate.
“Meaning God is not soft. If he
thinks a person needs to go through something in order to carve more glory out
of him or her, he’ll do it. He might
weep, but he’ll do it.”
Four months later, Arthur was diagnosed with cancer of
the lung, the liver, and the stomach.
The opened him, took a look, and stitched him back up again. They gave him maybe half a year. When I saw him at church after the diagnosis,
he had lost weight but not his wit. He
pointed at his chest and asked me, “What does this say about God?”
I shook my head, kept my lips in a straight line. Arthur laughed.
“The resurrection of the body,” he answered. “God is not interested in phantoms. That’s why the earth is an earth of
substance. Heaven will be the same. The Incarnation, my friend, the
Incarnation. He’s committed him-self.”
Arthur was not the kind to take a lot of drugs or to end
his days between four white walls. “When
this cancer releases me,” he said, “it will not do so in the presence of what
is fashioned by man. I will go into the
mountains and let it kill me before the face of God.”
He and Ellen threw a banquet of salads and roasts and
wines for all their friends one clear evening in July and the next morning the
two of them left for an extended camping trip in the vicinity of Lake Infrequent. Ellen returned alone one month later,
notified the authorities, then came to see me.
“He took the canoe while I was asleep,” she said. “He didn’t leave any note. I thought he might come back. I waited two weeks.”
She paused and looked down at the rug, at her slender
brown fingers. “I know now what he meant
the afternoon before when he mentioned something about only God knowing where
the body of Moses was.”
As far as I know, Ellen did not stop playing the
game. I know I did not. Nor did either of us stop camping by Lake Infrequent,
though we never went there together.
One August night I had just pitched my tent when there
was a remarkable display of shooting stars, a true firefall. I got into my sleeping bag and lay outside of
the tent and watched the sky for hours.
I caught myself imagining how Arthur might have interpreted a shooting
star in terms of God’s personality. Then
I had the sensation that he was right beside me, playing the game, answering my
challenge, only I was not able to make out his words. The sensation did not frighten me, but it did
keep me awake half the night wondering if Arthur knew all the correct
interpretations not, or whether, in light of his different perspective on God,
he had to start all over playing the game that could never end.
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