Part of this week’s prayerful focus on Listening to God
Fire cuts steel.
I saw it as a child. I close my eyes and see it again. I stand in the shop and Dad, with singed, frayed holes splattered across his coveralls, turns on the tap of the acetylene tank. He watches the needle of the gauge hop to the right numbers. Then those big old hands that I love scrape the lighter before that hiss of gas. A spark, then a roaring blaze of heat. Eye on the flame, Dad opens up the oxygen tap. He adjusts the intensity of oxygen, the deep of the burn. The torch whispers blue, white hot at its core. I step back and Dad steps into it. Searing heat lays into black iron. An explosion of light, sparks, metal scatters across shop floor and my memory. Heat burns open the unbreakable.
It always made me wonder: that heat too welds all the pieces together again, into new shapes and formations. Screwing back the torch tanks, Dad lets the flame die. He reaches over to flip the switch of the MIG welder under the shop bench. The buzz fills my ears. Dad slips a welding rod into the electrode handle, checks the temperature. From behind tinted glass of my welding helmet, scorching white light flashes and glowing molten weaves, bleeding two pieces of iron into one. Sometimes Dad has me weld and I sew steel with a thread of fire.
Now, decades later, my Dad still cuts steel on the floor of his shop, grey hair showing at his temples, and I, with grey hairs of my own, think about how to torch into hearts, steely and hard. Some hearts need that. Mine does. Maybe all do. To be cut open, to be bled into something new, better.
I wonder if the answer doesn’t etch across paper, a story from thousands of years ago when God walked here. For the cosmos-quaking events of then still reverberates through now, echoing off the walls of our existence.
It’s the narrative of two sorrowing men, two men who have lost all that gives meaning to their world, men who are blind to Emmanuel, God with them, close enough to touch. They are on the road, like we are too. Groping, stumbling along.
They invite a stranger in. Isn’t that the first step we all take? The Stranger enters their grief, their world, their heart. And in the breaking of bread, in the giving thanks, in the eucharist, their scales fall off. They see God. The resurrected Jesus sups with them. He who they thought dead lives, walks, eats, communes. Their orbits recalibrate. They rejoice in equilibrium.
Basking in the afterglow of it all, “They asked each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?’ ” There it is: hearts burned open. Heart burned open, torching out eyes to see a world ignited with God—God right there.
And what burned open their hearts? The opening of Scripture. Listening to God Incarnate speak into their lives torched open first ears, ears to hear. Their heart burning with them, lit by His Word, scorched out eyes to spiritually see.
John Wesley’s experience concurs. He writes of his conversion experience, “About a quarter hour before nine, while [a preacher] was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed.” Listening to God’s Word, His flaming sword that cuts open both the joints and marrow, burns us open, warms us.
We listen, and hear Jesus asking the blind man, and us groping ones too, “What do you want?”
We want to see. Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s fox in his classical children’s tale, “The Little Prince,” reveals that the secret of life is as this simple profound truth: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” It’s not our eyes that are blind. It’s our heart that is hard. Our heart that must soften, open, if we are ever to see.
Yet one hears before ever seeing. It’s the way a heart develops: our heart cannot see, until it first hears. As hearing develops in utero weeks before sight, so our soul cochlear must develop before the cornea of our heart opens.
Heart sight requires first heart burn.
Before the sun taps on the day, I open the pages of His Word and listen. He burns this heart within me.
Fire cuts steel.
Lord, burn this heart open to hear, to see.
Today’s fire:
For the word of God is alive and powerful.
