Sacred Journey I

I’ve just read the intro to this book by Frederich Buechner. He writes:

Life itself can be thought of as an alphabet by which God graciously makes known his presence and purpose among us. Like the Hebrew alphabet, the alphabet of grace has no vowels, and in that sense his words to us are always veiled, subtle, cryptic, so that it is left to us to delve their meaning, to fill in the vowels, for ourselves by means of all the faith and imagination we can muster. God speaks to us in such a way, presumably, not because he chooses to be obscure but because, unlike a dictionary word whose meaning is fixed, the meaning of an incarnate word is the meaning it has for the one spoken to, the meaning that becomes clear and effective in our lives only when we ferret it out ourselves… We must learn to listen to the cock-crows and hammering and tick-tock of our lives for the holy and elusive word that is spoken to us out of their depths.

I have mixed reactions to this:

• I love the clarity of expression. I understand exactly what he’s talking about.
• I love the idea that everything we experience is potentially very significant; it redeems the time, redeems the mundane.
• I’m skeptical that God has something to say in details as mundane as he describes here. What pops into my mind is a sermon on prayer years ago in college chapel in which the speaker asked, “Do you think God cares what color tie you wear?” He was making the point that God has given us common sense, and we don’t have to ask for help with every single tiny decision. Could it be that God allows some noise in the world just as noise? — beautiful noise, created noise, but still noise, and not deeply significant divine communication?
• I like the idea of listening to your life. I recall sitting in a backyard years ago and trying to separate the sounds, and realizing the complexity of it all. I couldn’t separate and categorize all the sounds. It did raise my appreciation for the activity and life around me.
• Does God’s speech really reduce to private meaning — “the meaning it has for the one spoken to”? Granted, I can only grasp what I can grasp. But surely God means more than I can grasp. Whatever personal meaning I derive from the events in my life, and God’s intended meaning for it, seem like two distinct things — actual meaning vs. perceived meaning.