Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.” —Joseph of Panephysis 6–7
God appears as flame again and again in Scripture. God reveals God’s self to Moses in the burning bush, and then—centuries later, at the first Pentecost after Jesus’ death—the Holy Spirit comes upon the disciples as flame.
The rabbis note that it takes some time—five minutes, seven minutes, ten minutes—for a bush to burn, and that the miracle of the story of the burning bush is not the burning-but-not-consumed shrubbery. The miracle is that Moses paid attention long enough to notice that the shrubbery was not being consumed. Only after God saw that Moses had stood still long enough to notice the bush in its unconsuming fire did God call out to him. As Ellen F. Davis has put it, “Evidently it was Moses’ conscious resolve . . . to turn away from the task at hand”—tending his father-in-law’s flock—“and investigate ‘this great sight’ that prompts God to speak to him for the first time.” Attentiveness, apparently, was the key attribute God needed in his chief prophet, deliverer, and friend. God needed a prophet and friend who could stop and stay still and look with focus and concentration; God needed a prophet and friend who could really see. God could have called to Moses in the form of a fellow shepherd, or in the form of a rock, or in the form of a breeze. Instead, God arrested the attention of Moses as flame.
Fire entrances. If I sit at a museum and look at a painting, I am twitchy after about two minutes, but if I am at home staring at a lit candle, I can gaze for an hour. In the winter, I sometimes sit on my sofa and stare into my (faux) fireplace for almost a whole evening. (Only occasionally do I have to shush the voice of my dead mother urging me to get up and do something more productive.) Fire captivates. To encounter the blazing God is to encounter the God who can hold, and wants to hold, our gaze.
For several years, I read the burning bush as an apt 21st-century cultural critique: we are all so busy and so distracted, rushing so hurriedly through the day that we barely notice our friends or ourselves, let alone the Lord. In a sermon I preached on the burning bush, I said that had I been Moses, I would never have looked at the bush long enough to notice that it wasn’t consumed—I’d have been too busy sending text messages. This is, I suppose, a fair enough point—but it rather reduces the ignic God to a curmudgeonly op-ed writer fretting about the fragmenting pace of modern life.
The God who wants to hold our gaze is not that. The God who wants to hold our gaze—the God who wants to fix our attention and say, “Here, look here, look at me, don’t look away”—that God is a lover. That’s what lovers do, after all. They gaze at each other utterly not distracted, utterly focused in their longing and their delight. Perhaps it is for this reason that Christian mystics so often turn to the language of fire to capture the love they feel for and from the Lord (so pervasive in mystical accounts is the notion of burning with love for God that it almost seems a cliché). Catherine of Siena wrote of her soul being set afire in the furnace of divine love. Gertrude the Great cried out, “Lord, how I want my soul to burn with such fire that it would melt and become a liquid so it could be poured—all of it—into you!” Teresa of Avila described God’s igniting a “fire in the heart” and in the “very fundament of the body,” whereby God “comes to the soul so that the soul, its flesh opened to God, can come to dwell, to dance, in the life of the Triune mystery.” The God who is fire wants to hold our gaze—and indeed, our bodies—as a lover does.
Lauren F. Winner is an Episcopal priest, the author of numerous books, and a professor at Duke Divinity School.
Edited excerpt taken from Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God by Lauren Winner, published by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Book Publishers, hardcover, RRP $24.99.
