Dear reader,
I’m close to finishing one of the most unique books I’ve ever read: a meditation on the seasons in England and the way they are represented and engaged with in Medieval literature and religion. It is a lovely, engaging read.
Author Eleanor Parker frequently explores the definition and etymology of Old English words, seeking to tease out the significance in the way humans name and describe their world. According to Parker, the word Metod, or ‘Measurer,’ “is a common metaphor for God in Old English poetry.” She defines it as “‘the one who metes out’ life, time or destiny–the one who governs times and seasons and the shape and duration of human lives.”
I find the idea of God as measurer to be particularly comforting as I consider the future. My life, my family’s future, has been increasing in uncertainty over the past few years, not in any troubling sense, but simply from a lack of vision for where we ought to be and where we ought to serve in the not-so-distant future. This lack easily stirs up anxiety in my heart–certainly in no small way due to having a personality that values planning ahead.
Even accounting for my personality, however, I often get discouraged by a tendency I find in my own Reformed circles–that of a complacent indifference justified by a confidence in God’s providence. Confident that God, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism beautifully professes, “doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by his most wise and holy providence,” we can find it easy to jettison our own responsibility. We can lack vision, sure as we are that all will work out according to God’s plan. We can forget that God’s working in us and in the world does not preclude our own activity, but necessitates it.
So perhaps in consciously resisting this tendency, I just as wrongly tend to construe my life in the modern terms of self-creation and self-determination. For of course this idea of God as “measurer” is the highest affront to a culture that resists any sense of our identities and paths coming from anywhere outside of us. We are the ones who “identify as…,” a phrase that centres our own agency in defining who and what we are. Any external pressure or influence on who we become is viewed as oppressive and unjust, something to be resisted at all costs.
But this fundamentally misunderstands what it means to be a creature. As ones who are created, brought into existence and sustained each moment by God, our identities and our paths are not self-curated, but given. They are the grateful response to what has been given–the “cordial consent to being,” to use Jonathan Edwards’ phrasing–that assents to our existence as a gift and our future as a promise. Fairness has nothing to do with it, because all time, every moment that we live in, is a gracious gift.
And so we can move forward into time, not as those who mindlessly or constrainedly march into a determined future in which we have no agency, but as those whose lives are lived within a time and seasons whose shape and duration are measured out by the One “in whom we live and move and having our being.” As he gathers up the days and hours and minutes, he is bringing them, as he brings all things, to their glorious end.
In this conception of God as architect of the world, from the Austrian National Library’s 13th century Bible moralisée, God is imagined to be measuring the dimensions of the universe: the sun and moon are already shaped in perfect spheres, the earth soon to follow with the aid of a compass. I’m always interested in what images like this find important to communicate, and what is incommunicable through an image. Here, the artist communicates the order and precision of God’s world. God does not create haphazardly but with a focused intentionality and careful measurement. Yes, this is true and worthy of our meditation–so too, the un-representable reality of the Spirit of God as the ground of being, the one who first hovered over the waters of the earth and even now sustains it.
O Love, O God who created me,
in your love recreate me.
O Love, who redeemed me,
fill up in me whatever part of your love
has fallen into neglect within me.
O Love, O God, who first loved me,
grant that with my whole heart,
and with my whole soul,
and with my whole strength,
I may love you.
Gertrude the Great
On the road with you,
Laura
The first thing that came to my mind, when I considered God as the One who measures, was the idea of hearts being "weighed in the balance". (Ps. 62:9, Dan. 5:27.) That isn't exactly what is being discussed here, but it is yet another way in which the sovereign God of the universe knows how much, how long, how far, how big... It is a comfort in prayer to ask the One who knows these things, "What should I do now, LORD?" and listening for His answer. It is a chance both to rest in His sovereignty and look for opportunities to take responsibility. Thank you for the thoughts, Laura. - Nancy B.