Word from the Potter’s House by Tim Kumfer

February 28, 2016

Third Sunday in Lent

And all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea – this Cloud names not only an event of liberation or light for passage but an emergent and yet unbounded social formation. The people who were ‘no people’ / the ‘nobody people’ who passed through the sea / in process becoming a people for all / all peoples. And they were struck down in the wilderness – To trace this origin story does not secure the future for its tellers. For this vaporous inheritance could ensnare as easily as it shelters, the fate of its children serving as a moral lesson for others. And in any event, you can be certain the Cloud will be undergone by each of us as ordeal.  

I remember about eight years sitting across from Gordon around one of the old trapezoidal tables at The Potter’s House. I was fresh off a big break up, deep in vocational discernment, and just generally sort of a mess. I was, perhaps, the 1,000th person in that position that had sat across from Gordon at that same table. And yet his words have stayed with me, like few other conversations have. He said, in essence, recognizing what you don’t know, and can’t claim to know, is the beginning. I was being invited, I realize now, to indeterminate life in and under the Cloud. May each of us move deeper into that path prepared by the Pillar that goes before us.