The Advocate May-June 2006
Clouds and Fog
By Stacy F. Sauls
Posted: Jun 3, 2006, 17:23

My lifelong love of flying, which turns out to be a very good thing for a bishop to have, began when my parents took me to Tampa to visit friends. I was six.

What I remember about that trip was my excitement about flying for the first time. What I was most excited about was seeing the tops of the clouds. I had gotten it in my head that up there, on the other side of the clouds, I would see angels. I didn’t expect to see God directly, but I did hope to catch a glimpse of my grandfather, who had recently died. Those beautiful images I had looked up to see in the sky had seemed to me to be the underside of heaven. Now, I thought, I would see what was on the other side.

As the airplane, a DC-3, lifted off the ground and headed up into the sky, my nose was pressed against the window. I waited eagerly. We passed from the blue into the whiteness of what had appeared to me from the ground to be fluffy but solid. It was disorienting inside the cloud. I could see neither below nor above. The clouds were just like the fog. It made it difficult to see what was coming. I hoped we would not hit any heavenly being. The light flashing on the wing did not penetrate the haze. It reflected back, like the headlights on my father’s car in the fog the time I had asked him why he didn’t turn on the high beams and he demonstrated why.

And then we emerged on the other side. There was no one there. I was perplexed.

I learned several things. For one, I learned that heaven was not exactly what I thought it was. As you well know, it was not to be my last religious misconception. For another, I learned that clouds were not what I thought they were either. The clouds and the fog were the same.

It is difficult to see what is ahead in both. All our efforts to penetrate the darkness only have the opposite effect. Whatever light we have to shine does nothing but bounce back at us. It is difficult to know what direction one is going. It is impossible to see what lies ahead. It is impossible to know what is coming.

We, you and I, are entering a profound experience of not knowing together. At least it feels profound to me.

Six years ago this weekend, you elected me to be your Bishop. A week from now, your deputies, Ginger, and I will leave for General Convention. And in two weeks, the Bishops will gather to elect the next Presiding Bishop. My name will be on the ballot. It feels a lot like being in the middle of a dense fog to me. Part of me is anxious to get to the other side. Part of me, I think the more mature part, is aware that the fog itself is spiritually important.

In the fog, we are living out something that is a basic part of being human, which is that we do not know. Actually, that is a constant reality of life. What may be different right now is how conscious of our unknowing we are. We are aware in a way that we usually are not of the fundamental truth that we do not know. We have the too-rare opportunity to use the words “truth” and “do not know” in the same sentence in a positive way. It is an awareness that is somewhat painful. It is frightening. It feels a little dangerous. It is very vulnerable. It has some excitement to it.

We just cannot be sure of what lies ahead. No effort on our part can clear the haze. In fact, like the headlights on a car or the flashing light on an airplane wing, our best efforts paradoxically make things worse. When it comes right down to it, we have no choice but to wait and see.

In that, I believe, we have quite an unusual opportunity. It is not often in life that we are so aware of our unknowing. And that makes us particularly available to God, whether we want to be or not. God, I think, has us where God wants us. And that is a place where we have no choice but to live in the uncertainty and to wait on God.

We will, of course, emerge from the uncertainty. By the end of the day on June 18 there will be a Presiding Bishop-elect. We will, in time, know who that will be. The time in the fog seems to go slowly. In retrospect, it will seem to have been no time at all. In truth, time is moving as it always does. God is working as God always does. The unique opportunity for us together at this moment is to be aware of God, even in the discomfort of unknowing. It is what the unknowing makes possible for us.

It turns out, as I learned on that first airplane trip so long ago, that the fog and the clouds are both the same. Although I didn’t find what I expected to find on the other side of the clouds, I did find what was true. It wasn’t that God was not present there. It was that my expectations of what I would see made God’s reality more difficult to discern. Now that is more than a six-year-old could have figured out at the time, but that is what clouds, and fog, do for us over time if we let them. They encourage us to dwell in the unknowing and let God reveal Godself as God will.

That is what is before us. The unknowing of the moment will pass. But before it does, we have one of those rare opportunities to be conscious of it and, if we can let it be, to see what God would have us see.

The election of a Presiding Bishop will come and go. And the next morning, the sun will rise and we can be sure of one thing. And that is that, as much as our expectations and pride often obscure the reality, God reigns.

Agape,