Toward the end of Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, he wrote something that sounds a lot like this:

I’ve given you something really, really important, maybe the most important thing that I’ve learned:

• Christ died because we sin.
• He was buried.
• Two days later he was brought to life like it says in our Hebrew Scriptures.
• He appeared to Cephas (Peter to you), then his Twelve closest followers.
• He appeared to more than 500 brothers and sisters at once! Most of them are alive still, though not all.
• He appeared to James, then all the apostles.
• Last of everyone,  as if I were someone untimely born, he appeared to me.

'And I say to myself that my work, at present is to notice.' Share on X

Standing at a table, chair kicked back, but not wanting to block the aisle, in a Starbucks bustling with activity, I pray and prepare for my day with ambient noise cancelled by puffy black headphones. The music paused but waiting patiently to beam again through the Bluetooth to my ears. Ten minutes I must take. Just ten minutes. I can give that.

I can’t produce silence here. But I can approximate it.

Here I read Paul and see the people working at tables, reading, typing, the usuals at their big table talking. The two bikers in leather order their coffees and the morning caffeine crew coming to wake up finally, after driving their cars here.

It is a strange place to consider Paul and prepare for silence, because it surely isn’t going to happen. And yet it is here that I feel more like Paul. More like the one at the end of the sequence. For here is the truth as Paul sees it, that central to the faith is that we needed (and still need) Jesus and it was because of that need that Jesus dies and comes back. But he comes back to these people. To his closest followers, then all his followers, then all the people who have come after him, and then in the end, even to me.

It is almost like Paul has missed the boat and would agonize about missing the boat if Paul actually believed he missed the boat, but the boat hasn’t actually left. Not really. Not in the way boats leave and never come back. Not in the way we can all queue up and wait for the ferry at 8:15 because we don’t want to get stuck on the island over night and you better get to the docks before it leaves.

Not like that at all.

It is more like the impression of a boat and a dock and that the boat has left, but more like the boat is constantly leaving the dock, the line for the boat is constantly queueing and we are getting there after the boat has left and yet the boat is right there still. That somehow the physical boat, the one that the others say left the dock, left it long ago, years and years ago. But here it is, a boat in front of us. And here’s our chance to get on it.

And that dock is this Starbucks. And the sounds of this world never go away; the memories of this world never go away; my awareness of this world will never go away. And yet it is here in which I can hear him, or I can notice his appearance. It isn’t physically him, it isn’t the ferry boat that left 2000 years ago, or the man, the literal man, hanging from a cross and laid in a tomb that I can physically see with my eyeballs, but his appearance is here wearing black shirts and green aprons and white and grey and blue and red and stripes and plaids. And he is sitting and standing and half the time he’s a she.

And I can hear his voice and I can see his face. And I know that he is here. And I know that he wants something, he wants me to follow him and I’m not sure how and I’m not sure what that really looks like without him physically leading the way and…

I notice my mind is racing away from this moment, the awareness, the appearance. And I say to myself that my work, at present is to notice. And keep noticing. For tomorrow, he may appear to be different.