This blog was originally published on ridewithgps.com
The film above, “Indian Blankets,” and its score were inspired by this ride. Original score by Sam Baylis, film footage from pexels.com by various photographers.
The Design
The Trail Guide I sent out – ignorantly not knowing what would happen.
I write the trail guide – I go out for the preride. My mind is telling me to stop – telling me this is crazy – act my age! I take a wrong turn on the preride – the hot Texas sun beats down on me – is this a good idea? I think of many ways to justify this to people. Arguments about why this is indeed something that a church ought to be doing. I ride up and down, checking multiple iterations of the route, examine different paths, try to figure out which one will bring the biggest adventure. I find the restaurant right off the trail – Norma’s diner! The double cheeseburger was great. Check.
As a ThM student at Dallas Seminary, and having studied enough philosophy to be dangerous, I now know that these are phenomenological ‘structures of experience.’ They are wonderful – they thrill us, they plunge us into the depths of terror, they delight us with forged friendships, and most of all, they reveal a Creator who loves stories more than we do. When we return, we love to tell those stories to others, giving them a peak into a structure of experience that they didn’t have themselves, but yet, they still experience the same rich harmonious resonating chord structures. Similar to stories, since music is likewise a ’structure of experience,’ we can mesh our own experiences into the music and relive the experiences all over again.
The Entry into the Structure of Experience
The pool is great and I start to calm down. I don’t think we ever grow out of the feel and smell of blue chlorinated water on a hot afternoon. Since this ride, we have watched our dignified pastor shoot down a water slide with his hair plastered to his head, and we have since rescued one of ours from drowning in the lazy river – God’s family is wonderful! After that, we got changed again and start to prepare the bikes.
When we are all ready, I remove my helmet to talk to the triune Creator of the universe. Uncreated and the unmoved movers, the Father and the Son and the Spirit created all of this massive structure of experience of the universe, and in the Son all of it continuously holds together. Unlike blind and deaf and frozen and inanimate idols, this infinite being sees, hears, and walks and is ultimate eternal life. (Rev. 9:20)
The right thing to ask Him strikes me at that moment – “Lord, help us to see your presence all along our path.” After all, He is the one who said, “everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it shall be opened.”
That’s the interesting thing about designing structures of experience. We can arrange the blocks, but we can’t bring a living presence to weave music upon those blocks. Just like, I can design a fishing trip, but without my living breathing dad along with me, it can’t be the same.
The Surprise
As we started to roll, I calmed down. There is great peace in allowing God to be the living and moving and seeing God and just being in the moment with Him and letting Him create.
Author’s Rendering of the Chisholm Trail, Plano, TX
The Destination
By this time, now seated in a booth at Norma’s, we thoroughly feel as though we have stepped into a different world. The contours of the trail and the pool water sit in our heart like a beautiful main course, and now we were going to add a cheeseburger to it. How good can it get! Suddenly the door opens and poof – Jason walks in – a dear brother in Christ – a scrumptious side dish! He decided to surprise us and meet us for dinner. Somehow seeing him here adds to the music – it is like he had swirled into our new world we had created through some sort of magic, but nonetheless here he sits.
The Way Back
Rolling back up the trail, now the sun is going down, and it filters through the tree leaves like dancing golden bulbs upon the path as the trail undulates through groves of trees along the bank. We stop to swing on the swings along the trail – we hear the rushing water down below in the creek. All of this embedded into the structure – swings and food, and friends and cool blue water, and a magnificent fading sky which glows red in the sunset — sending beams of light through glades of trees, heralding an unfolding starry sky unrolling a new night which would resound the mystery of its wise Creator.
The Arrival Where the Stars Come Out
The stars do come out – the sunlight fades, the stars and the Milky Way stretches across the early summer sky — above the pool complex and the Texas grasslands like a big screen, light years in its span, and all of those dots of light resonate upon my heart — just the same way that the Indian Blankets did in the late afternoon. What splendor, what magnificence, all held together by the one who went down to death and back again to give me a share in His own life forever.
I remember my prayer earlier that day – Lord, help us to see your presence all along our path.” Just like those flowers covered the hillsides sloping down into the forests, so the Creator is with us, all along our paths as we walk by faith in the righteousness of Jesus, the risen sacrificial Lamb of God, in perfect fellowship with our Creator.
But the greatest moment was yet to come.
The Next Day – The Resonance
The next morning during my time with the Creator, the experience of the yesterday filling my heart – that pool – those flowers – the golden sunlight – the stars…I pick up a collection of old puritan prayers, The Valley of Vision, to read my daily reading for that day. Then unbelievably staring up at me the words – “O LORD God, Who Inhabitest Eternity, The heavens declare thy glory, the earth thy riches, the universe is thy temple; thy presence fills immensity…I come to thee in the all-prevailing name of Jesus, with nothing of my own to plead, no works, no worthiness, no promises,” and then…….at the end…..”Impress me deeply with a sense of thine omnipresence, that thou art about my path, my ways, my lying down, my end.”
I couldn’t believe it – how magnificent this is. I go to my piano to see if I can work out a structure of experience in the form of a melody that captures this whole thing. The melody comes, undulating like the path, tones of the western, and the Native Americans who once filled this land and their beauty upon horses, and their colorful blankets reflected in the colors of the flowers for which they are named. I proceed with the orchestration and my heart resonates further with the beauty of a Creator which allows music to be made to capture just a bit of the things, the structures of experience He has created to ‘declare his glory,’ his ‘weightiness.’ I think about a fellow seminarian who used to say – “God’s love to me is just like a warm blanket.”
That’s just the way it felt along the trail – the warmth enclosing my path. My path doesn’t end back at the pool complex looking at the starry host – it ends on the other side of death, a part of the trail I have yet to go through. But when I do, the image of those Indian Blankets along the trail fading into that starry sky on the Texas plains won’t be far from my mind.
And, it will be on that day, that ‘the Lamb in the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and will guide them to springs of the water of life; and God will wipe every tear from their eyes.’ (Rev. 7:17)
He was the first trail guide, and He will be the last and the eternal trail guide after that. He is the one who says “I AM – do not be afraid.”
The film above, “Indian Blankets,” and its score, were inspired by this ride. Original score by Sam Baylis, film footage from pexels.com by various photographers.
Epilogue
Strangely enough, this story didn’t end back a year ago when this happened. Just yesterday (now year later from when the ride actually happened), I was wrestling with my friend Nathan about the philosophical implications of this writing. He told me – Sam, “every perfect gift is from above, from the Father of Lights.” (James 2:17) I thought that his comment came from nowhere. Today, as I reopened my “Valley of Vision” book, I noticed the title of the above prayer that I had read a year ago the day after my ride…was…”God, the Source of All Good.” Wow.
A couple of philosophical notes. How exactly should an experience be processed. This is a real experience in the creation of God – how does the Creation teach us about the creator? I would propose that it is through resonances. You will notice that I mentioned the term “resonance” throughout. Resonances are a uniquely physical phenomenon – when a vibrating structure, ‘matches’ another structure, you get a resonance. The LORD created the universe with a particular structure, and he uses those very structures to teach us about himself. Our bodies have structure, our eyes have structure, our ears have structures, our emotions and our memories have structures. As we get the structure of the Creator’s written story in written λογος down in our hearts, as we walk through the world, those structures in the World resonate through the Holy Spirit with the written structures of the text.
It is for this reason that visual art and music work so well to point us to the transcendent – it is through the mechanism of resonance, because, every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of Lights. I can understand what it means for the Lamb to lead me to the springs of the water of life, because I know exactly what that feels like on a hot Texas day. This is a phenomenon that artists and musicians know well – at our best, we are only reflecting the structures of tension and fulfillment that the Creator himself created when he separated the waters above and the waters below, the land from the sea, made them male and female in His own image, and set the boundaries and habitations and times of the nations, He Himself being the interplay of three distinct eternal persons. The written Word is the source, just as Jesus is the source, and the Father is the eternal source of Him, and this written Word resonates deeply with our human structures of experience, causing us to understand the written Word revealing the eternal Creator with a deeper acuity that extends to farthest height and the lowest depth of the vast universe.
