Mark Buchanan - Hidden in Plain Sight: The Secret of More

HIDDEN
IN
PLAIN
SIGHT

HIDDEN
IN
PLAIN
SIGHT

The Secret of More

MARK BUCHANAN

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

2007 Mark Buchanan

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All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version. 1973, 1978, 1984, International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers.

Scripture quotations marked (NKJV) are taken from The New King James Version, 1979, 1980, 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc., Publishers.

Editorial Staff: Greg Daniel, acquisitions editor, and Thom Chittom, managing editor.
Cover Design: John Hamilton
Page Design: Walter Petrie

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Buchanan, Mark (Mark Aldham)
Hidden in plain sight : the secret of more / Mark Buchanan.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8499-0174-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-8499-1990-9 (trade paper)
1. Virtue. 2. Virtues. 3. Christian life. I. Title.
BV4630.B83 2006
241'.4dc22

2006029949

Printed in the United States of America

08 09 10 11 12 RRD 5 4 3 2 1

To Carol Patricia Boschma,
(March 8, 1965August 8, 2006)

whose love for the Fathers house
helped us all come to our senses
and long to come home.

If anyone chooses to do Gods will, he will find out whether my
teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.

JOHN 7:17

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T. S. ELIOT
Little Gidding
V, stanzas 239242
The Four Quartets

Contents

Preface
Come in Here with Me

I WENT SPELUNKING LAST SUMMER WITH MY DAUGHTER NICOLA, nine years old at the time, and forty of her classmates. Spelunking is cave exploring. Spelunking means you find some pleat in the earths crust and slither, lizard-like, into it. You thread your way down shafts narrow as the grave, shimmy your way up holes tight as chimney flues. You emerge into vaults and caverns hidden forever from sun and wind, hewn by the brute violence of tectonics, the solemn patience of melting ice, the slow burnish of trickling water.

I didnt think Id be up for it. I suffer mild claustrophobia and can easily relive the terror of a childhood event in which my brother and his friend locked me in a trailers closet. I panicked. I rammed my shoulder against the thin mahogany door, splintered it off its hinges. The trailer belonged to the parents of my brothers friend, and he stood to catch trouble for the damage. I couldnt have cared less.

So spelunking held no initial charm. To enter one cave I had to flatten my body to a knife blade, insert it between a thin cleft of rock, and step into the underworlds thick silence and thicker darkness. I picked my way down a staircase of boulders. I descended twisting chutes, squeezed between narrowing shafts, shoehorned myself through rock eyelets, duckwalked damp tunnels. The trail led nowhere, just further in, deeper down.

Why did I come?

It was unclear at first. I came to test something, to prove something, to overcome something. I came to see things daylight cant produce. I came because its shameful to fear the dark at my age. I came because my daughter and her classmates needed me in some vague, loose way, and I couldnt let them down. Nor let them show me up.

And what did I discover?

Beauty beyond imagining. Stalactites long and sharp as Zeus thunderbolts. Stalagmites tall and jagged as tiger-pit stakes. Snowy-white cascades of calcite. Filigrees of encrusted mineral. Exotic rock sculptures finessed by seepage, as though by fingertips, over eons. And then, when all the flashlights turned out, a blackness so complete it is one of the few holy and perfect things Ive touched in this unholy, imperfect world.

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT PRACTICING VIRTUE, WHICH AT FIRST may seemit did to mea descent into something narrow and dark and enclosing, a world without wind, without open spaces where weather dances its varied moods. The word virtue almost made me claustrophobic. By temperament and against better instinct, I still have moments where I think the good life is seeking my own pleasure at my own convenience, and so the very thought of practicing virtue chafed me. I pictured Victorian women bound in corsets. I pictured Mormon boys in starched white shirts and crisp ties, earnestly soliciting at my door. I pictured primness and stiffness and pursed lips and arched eyebrows.

I never imagined life to the full.

But thats what Im discovering: a world vast and beautiful and holythat all along has been hidden in plain sight.

Why dont you come in here with me, and see for yourself ?

Introduction
The Incredible Shrinking Man

IN CHILDHOOD I WAS OF TEN AND UNPREDICTABLYS TRUCK WITH an odd sensation: I felt I was shrinking. The feeling was as sudden and startling (though more pleasant) as skinning my knee in a fall, as abrupt as plunging naked into cold water. The only necessary condition was that I had to be still. Otherwise it could hit me day or night, half-asleep or wide awake, upright or prone. Id be standing beside a field at days end, sunlight serrating the edges of thunderheads, watching my friends in a clumsy game of softball. Or Id be slumped on the couch at midday, reading a Spiderman comic, bored and transfixed by its gaudy spectacle. Or Id be curled up on my bed at night, sinking fast into sleeps netherworld.

And then it might hit me, or not, this odd sensation of shrinking. I experienced it as an actual coiling and compacting in my limbs. It spread from there to my midriff and head. It was as though my bodys molecules, one minute turning lazy arcs in wide circles, moved together, quick and steady, until they had no room to move at all. My body became heavy as water, tight as a fist.

And then I had another sensation: of looking out from my body, now miniscule, on a world grown preposterously large. Trees and pets and lamps and furniture had swollen to gargantuan proportions. The world towered and loomed, gaped and sprawled. I was Gulliver among giants.

And then it would be over. The entire experience lasted, Im guessing, ten seconds at most. Probably less. I couldnt conjure it, though sometimes I tried. I neither welcomed it nor shunned it. I didnt understand it, and still dont. It was just something that happened to me, a vestige of instinct, a quirk of genes, a glitch of biorhythms. I assumed it happened to everyone. I outgrew it in early adulthood, though its happened once or twice since.

There must be some neurological explanation for what Im describing. There might even be a condition here, a viral trace, a syndrome of sorts. Until I started writing this, it never occurred to me to check any of that. I simply wanted to tell you about my childhood experienceeven at the risk of appearing freakish in your eyes because, since late adulthood, I have been trying to produce its spiritual equivalent: to become small, small, ever smaller, reduced to my core, as the world grows big, big, ever bigger, expanded to its limits. I want to decrease, and Christ and his kingdom to increase.