"Like the Hebrew alphabet, the alphabet of grace has no vowels, and in that sense his words to us are always veiled, subtle, cryptic, so that it is left to us to delve their meaning, to fill in the vowels, for ourselves by means of all the faith and imagination we can muster. God speaks to us in such a way, presumably, not because he chooses to be obscure but because, unlike a dictionary word whose meaning is fixed, the meaning of an incarnate word is the meaning it has for the one it is spoken to, the meaning that becomes clear and effective in our lives only when we ferret it out for ourselves."(F.Buechner "Listening to Your Life" p.4)
Anytime I'm in a discussion group of some sort, I find it fascinating to hear what other meanings people got, from a movie, a book, the Bible, or a TV show.
All of us can experience the same event and have it affect us differently. That is how I would understand that idea of an alphabet of grace.
I also find it to be true that I can read or watch something multiple times and get something new or different from it each time. I believe this is because where I am in my life, isn't always the same. What God needs me to hear at that moment may be very different than what I needed to hear three years ago.
Sometimes I can experience something and be clueless at the moment what I was supposed to take from it. Later on, as the experience has some time to sink in, I begin to see and understand a little more clearly what was going on.
No one can tell us what anything means for us when it comes to encounters with God. We can really only know for ourselves its meaning. When we try to make our experiences universal, we usually get the spelling wrong.
Blessings,
Ed
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