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The Burning Bush in Ordinary Life

Michael A. King

Because it’s one of the most riveting texts in the Bible, and perhaps in the holy writings of any faith tradition, I’ve spent much of my life both pursued and troubled by this text from Exodus 3:1-6 (NRSV):

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

The problem for me was that from boyhood on I sensed the power of this text but could never find its equivalent in my own life. This was one factor contributing to my adolescent and young adult difficulty believing in God. Now I believe God does sometimes pull back the veil between the holy and our ordinary daily lives. As I age I have more stories to tell of amazing synchronicities, inbreakings of meaning that seem to make sense only if they come from Beyond, twists in my life story I have no idea what to do with if they don’t emerge from the same source as Moses’ burning bush. 

So I want to keep room for the extraordinary burning bush experiences in my and our lives as well as to remember that the moment in which “I am who I am” (Exod. 3:14) breaks into Moses’ and our history is far grander than anything I am about to report and should never be reduced entirely to personal experience. 

Nevertheless, I have also come to wonder if one reason we, or at least I. often fail to glimpse burning bushes is that for too long I equated them only with the extraordinary. So I didn’t see those lurking even in ordinary circumstances. 

I think, for instance, of the day I sat on the porch of that Galisteo, New Mexico, inn gazing south. The rays of the setting sun flamed through heartbreakingly clear air. Out in the pasture, leaves on a small cottonwood danced in the breeze, gleaming as if on fire.

On the one hand, just sun, wind, sky, leaves. On the other hand, at least in my spellbound spirit, a doorway into the holy. Whatever it was like for Moses to face his burning bush, this was as close as I’d been to my own burning bush, not only because the actual sight was so captivating but also because it sparked something deep in me at a time of great soul-searching. 

When I got home, I saw that right on ordinary Klingerman Road where our name is peeling off the mailbox, the sun also sets, and when the rays get to just the right height on just the right warmish day after a cold front has blown in, they shine on that growing-like-crazy silver maple (which my brother sees as overgrown weeds) I planted at the edge of the lawn after it sprouted from a seed thrown down by another maple. Then the maple shimmers. And for me the bush burns once more.

The Galisteo vision changed not only my but our entire family’s life. Because year by year we fell more in love with the visions of both natural and spiritual splendor we could find in our yard at sunset. Rituals sprang up. Just the right haunting music playing. Sitting in the wooden Adirondack chairs handmade by a neighbor. Lighting the chiminea, an outdoor fireplace Joan found on sale. Our burning-bush afternoons and chiminea evenings became havens our children made plans around or invited friends to. Then, from Africa or college amid the hard times they’d tell us, “Oh, I just can’t wait for one of our evenings outside.”

After we became more aware of the penumbra of the holy flaring around the ordinary, a daughter once marveled that we had lived most of our lives together mostly ignoring the outdoors. What if we had never stumbled across its blessings? That made me vow again to remember how often the burning bush is right there in my and our ordinary times, blazing away, yet I walk right past it, and to keep my eyes open for the first signs of its glow.
—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, and Harrisonburg, Virginia, is Dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC.