Sometimes as I sit in the backyard of my home in silence, I hear the birds singing. I wonder what the songs are that they sing. What is their meaning? There is great beauty in the hearing – the songs sounds joyful and beckoning to me, and at times they also sound as yearning and even sad. I find myself trying to translate something that I cannot understand. Should I even be trying to translate? Perhaps the gift of the song is that I simply get to hear it. Is there meaning in simply the given-ness of the song?

In Deuteronomy (DT 4:1, 5-9) we hear Moses instructing Israel to “hear the statutes and decrees which I am teaching you…observe them carefully, for thus will you give evidence of your wisdom and intelligence to the nations.” This sounds like an identity-marker for Israel, in the sense that insofar as they follow the statutes and decrees given by Moses they will be identified by others as wise and intelligent. Most of us can appreciate that type of identification. However, this type of identification of law obedience with wisdom and intelligence, characterizes wisdom and intelligence strictly in terms of the law.

The line in the Deuteronomy passage that seems to expand the meaning of wisdom and intelligence beyond simple obedience to ‘statutes and decrees’ is the following:

For what great nation is there
that has gods so close to it as the LORD, our God, is to us
whenever we call upon him?

I would like to suggest that it is the very closeness of God to Israel that is significant in the hearing and following of the decrees and statutes Moses is giving the people. Wisdom and intelligence are then not simply rule-following, but more how God’s loving relationship with Israel is translated in the lives of the people. How bold is this closeness of a God who is there ‘whenever we call?”

Wisdom and intelligence take on the characteristics of acknowledgment, appreciation, and committed engagement to a relationship that constitutes Divine intimacy. The decrees and statutes themselves are not as significant as the Divine Love that grounds them. They are translations of Divine Love that are designed to engender relationship rather than simply corral morality.

Furthermore, it becomes important to recognize that the wisdom and intelligence of the Divine relationship is collective and communal, not simply a one-on-one exclusive encounter between and individual and a God. The responsibility of translating God’s love rests upon the community:

“However, take care and be earnestly on your guard
not to forget the things which your own eyes have seen,
nor let them slip from your memory as long as you live,
but teach them to your children and to your children’s children.”

Translation becomes a fairly hefty word in this scenario. It is not simply a matter of figuring out what is being said, but involves delving deeper into a context or grounding of HOW we can even begin to translate the intimacy of a Divine relationship with the world.

From a Christian standpoint, this translation corresponds with the Incarnation. The closeness of God’s love is enfleshed in Jesus of Nazareth. The Christ of the Universe becomes historically incarnate in the human person of Jesus. This is Divine Love’s translation in the history of our world that beckons us to new and more life.

In speaking of translation in this way, though, it occurs to me that it is very dualistic-sounding. The implication is that “I” or “we” translate God’s love, but indeed the translation is relational. Perhaps it is better to say that God’s love translates us, or at least has the capacity to do so, if we are open to it. Looked at in this way, we could say that the decrees and statutes that strive to translate God’s love for us can have the reciprocal effect of translating us – i.e., transforming our lives by our reception of them. We seek to translate God’s love and God’s love translates our lives.

It may seem easier to hold on to laws as an attempt to maintain order and sustain behavior, but so often these attempts serve to calcify our notions of morality and isolate behavior apart from relationship. We carry on the project of lawfulness, which will always include failure for everyone at some point, while sidestepping the fullness of the Divine relationship, which is the only thing that can ‘ground’ our actions. To confine the translation of Divine love solely into the parameters of lawfulness prohibits the possibility of our lives to be translated by Divine Love. The Divine translation gets lost.

This is not an either/or type of situation. It’s not as if hearing and observing statutes and decrees is not important, but the problem arises when the strict adherence of these laws results in condemnation, isolation, exclusion and hatred (self and others). When we allow the laws to translate our lives rather than the Divine closeness of God’s ever-present love ever-present to us – “whenever we call” – to translate us, we tailspin in a world of rigidity marked by shaming failure and condemning judgments.

Jesus himself makes it clear that as the incarnation of Divine closeness, the translation of Divine intimacy, does not ‘abolish the law,’ but indeed fulfills the law (Mt 5:17-19):

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.
I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.
Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away,
not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter
will pass from the law,
until all things have taken place.

The fulfillment of the law is directly correlated with the translation of God’s Love. The wisdom and intelligence, or commitment and engagement, regarding the translation of Divine intimacy in relationship is that alone which can ground and fulfill us. It’s a translation that springs not from the understanding that we have of the contents of the laws and decrees set before us, but rather from the wisdom and intelligence that we glean from being translated by God’s intimate proximity to us and the yearning love God has that draws us closer and closer.

That ‘smallest part of a letter that will not pass from the law’ is the minutiae of our lives, each and every moment that we engage in and become more whole through the Divine translation in our lives, where nothing is lost. Everything is accounted for because nothing falls outside of the fierce wholeness of God’s love!

It would be unrealistic though to not at least mention that there is a cost or a suffering that comes along with this Divine translation in our lives. If we authentically allow the reality of this powerful Love to touch us, we will be wounded – become vulnerable – suffer. We will constantly be challenged to begin to translate everything in our lives through God’s translation. This is the suffering of intimacy that demands that we see things through eyes other than our own.

The Quaker missionary, speaker and writer, Thomas R. Kelly, refers to this entering of suffering through engagement with the demands of Divine love as a Holy Obedience that stretches our heart. And it is precisely this painful stretching of our hearts that grants us the capacity to see both that everything matters and that nothing matters.[i] This paradoxical quality of holy obedience transforms our experience in such a way that we can translate all we have thought unworthy, irrelevant or uninteresting into something of divine dignity, honor and respect.

Nothing matters and everything matters. In other words, no suffering is deeper that God’s love for us and God’s love for us empowers us to embrace all suffering in our lives and others as the possibility for transformation. How countless are the ways that we could allow the Divine relationship to translate our lives more and more so that we “obey and teach these commandments’ passing them on and translating them with others? How many songs like the morning birds at dawn can we sing to each other?

[i] Thomas R. Kelly, A TESTAMENT OF DEVOTION (Harper One: 1992), pp. 40-43.