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I call my work 'Echosounder' because the Spirit helps people to see below the surface of their lives. But this week I had an experience of literal echosounding. My wife is pregnant with our third child, who is now 20 weeks into its little life; and so it was time for a scan.
As the lady pressed her scanner into Katharine's tummy, the sketchy lines of a baby appeared on the screen above, and we were treated to an impeccably clear view of something we will probably never get to see again in our life: our child's heart. The specialist lingered on this image for what seemed like an unusually long time; and the longer she remained there, the more powerful this pulsing sight became. There, amid the grainy flashes of a spine curving or an arm moving, this heart was beating its rhythm - the rhythm, I suppose, of life. She focused in sharper, closer still.
'I don't know if you studied biology,' said our guide, 'but those are its four chambers.' And so they were. The four chambers of a newly formed - still forming - human heart. Right there, deep within the otherwise secret intimacy of the darkness.
'For I have knit you together in your mother's womb,' writes the psalmist. 'I know you full well. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.' This God's-eye view, set fleetingly, tantalisingly before us, will never be ours again. From henceforth, our task is to call, without technology but with Spirit, 'as deep calls unto deep' - to the hidden heart of this as yet embryonic brother or sister of ours, of yours.
Humanity in microcosm; beauty writ large.
Search me, O God, and know my heart. For you were like this baby, once. And lead us, together, in the way everlasting: into the unforced rhythms of your coming advent grace.
Brian Draper
Brian Draper runs Echosounder, to nurture the spiritual intelligence of individuals and organisations. To find out more, visit Brian's website here.
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