When my children were very small we lived on a farm. It had an old blue farmhouse that overlooked a lovely pond teeming with snapping turtles, fish, and croaking bullfrogs. Winding around the corner of this pond was an old dirt road that the farmer’s noisy tractors would rumble down on the way to the fields behind the house. I would sometimes take my kids on walks down this road, in the evening after supper, when the sun was setting low. We discovered early on that if we stood in a certain spot along this path and shouted towards the barn, we would hear our echo bouncing back at us. We called it Echo Lane. One of my daughters recently reminded me of this time and got me thinking about echoes, and their visual counterpart reflections. There are many things that they can teach us. Here are just a few.
Ancient people only heard themselves in echoes. The replying canyon walls were the first to let them hear their voice as others did. Sure, they could hear their voices in one sense, but they couldn’t hear them aright. Nor can we. There’s a strange distortion that takes place in the distance between our mouth and ears. Not until Edison captured voices on his tinfoiled cylinders did we start to hear ourselves correctly. I’ve often noticed how appalled most people are to hear their recorded voices. They are shocked to think they really sound like that. But when all the others listening to the reproduction say, “no, that’s exactly how you sound,” they are forced to accept the truth. And an audio recording is just a frozen echo we can endlessly repeat by pressing “play.” Like the echo, it is just the original returning to our ears.
Echoes remind us that our words and deeds reverberate. If there were never any sound waves bouncing back at us, we might be tempted to forget we are a cause that has effects. We can listen to ourselves reflected off the surface of the souls around us. The father hears familiar tones in the words his children speak. The mother’s emotions are often emulated in the feelings of her daughters. We think we sound like one thing, but what returns to us is something we didn’t want to hear. Of course, the waves returning are mingled and distorted just a tad, but not so much that we don’t recognize the source. We’d do well to ponder what comes back.
And echoes are to ears what reflections are to eyes. How ignorant of our faces we would be without reflections. We can see our hands and legs and bodies, and can assume we have a face like all the others that we see, but without a surface to reflect us, how could we know for sure? For centuries we relied upon the calmness of a pool or the polished surface of metal or stone to let us see ourselves. Now cameras capture our reflection and preserve them for the future. Old photos are just mirrors that we stood before a long, long time ago. But unlike photos, mirrors don’t retain the sights they see. Once I leave behind the looking glass, my image doesn’t stay within its frame. And how quickly we can lose the way we look. We may note the echo’s quick diminishment, but the loss of mirrors is immediate.
But creation is an echo of another kind. If I were to go back to Echo Lane today, my children’s voices wouldn’t still be lingering in the air. Unlike the mundane echo’s quick decay or the light wave’s temporal span, the voice that spoke the worlds into existence still vibrates in every fiber of reality. The One who uttered each “Let There Be” still hears a testifying reply in all He’s made. And we all hear this echo just as well. It is why the pastor and the poet find a plethora of illustrations in the world around them. It’s also why the atheist is a fool. The resonating testimony of creation and the reflected wonder of His works are just too numerous to ignore.
May all the echoes and reflections of creation serve to turn us to the source from which they came. May every iteration of our voice and reflected image remind us that we are a source as well. Proverbs 27:9 teaches us that “As in water face reflects face, so a man’s heart reveals the man,” and so we understand that our hearts will always be reflecting what we’re gazing on. May we with unveiled faces look on Him who will transform us by His glory, and so reflect Him like a mirror here on earth. And may our voices share a resonance with the One whose words are still ringing from the start.
