There be dogs

There’s a house on my regular walking route with a chain-link fence that contains several dogs whose sole purpose in life seems to be to alert the world to the existence of any passersby. I have long since given up being annoyed at them. They’re just dogs, after all.

Their owner, on the other hand, I find to be unbearably annoying. An otherwise nice old lady, albeit a bit eccentric with her dozen animals and cluttered yard and eagerness to chat your ear off about as much as you’re willing to listen to, she has a frustrating impression that she can get her dogs to stop barking by yelling at them. Were this true, I might not mind so much. Yet as it is, with her dogs to alert her of my presence, she comes running to the sidewalk to chat with me whenever I pass by, yelling at her dogs to shut up every couple seconds while she has me stuck there, even telling me to wait there while she goes to the fence to yell at them from at a closer distance. The dogs, of course, never respond.

There be dogs inside my head, as impossible to silence as these lady’s backyard barkers. I never noticed how incessant they are until a friend started a weekly contemplative prayer group in one of the chapels on campus.

“This is not a time to articulate prayers or come to deeper understandings,” he explained. “The monastic tradition holds that God is beyond understanding, and we find him past ‘the cloud of unknowing.’ This is a time to learn the posture of waiting before him, listening, receiving.”

As an academic who spends my day accumulating and interpreting information, I find silence to be a harder a discipline than any I have tried.

“Inevitably, you’ll find yourself thinking,” my friend went on. “Don’t be upset at yourself for doing so; just gently push the thoughts away and return to silence. Sometimes it helps to have a particular word like ‘love’ or ‘Jesus’ to say to push the thoughts away, but don’t meditate on those words; try to quiet yourself before the Lord.”

In these weekly gatherings, I find my attempts to silence my mind to be about as fruitless as the lady’s attempts to silence her dogs, my silencing words about as ineffective as her yells.

The contemplatives call us to let “your thought of self be as naked and simple as your thought of God, so that you may be with God in spirit without fragmentation and scattering of your mind.” My mind is fragmented and scattered indeed, but there is a longing in me to be whole, to be unfragmented, to be listening, to be in his presence without the constraints of my own understanding. One day, I might learn to be silent long enough to begin that journey.

Fingerprints of God

The week that thousands were dying in Haiti from a catastrophic earthquake, my dear friend Seamus in Ireland very nearly died from a weather-related freak accident. In an unusually harsh Irish winter, Seamus was riding into town with his parents when a tree, roots weakened by the severe frost, fell directly on their vehicle and destroyed it. “At the extremest end of statistical unlikelihood,” Seamus called the situation. His crouch-instinct saved his life; the tree crushed past the headrest in the back seat where he was sitting. In the end, Seamus and his parents emerged from the pulverized vehicle without a scratch. “I’ve cut myself worse shaving,” he told me.

Unbeknownst to the three hapless passengers, Seamus’ devout grandmother had awoken at 6am afraid for her son’s life, and spent the next hour praying for him. The tree fell at 6:45.

It’s a bizarre situation that seems to have the intervention of God written all over it, but as I’ve mulled over it in the past week it strikes me that I cannot isolate specific locations for his fingerprints. Does God knock trees down on people to demonstrate his power and protection (by far the most uncanny part of the whole story)? Does God take the initiative to wake old women in order to answer their prayers, as if he could do the former unprompted but required prompting for the latter? Does God simply manufacture the physics of the world such that the tree did not crush the family (reverse entropy yet again?), so that the climax of the story is the most explainable, and the most joyous miracle can be accepted by a Deist?

I do not know. Nor exactly did I know how to pinpoint God’s intervention when my college friend hit a patch of ice in the mountains and found herself upside-down in a freezing river trapped in her seatbelt. Nor when an enormous tree fell where my little brother was playing in our childhood, scratching his arm as it came down. Nor when a car hit my housemate on her bike, or me on foot. Nor can I make sense of it when there seems to be no intervention, and friends get shot or hit by cars or drown.

Perhaps we meet God like any other person, not like a scientific phenomenon that we can test and analyze. Just as I cannot objectively qualify the actions of a friend, determining which are fueled by love and which by self-interest, but can nevertheless assert over time that I know my friend, perhaps in time we can come to know our God who is loving and powerful as we become familiar with the way he runs his world.

I do not know how to qualify God’s actions; all I know is what they say about him. And they seem to say that he is a God near enough for me to love.

Why do you contend against him,
saying, “He will answer none of man’s words”?
For God speaks in one way,
and in two, though man does not perceive it.
Job 33:13-14

Holy Innocents

I spent yesterday evening with my sister-in-law, receiving somber updates about her cousin who flew into Haiti on Tuesday 20 minutes before the earthquake hit. Sobered by the details as he sleeps in cornfields with the orphan girls he went to serve with little food or water and the looming threat of rampant disease as bodies decay, I was in no mood to receive a call from my old KKK friend Russ this morning on my way home from a mass offered for the victims of the tragedy. I should not have answered the phone. While his editorial is not worth repeating, it somehow connected the brokenness of the shattered country to the brokenness of our sinful hearts, the decay of death in the ravaged country to the decay of bitterness in our ravaged spirits. I pray for Haiti. I pray for my cousin-in-law. I pray for Russ.

We seek the living here among the dead,
But may we find you.
Where we discover our decay instead
And cannot find you,
Then be at least the cold that slows disease
And slithers through the shelter of debris.

I heard that Herod made a careful search
And could not find you;
But in the blood of Innocents the Church
Still strains to find you.
Be never as elusive as before
And more tenacious than the shattered floor.

We asked you for a king, but found his fist—
Now may we find you—
For life, but found a Cross behind the mist—
There may we find you.
And to the slave-girl when the dust is clear
Unveil your presence that was always near.

Once again...

Another dear friend of mine lost a baby this week: a seemingly healthy five-day-old little boy whom she put down for a nap only to watch him stop breathing.

There is a name for this syndrome (as it is called): Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. From what I can tell, that is just a fancy way of trying to define the unknown, to diagnose undiagonosability. When life slips through our fingers like sand, we cry out to doctors for reasons, and receive mere descriptions. They could have just as easily named it Frailty; they could have just as easily named it The Fall.

Once again, I find myself grieving for the little momentary miracle that shocks us like a lightning stroke and is gone. Once again I find myself amazed at the human capacity for love, that the human soul can make room for love so quickly, that love can leave a hole so large after so short a life. Once again, I find myself longing for the Resurrection, and find the little seed of love that the little boy’s life creates within us being the germ of hope, the deposit in our souls to remind us that life is not a flame that can be extinguished. But the germ is a small one.

And once again, I find myself pontificating, trying to distract myself with philosophical musings to avoid the only response that makes any sense: grief.

On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.

On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;

he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove the disgrace of his people
from all the earth.
The LORD has spoken.

In that day they will say,
"Surely this is our God;
we trusted in him, and he saved us.
This is the LORD, we trusted in him;
let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation."

Come quickly, Lord Jesus.


Photo taken by Franklin Golden. Franklin is a volunteer with Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, a non-profit foundation that provides professional maternity and birth photos to parents who are losing a child.

Speaking Oddities

I grew up in the Assemblies of God church (a branch of the Pentecostals), so it should come as no surprise that at some point in my childhood I felt that God had spoken to me. God was speaking to everyone, after all; the Holy Spirit came upon people regularly during our worship services; some spoke in languages they did not know, and others received the translation. The fact that God spoke to people directly was one of the first things I learned about him.

But when it happened to me, it was not like anything I had seen at church or knew to expect (perhaps that was one of the primary reasons I knew it was him). It was not at church at all, and it was not in a sanctified time of worship.

On the contrary, it was right after one of the most violent fights I would ever have with my brother, and I was feeling about as unholy as an otherwise well-mannered child could feel. That afternoon, it had not been the Holy Spirit who had seized upon my body; it was a rage that was borderline demonic, and I wanted for a few frightening minutes to do nothing other than hurt him. Now, having been caught, restrained, and sent outside to cool down while the adults discussed whether or not an exorcism would be in order, I wandered in the woods to face my own inner demons of shame and isolation.

And I knew it was God who spoke to me then, not because he was loud enough to drown out the million other noises in my head—my unexplainable rage, the severe alarm of the adults, my liturgy of despair that repeated its insistence that I was utterly alone—but because it was so much quieter, and yet I heard it anyway. Suddenly—and I remember the exact square foot of sacred wooded ground where I was standing at this moment—a stillness came over me, a stillness that seemed to say one thing:

“I love you.”

In almost two decades since that day, I have never been so sure of God’s voice, nor have I grown out of the need to hear that inaugural message. In these almost two decades, I have cried out for direction that never came, and I have been certain God was telling me things that later seemed to come more from my own idealism. But as I experienced that afternoon, God's voice rarely says what my spirit is prepared to hear.

Christ said that his sheep know his voice, and will not follow a stranger because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice. Perhaps one way we can identify his voice is by its peculiarity; that afternoon in the woods, I knew that voice of love was God’s voice because it was such an oddity. Perhaps he still speaks in oddities, in the last thing we expect or hope to hear, in the dirty baths to cure leprosy or the seven buckets of water to start a fire, in the still whisper that follows the thunder and storms.

I want God to speak to me loud enough to drown out the other voices; sometimes he only speaks in whispers. Odd whispers, at that.

Why do you contend against him,
saying, “He will answer none of man’s words”?
For God speaks in one way,
and in two, though man does not perceive it.

The Middle Voice of Faith

“It just seems weird to me,” I said about some theological point (we’ll just say it’s irrelevant for now; context would be distracting). “It’s not that it’s offensive or that I know it’s wrong per se, but it certainly doesn’t make sense, and it feels strange.”

The Catholic seminarian listened to my qualms patiently for a while, and then said what might prove to be one of the most helpful things I’ve ever heard about faith.

“I understand it sounding strange to you,” he agreed, “and truth be told, it might always sound strange to you. But it might be helpful for you to remember that the majority of Christians throughout the centuries have been in agreement about this. It might be helpful to remember that your misgivings are a minority opinion, and your inability to understand it could be somewhat of a deficiency on your part, rather than on the part of the theology.”

Aside from the specific theological point we were discussing, it strikes me as a radically different way of approaching faith than I am accustomed to, an approach that directly meets some of my doubts from this spring when I didn’t even know if I believed in God’s redemption anymore.

I grew up in circles that considered faith a matter of the heart. Faith meant a feeling of God’s presence, a sense of his spirit and an experience of his power that would overflow into our lives. In some ways, then, to believe was to feel.

I matured in circles that considered faith a matter of the mind. Faith meant a grappling with the reasons behind what we believed and delving into the nuances of an overarching view of the world. In a powerful way, then, to believe was to understand.

I rebelled from both these a bit in college, and pursued an alternative idea that faith was a matter of action. Faith was the incarnation of ideas or emotions into the tactile grit of life. Perhaps, the idealistic college student pondered, to believe was to do.

And what struck me in conversation with my seminarian friend the other day was that faith to him seemed to mean none of those things. He did not seem frazzled by the fact that I did not feel comfortable with the theology. He did not try to explain the point to me so that I could understand it. He did not suggest an action I could take to produce faith. He allowed that I may never have the feelings or the understanding of faith.

Faith, he suggested to me later, is a gift, a thing that we receive from God rather than something we can produce. On our part, it involves receiving, a surrender of our right to reject what does not feel right or does not make sense. But (and believe you me, this is good news for me!), if our senses and our understanding do not ever manage to join in, it does not mean there is no faith. Faith, after all, is not something we are called to form; it is something that forms us.

Faith then may not be the absence of doubt or despair; it may rather sit in the presence of doubt and despair, acknowledging that the doubt and despair are one’s own deficiencies, and not be threatened by them.

As a completely esoteric analogy from the throes of Greek boot camp, faith may be the middle voice. Greek, in addition to having an active voice (The boy ate the banana) and a passive voice (The boy was eaten by the banana) also has a strange thing called a middle voice that I cannot for the life of me explain: it takes mostly passive endings and has an active-ish meaning, sometimes reflexively (The boy ate himself) or some other self-centered sort of emphasis (The boy ate for his own benefit). But the important thing for the analogy is that it looks passive, and it is indeed not active; it is somehow neither or both. English does not have a way to express this. Neither does my theology.

But the next time I feel alone and cannot understand God’s presence, the next time I feel outraged at injustice and cannot understand God’s redemption, the next time I feel weary and cannot understand God’s goodness, it may be helpful to receive the faith that can sit with my doubt and despair rather than assuming that they are mutually exclusive. It may be helpful to consider my doubt and despair to be my own deficiencies, not God's deficiencies but also not my sins, deficiencies that he is welcome to tend to as he will. That seems a whole lot more passive than I thought I would ever hear myself suggest, but only because it is clearly not active, and my theology has never had to make room for a middle voice.

The Present Tense of Hope

The readings at church this past Sunday came from II Kings 4:42-44 in which Elisha miraculously feeds 100 men with 20 loaves, Psalm 144 for which the congregational response was “You open wide your hand, O Lord, and grant our desires,” and John 6:1-15 in which Jesus feeds the 5,000. Father Padraic, whom I got to know last year, gave a lovely homily that emphasized God showing up in history, ultimately through the incarnation where he walks up another hillside to feed the people as he opens wide his hands on the cross. It was a fabulous homily for an English major.

But as any of my regular readers may recall, God’s presence was an issue of serious question for me this past spring. Furthermore, though Ireland has proved to be a refreshing holiday from my characteristic melancholy, the intensive language school has a tendency to push each of its victims to his breaking-point throughout the summer, and Tuesday ended up being my day to snap. That afternoon I found myself unable to study and hounded by all the questions that I knew where waiting for me in the US, and I left my homework and went to the cathedral to pray.

And eventually Father Padraic showed up beside me, having uncharacteristically decided to do his evening prayers in the cathedral that day, and finding me crying in front of the crucifix he asked me if I’d like to get a cup of tea with him. We walked to a nearby cafe and talked for about an hour.

“But there are sometimes God doesn’t seem to show up,” I interjected at some point in the conversation, thinking about the situation this past spring. “And I can’t walk away unless God starts providing more people. Sometimes there is no one else...”

“Watch out with those kinds of words,” Father Padraic interrupted me. “There are six billion people in the world. You only have a vague idea of what God is doing with one of them.”

“I know...” I admitted. “I know I shouldn’t say any statements with words like ‘no one’ or ‘never,’ but it certainly seems like God stands aloof sometimes.”

“Maybe you’re asking for the physical proof like Thomas was,” Fr Padraic suggested. “Unless you have the categorical evidence that you can see and touch you will not believe in the risen Christ. But blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe. The call of the Christian is a call to hope in the risen Christ.”

I never thought of myself as a Cartesian materialist demanding physical proof. But maybe he was right; one way or another, he was certainly dead-on with suggesting my need to grow in hope.

“What do you mean by hope?” I asked. “Is hope in this case a future thing, hope that God will work everything out in the end into a beautiful story that makes all the evil worth it? I have plenty of that, but a hope for the future can often lead to a despair in the present.”

“No,” he assured me, “it is a hope for the present, hope that the risen Christ is alive now and working miraculously whether or not you see him. Your friend back home, for example, might have 50 people in her life right now; it is a hope that God is using the other 49 as well, whether or not you see it. It is also a hope that God is taking care of you, using people in ways they are not aware of to meet your needs, like when I came to the cathedral this evening when I would normally be elsewhere. You are not always given the chance to see him, but he is risen.”

The next morning was the feast of St. Martha. At mass we celebrated her belief in the resurrection that she had in the midst of her grief, hope that was not only in the future tense, but also the present:

Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

Martha said to him, I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

She said to him, “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!

“Do you believe that?” my Muslim friend asked me after my brief abstract explanation of one of my Christian friend’s theology of redemption. I was struck by the question that had an obvious right answer, and struck by the fact that I didn’t know if I could give it.

It was an Evangelical Christian’s dream come true: my friend was in a terrible time of personal crisis, and the Christian notion of a God who was involved in the muck of our lives transforming it into something beautiful was both directly applicable and entirely foreign to her. All I had to do was give the right answer that I knew almost as early as I could say the word “yes.”

But it was not a good Evangelical she had with her that night... it was a girl whose faith was defined by the changing ways she railed at God over the years, and at that moment the rail had to do with this particular friend’s hell that God had seemed absent from. I wished I was any other Christian in that moment.

“I don’t know...” I stammered honestly. “I want to believe it. I try to believe it. Sometimes I think I do, and then things like last week happen...”

It has been a hard Lent for me. The world feels so much more unredeemable when one is swamped in an unredeemable situation. My brother quoted to me an Orthodox priest who said, “If one where to solve the problems of Jerusalem, he would have solved the problems of the world.” Sometimes I feel like if God could redeem even one of these broken lives I enter, he will have redeemed the world.

But that thought, the comparison of my friend’s hell to the grand picture of redeeming humanity, became a challenge for me in the next week. Over and over, I was struck by these small glimpses of redemption. They don’t look like redemption because they are so comparatively weak in comparison to the evil that happened; but they are like small glimmers of sunlight in a dark forest that let you know something greater is behind it. And I began to wonder if slowly, imperceptibly, God was indeed redeeming my Jerusalem.

Maybe he is. In the mean time, he can’t get upset at me for weeping about it all... he did indeed weep over Jerusalem, after all.

The posture of Faith

In the group I've mentioned before that meets to listen and discuss the words of different religious thinkers, we just listed to a program about Elie Wiessel, an Auschwitz survivor who lost both his parents in the holocaust. Though we listened to the whole program, there was one quote from the beginning that grabbed my attention, and that seized the entirety of the discussion afterwards:

Some people who read my first book, Night, they were convinced that I broke with the faith and broke with God. Not at all. I never divorced God. It is because I believed in God that I was angry at God, and still am. The tragedy of the believer, it is deeper than the tragedy of the non-believer.

The words resonated with me, and with one of the other "messier" Christians in the room (whose dying father is an atheist and whose mother is a Buddhist). But for the other people in the room, from Christians to unaffiliated theists, the words were anywhere from irrational to repulsive. Why would one be angry at God? they wondered. If it seems like God is not doing his/her responsibility, you must have the wrong idea of what that responsibility is. Change your perception of him; he is beyond anger.

I think one of the best parts of being a Christian is that three-quarters of our Bible is the Jewish Bible, the story of Israel who was named the Wrestler. Abraham barters; Jacob wrestles; Moses argues; David pleads; Jeremiah laments; Jonah pouts; Job demands.

To my Christian friends, that posture often seems dangerous. To my unaffiliated theist friend, it is ridiculous. But I wonder if it is the posture of true faith in a God who claims to be just and righteous; I wonder if anything less is to not take his words seriously. At the very least, God has shown himself big enough to take it; at most, he has specifically chosen the wrestlers who will take him to task about making good on his promises. Certainly he will prove himself right in the end, but that knowledge doesn't seem to keep the faithful from wrestling with him in the mean time.

When he comes...

I know that Messiah is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.

-John 4:25

The obvious irony of the Samaritan woman’s statement to Jesus is that she was talking to the Messiah himself. But the other irony is that she was wrong: she’s been standing around talking to the Messiah for a while now, and he is doing anything but explaining.

He is doing quite the opposite, from what I can tell. He asks for physical water, and then says that if she knew who she was talking to she would have asked him for “water” that would create "springs of water" flowing out of her. She asks about where one should worship, and he answers, “in spirit and truth” (Oh... there!). When the disciples come and offer him food, he says that he already has “food” that they don’t know about, because the “fields” are “ripe for harvest.”

Two thousand years later, I think I’m still expecting him to come and explain things to me. But he doesn’t, and maybe that is why it takes me a while to recognize him. Like with the Samaritan woman and with the disciples, he just keeps talking around my questions. From what I can tell of his interactions with these people in Scripture, there’s not really any way they could have figured out the secret hidden meaning from the context. Maybe there are times when you “worship what you do not know,” times when you believe in a Savior even though you are not really sure what you are believing about him.

There seems to be quite a precedent for that kind of faith. I suppose it puts me in good company.

...But I still wish he would come and explain everything to me.

Out of the Vermillioned Nothingness

I’m trying to expand the horizons of my education this summer to include twentieth century American poets. With one week out of five down, they are meeting my expectations: I liked Frost a good deal, Stevens a great deal less, and Williams not at all. It’s not looking good for the twentieth century.

But as I’m writing this second entry to my listening-blog in a month that is almost over, God’s silence is on my mind, and Wallace Stevens has a thing or two to say on the matter in his poem “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit”:

If there must be a god in the house, must be…
He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed…

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermillioned nothingness…

The Job in me—with her long list of complaints against the God whom she will not rebel against but from whom she had demanded answers—is less inclined to interpret Stevens as laying out a list of rules for God to follow (“Deities must be seen and not heard”) than as deducing his best assessment of how God must function, based on his observation of the silence. But the mysterious Elihu had once asked Job, as he might have asked Stevens or me,

Why do you contend against him,
saying, ‘He will answer none of man’s words’?
For God speaks in one way,
and in two, though man does not perceive it.

I once suggested in another entry that God seems deaf to my questions because I ask the wrong ones, and that humility comes in allowing the questions to be rewritten. But if Scripture is any precedent (isn’t that a great conditional statement?), maybe half the time God answers with a question. Maybe God surprises the interrogator with questions of his own, and while I maintain my status as the interrogator I will not hear him. Throughout Scripture, God emerges from silences and confusions and pain with questions:

To Adam: “Where are you?”
To Cain: “Why are you angry, and why is your face downcast?”
To Hagar: “Where have you come from and where are you going?”
To Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
To Andrew: “What are you seeking?
To the paralytic: “Do you want to be healed?”
To the crowds: “Does this offend you?”
To the blind man: “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”
To Simon: “Do you love me?”

To me? I don’t know. Hearing God’s questions would require a different kind of listening than I have done, a listening without the stipulations of my own questions. To quote my very favorite twentieth century American poet, it would be “Wait without thought”:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
T. S. Eliot

Survey

Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil. Be not rash with your motuh, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few.

When that passage came up in our Bible study last night, I immediately felt as though it had advice I needed to heed. I thought of the volumes of journals I had filled over the years with my rants and frustrations to God, with little time taken to listen. I thought of the fruit that approach had produced in my interactions with people. I thought of our American Evangelical buddy-buddy image of God, and the ways it seemed to cheapen the Faith.

But then I listened to my friends comment on their reaction to the passage. They received it has a harsh image of God. "Don't bother God," they heard; "He's a harsh tyrant who may decide to wipe you out." Many received it as a discription of contrast, one of those passages that we read to remind us of how wonderful it is to be on this side of the Incarnation. Now that Jesus is here, we don't have to look at God that way.

I am torn. I am well-aware that my own tendency to tell God more than I hear from him has been harmful, and that I could always use a little more good healthy reverent silence. Yet I also know that it has always been easier for me to connect with Zeus than with Jesus. I tell people that I like the Old Testiment because it has been so neglected by modern Christians, but I know I really like it because I prefer the powerful God it depicts over the fluffy God I often hear about in church. Maybe I need a good healthy dose of the fuzzies.

So I thought I'd take a survey to get a feel for how the small cross-section of the Church that reads my blog reads this passage. When you read Ecclesiastes 5:1-2 (written above), do you think:

1. "Indeed, the Church (and individuals such as Em) would do well to have more of that reverent fear. How deeply are we infused with a fluffy image of God that causes our faith to emphasize our own words and takes so little time to listen!"
2. "Thank Jesus that we no longer need to think of God that way. Indeed, the Church (and individuals such as Em) no doubt suffer from such a harsh, pre-Incarnation picture of God that forgets his Grace, forgiveness and humanity."
3. Both of the above.
   
4. None of the above.

The Trump Card

Sometime last year, I found myself deep in conversation with Russ, a 60-year-old citizen of the southern city where I was living who opposed nearly everything I stood for. As one of those things was Christianity (though he made allowances for the beauty it added to the KKK), we often got in theological discussions.

“The way I see it,” he asserted confidently as he worked on consuming another pack of Camels into his puttering lungs, “there are two types of people: those who operate on faith, and those who operate on reason. I will always operate on reason, no matter what anyone says.”

This false dichotomy was not a new concept to me, so I didn’t bat an eye to answer him. I responded with a discussion about various examples of times one used reason to submit to faith (going to the doctor, for example).

Russ listened pensively, and acquiesced most of my argument to me. When he realized he wasn’t going to win on the classic Faith vs. Reason polarization, he seemed almost ready to surrender to me that my allegiance to Christianity might not be as ridiculous as he had originally claimed. For the first time in the conversation, he simply smoked in silence.

Suddenly, Russ straightened confidently as if he had finally remembered his secret weapon, entrusted to him during his most recent stay in prison.

“But if what you say is true,” he triumphantly laid his trump-card, “why did they destroy the records at the Counsel of Trent?!”

I almost choked on my campfire coffee he had brewed over his kerosene stove. Clearly, Russ used his time at the prison library well. When I had recovered from the shock of the derailing of our intellectual conversation, I finally addressed his question in the most fair way it deserved.

“Russ,” I answered, “I don’t think you give a damn about the records of the Counsel of Trent. As a matter of fact, if I had them with me here in my back pocket, I don’t think you would read them.”

I happened to remember that conversation last night when my brother and I were watching the Da Vinci Code. But I am placing myself in Russ’s place now. How many times am I up against the wall, knowing that all my arguments have proved thin and the only thing left for me to do is admit I was wrong, when I suddenly pull out a ridiculous trump-card that had nothing to do with anything.

“Well, if God really does love me, where was he that one time in high school when…”

As I mentioned in an earlier post, perhaps God is often silent to my questions because they are the wrong questions. In fact, maybe half the time they are not even questions, anymore than Russ’s qualm about the Counsel of Trent had been a genuine question.

Yet must I think less wildly

Yesterday I was re-reading Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and there were a couple stanzas that well-described the state of the melancholy poet-prophet who Byron believed himself to be. (Okay, okay... so I really meant “who I always believed myself to be,” but I can’t always be self-revealing on this listening-blog. Every poet thinks himself a prophet, and most of them are melancholy ones.)

Yet must I think less wildly: I have thought
Too long and darkly, till my brain became,
In its own eddy boiling and o’erwrought,
A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame:
And thus, untaught in youth my heart to tame,
My springs of life were poisoned. ’Tis too late!
Yet am I changed; though still enough the same
In strength to bear what time cannot abate,
And feed on bitter fruits without accusing fate…

But soon he knew himself the most unfit
Of men to herd with Man; with whom he held
Little in common; untaught to submit
His thoughts to others, though his soul was quelled,
In youth by his own thoughts; still uncompelled,
He would not yield dominion of his mind
To spirits against whom his own rebelled;
Proud though in desolation; which could find
A life within itself, to breathe without mankind.

(III: vii., xii.)

Without expounding on why those passages struck me—the poet whose thoughts can become poisonous torture, the visionary whose stubbornness isolates him—which would by necessity be either hypocritical or self-incriminating, I thought I’d contrast them against what I read this morning from the daily lectionary.

O LORD, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.

O Israel, hope in the LORD
from this time forth and forevermore.

Psalm 131

The contrast for me this morning after spending yesterday submerged in Byron was striking.

Credentials for High Priest

In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.

Sandwiched between two verses about Jesus being made a high priest forever in the order of Melchizedek, the author of Hebrews lists this as his credentials, hardly the material I would put on a resume for the position of Ultimate High Priest. Basically, Christ is said to be the ultimate high priest because during his time here he cried out to God for help who could have saved him, but then he died anyway. Christ is the high priest whose prayers were not answered.

I wonder how much my prayers would be transformed if I remembered that I prayed through a mediator who as a man offered unanswered prayers. I often see myself as Job, crying out to a God who seems mostly silent, and whose greatness and power would silence me if he actually answered. Job asked God to come and meet him in the flesh…

…and when God ultimately answers Job’s prayers in the person of Christ, he does it as a man who cries out seemingly unanswered prayers. Christ is the ultimate High Priest because he also has begged for relief to his present pain that did not come. It is that man (with an emphasis on man in this particular context) who intercedes for me in my own seemingly unanswered prayers.

The Silence of God

Yesterday my questionably-recovering, weak, anemic, drugged, sickly sister learned that a friend of hers just died. He was vacationing with his family, went into some pretty rough waters, and got caught in a rip-tide. They haven’t found his body yet.

The news is hard on me, partially because it is hard to see my sister trying to take the news like a trouper, partially because I am only just now getting used to the idea that I had almost lost her.

Somehow the lesson that I serve a gracious God who spared the life of my sister is not what I want to be hearing right now. I want him to answer bigger questions:

• Why did God save me from drowning when I as an idiot high-schooler tried to swim across a lake with a bolder tied to me, but not the life of my sister’s friend?
• Why did God save my life when I had a nearly-fatal car accident at 16, but not the life of my friend’s sister when she died at the same age?
• Why did God give me the couple inches that saved my life when I got hit by a car last spring, but not the life of my friend who got killed the same way a few weeks later?

Sometimes the reason I stop listening to God is that he has a history of being so silent to my questions. My listening comes with stipulations: “God, you have a lot of explaining to do, and I’m ready to hear it.” And God is silent. So I stop listening.

The thing about listening to God is that you don’t always get to chose what you hear. Sometimes God ignores my questions and takes me back to the ones that didn’t seem relevant. He reminds me that he saved my sister’s life last week. He reminds me that he often saves mine, despite myself. He reminds me of his care, and that his care applies to my sister now in her grief, and to me as I cannot take her pain away.

But that wasn’t my question.

Perhaps true listening requires the humility to allow the questions to be rewritten.

Why do you contend against him,
saying, “He will answer none of man’s words”?
For God speaks in one way,
and in two, though man does not perceive it.
Job 33:13-14

A Costly Deafness

My little sister nearly died two weeks ago because no one was listening to her.

That sounds a little drastic, as I always do, and I certainly don’t mean to point any fingers at anyone (even the school nurse who kept telling her she was probably having allergy trouble) that I haven’t pointed at myself.

Just days before lying in a hospital bed to receive four blood transfusions to begin to replace the two-thirds of her blood that she had lost, my sister had described her excessive blood-loss situation to me. I thought it sounded annoying, like anything in that genre of issues. She also told me she was feeling weak and having headaches, but she’s always saying things like that. By the time she finally pleaded to be taken to the doctor a few days later, she wouldn’t have survived another day.

I’ve had to pay some heavy costs for not listening before, but that would have been unspeakably severe. I thank God she is alive.

Let us listen; deafness can be costly. Let us hear one another more closely than the speaker intends; sometimes people do not know that they are dying.