"Everybody prays whether he thinks of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when a sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else's pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else's joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with all over your life. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to yourself but to something even more familiar than yourself and even more strange than the world. According to Jesus, by far the most important thing about praying is to keep at it. The images he uses to explain this are all rather comic, as though he thought it was rather comic to have to explain it at all. He says God is like a friend you go to borrow bread from at midnight. The friend tells you in effect to drop dead, but you go on knocking anyway until finally he gives you what you want so he can go back to bed again (Luke 11:5-8). Or God is like a crooked judge who refuses to hear the case of a certain poor widow, presumably because he knows there's nothing much in it for him. But she keeps on hounding him until finally he hears her case just to get her out of his hair (Luke 18:1-8). Even a stinker, Jesus says, won't give his own child a black eye when he asks for peanut butter and jelly, so how all the more will God when his children... (Matthew 7:9-11).
Be importunate, Jesus says—not, one assumes, because you have to beat a path to God's door before he'll open it, but because until you beat the path maybe there's no way of getting to your door. "Ravish my heart," John Donne wrote. But God will not usually ravish. He will only court." Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking
Lenten Learning 2: I spend a whole lot of time talking to myself (and maybe to God).
As I tried to pay more attention to my actions over Lent (and, apparently, overdosing on Frederick Buechner), I noticed that I spent a lot of time in my own head. Mostly holding one-sided conversations, as opposed to actually thinking, heaven forbid. Is this a bad thing? Maybe not. Maybe a little. Worrying, wondering, speculating, planning. Deep ideas and dull ones. Sporadic and often disparate thoughts. Occasionally, actual prayers. Often the same ones over and over. Pretty standard fare, right? Just an awkward protagonist delivering a semi-conscious internal monologue. My soul in paraphrase. But, regardless of what I'm saying or how much sense it makes, regardless of whether it's stream of consciousness stuff, or structured, whether they're introspective or just crazy, it seems all that 'talking' can also be prayer. I think God knows what's meant for Him. Bottom line - I think it's ok to spend this internal inadvertently-sacred time, as long as I start talking to real live people, too.
“The life that I touch for good or ill will touches another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place and time my touch will be felt. Our lives are linked together. No man is an island.
But there is another truth, the sister of this one, and it is that every man is an island. It is a truth that often the tolling of a silence reveals even more vividly than the tolling of a bell. We sit in silence with one another, each of us more or less reluctant to speak, for fear that if he does, he may sound like a fool. And beneath that there is of course the deeper fear, which is really a fear of the self rather than of the other, that maybe truth of it is that, indeed, he is a fool. The fear that the self that he reveals by speaking may be a self that the others will reject just as in a way he has himself rejected it. So either we do not speak, or we speak not to reveal who we are but to conceal who we are, because words can be used either way, of course. Instead of showing ourselves as we truly are, we show ourselves as we believe others want us to be. We wear masks, and with practice we do it better and better, and they serve us well – except that it gets very lonely inside the mask, because inside the mask that each of us wears there is a person who both longs to be known and fears to be known. In this sense every man is an island separated from every other man by fathoms of distrust and duplicity. Part of what it means to be is to be you and not me, between us the sea that we can never entirely cross even when we would. “My brethren are wholly estranged from me,” Job cries out. “I have become an alien in their eyes.”
The paradox is that part of what binds us closest together as human beings and makes it true that no man is an island is the knowledge that in another way every man is an island. Because to know this is to know that not only deep in you is there a self that longs above all to be known and accepted, but that there is also such a self in me, in everyone else the world over. So when we meet as strangers, when even friends look like strangers, it is good to remember that we need each other greatly you and I, more than much of the time we dare to imagine, more than more of the time we dare to admit.
Island calls to island across the silence, and once, in trust, the real words come, a bridge is built and love is done – not sentimental, emotional love, but love that is pontifex, bridge-builder. Love that speaks the holy and healing word which is: God be with you, stranger who are no stranger. I wish you well. The islands become an archipelago, a continent, become a kingdom whose name is the Kingdom of God.” ― Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark
I'm baaaaaaack. I took an unplanned, self-inflicted break from blogging over Lent - did you miss me? Over the next couple of days, you'll have to listen to I plan to tell you about what I learned over the last 40+ days. I've had plenty of time to think about stuff.
Today's learning, advantageously, coincides with the date.
Learning One: My fear of looking like a fool trumps my ability to move mountains.
Thinking about relationships (work and personal, real and imagined) in retrospect, I've identified instances where I either did or said something which masked the way I actually felt. Not lying, really. Mostly just non sequiters, adianoeta, phrases turned which please the listener, but still convey truth when looked at sideways. I wasn't dishonest, you just interpreted me incorrectly.
Why do I do that? Well, simply put, I want to protect whatever I believe the relationship's status quo is. Even if it's a crappy status quo, it's the devil I know. And I want to be the me that I think you'd like. It's incredibly difficult for me to take the chance of being completely honest with every man, woman or child. I don't know any human who can manage that.
I can save face for a while; ultimately I'll end up more and more detached from myself and others. In keeping with the landmass analogy, I break off and do a little continental drifting.
I know someone who seems kind of like this The self they've created is quite honorable: intelligent, well-spoken, sincere, compassionate, able to cut to the heart of matters. But behind that, I sense a sort of detachment; not an insincere one, but an unconscious indifference created more through habit. I don't know. It kind of makes me sad. Like there's a personal fortress of solitude. Or maybe it's just my imagination.
ANYWAY. The bottom line is, even though I keep getting the word that I can, in fact, move mountains (enough, already), the leap of faith from private island to archipelago is pretty damn scary.
I might take that chance if I knew for sure that you were a fool, too.
“The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness -- that I myself am the enemy who must be loved -- what then? As a rule, the Christian's attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us "Raca," and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves.”
― C.G. Jung
I'm feeling pretty guilty about not being here as much as I want to be, and about letting work have more say in my life than it ought to.
Lately it seems like I have a lot of "obligations" that are getting in the way. When I consider them, I see that it isn't so much that they are obstructing anything, but more that I'm giving them free rein and being lazy about controlling them. Because of my lack of discipline, the first thing that suffers is my God time; the second my sabbath observance. I have fleeting pangs about it and quickly throw myself into other mindless tasks.
What's worse is, normally, Lent is usually so much more meaningful, more contemplative for me. But this year, I really haven't given it a chance to sink in. Maybe it's work. Maybe it's the ankle. Maybe it's just me looking for excuses (or absolution). Plus, I had Burger King on Sunday and stayed up past 11:00 on at least two work nights (unless they don't count because I did actually fall asleep in front of the laptop and woke up a couple hours later to turn everything off). So I've blown both of my goals and need to pick up the pieces and try again.
So, tomorrow evening's study examining forgiveness in view of the cross, should be interesting.
I know that I, like Christ from the cross, must forgive the others who hurt me; who know not what they do. I hope that I can find a way to come to grips with how to forgive myself; who knows all too well what she does.
