This is the Word

“Open your ears and hear my prayer. Don’t pretend you don’t hear me knocking. Come close and whisper your answer. I really need you.”
—Psalm 55:1-2, The Message

There are times when we are, if not desperate, then at least fervently longing for some word of the Lord. There are things that happen that drain away all words, leaving you with a silence loud enough to make you shout back prayers all day and night to fill it, knocking, knocking at the gates of heaven. And that sense of need, of pleading, comes through in The Message translation of Psalm 55 in one honest statement: “I really need you.”

There are times when I am less desperate for an answer, but still want to know that there is some response to my questions of life. And for those times, I have the rather odd habit (though not that odd, I have discovered) of typing random things into Google: everything from “What should we have for supper tonight” to “Why are my kids acting crazy?” to the more philosophical “Why do people suffer?” And there is always, always, some word to be found. Sometimes it’s an informational web site with recipes or spiritual guidance, other times it’s just someone else’s blog complaining about unruly kids. There is always someone to answer back; there are always words in response.

It’s an odd impulse, but one that goes back to the very beginnings of creation. God speaks, and we are created. We speak back to God, to each other, and the dialogue continues. All of it reassuring us that we are not alone. And maybe that’s why I can’t abide the silence so well. With that kind of open-hearted vulnerability, “I really need you,” I would think anyone would be moved to respond. But so often there is only silence and a God seems to have closed his ears, pretending not to hear our desperate cries. The best we can do then is keep talking—keep telling ourselves the words that tell the stories of who we are … tell them to Google, to friends, to blogs, in sermons, emails, and phone calls. And in the practice of telling them, we may find at last that God is not in the answer, but in the very breath with which we are moved to ask the questions.

Dots

“You may wonder where they have gone, those other dim dots that were you.”
—Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

Over the last weeks, I have done a lot of traveling back to places I used to live, rocketing through time quickly from the place I went to elementary school, to the place I went to college, and back to where I live now. I found this a very disorienting experience. Instead of telling a smooth story, tracing my life narrative from one place to the next, these visits made me wonder how many different places a person can spread their DNA without losing something of who they are each time. Where, in all of these places was home? Where, in all of those places, was me?

Was there some trace of me in the elementary school playground, in the red brick blockhouse where we’d come in with eyes squinting after being in the sun, smelling the stale milk, pushing into each other to go up the stairs more quickly? Could my voice or some tiny fleck of my skin still be present in the gray windows where we played “Squish, Squash, Out of the Box”? And if some trace of me was there, what about all the other places I have lived? How is it possible to leave bits of yourself in so many places and yet still have enough left to keep going? I find it harder as I get older to live with so many disconnected things. I resist this this scattering that seems to be spinning out farther and farther with every year I age. I live with what is bent, broken, and breaking down. And I am waiting, waiting, for things to be whole.

What hope I have now comes in a picture that might someday be true: A day when the breath of the Spirit will move across the surface of my soul, making all those disparate dots of dust spring to life and dance in the air, and the finger of God will trace through the light, joining together every speck into a story where there seemed to be none. There is a story that includes everything about me, a place where I can be at rest. This I believe. Lord, help my unbelief.