Gratitude

There are some who advocate an “attitude of gratitude” because of the benefits it offers for one’s emotional health. The more grateful you are, goes the thinking, the happier you will be. And I’m sure this is at least partly true. Recognizing the things that often go unnoticed and giving thanks for them surely deepens our sense of wonder and our joy at what it means to be human. But what about giving thanks when things are hard? Giving thanks when we don’t get what we want, when we are lonely, when we despair?

There is a song by Nicole Nordeman called “Gratitude” in which she describes giving thanks if we never get rain, daily bread, safety, peace—giving thanks for lessons learned in hungering and thirsting after God. A friend recently told me that anyone who hungers and thirsts after righteousness will find herself restless and ill at ease much of the time. But what other way is there to be?

The joy of this kind of restlessness comes in the times when in spite of circumstances, we find ourselves drawn in to caring conversation, find ourselves unaccountably moved to tears by the gentleness of men singing, find ourselves filled with the sense that though we are thirsty and hungry, we are not alone.

So this Canadian Thanksgiving day, I am grateful for brothers and sisters on the journey. I am grateful for times of absence and how they make me appreciate presence more. I am grateful for tears. And if nothing else, I am grateful for a heart still alive enough to burn.

(Not) Knowing God

“When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.” (John 2:13-15)

Jesus made a whip out of cords. How did it happen? He took in the scene and was enraged. He stopped, sat down maybe, turned his fingers over and formed knots, one after another, to make a whip. Before his hands touched blind eyes with mud to make them see, before his hands broke bread to feed the hungry, his hands worked leather (or whatever the cords were made of) and created a whip.

What I realize thinking about this passage is I don’t know the first thing about God. I want him to be tame, to be someone I can understand, someone who talks to me and makes me feel good about who I am and what I am doing. But other times I think God’s not interested in making me feel good, but making me, simply … less. Less of me. More of him. Less of my own self-preoccupation and fretfulness with pleasing people and more of that nameless beauty I find but do not understand in rare moments of pure grace. More of the one who, with his own hands, makes whips but who also later gives his back to be struck with them on our behalf. What kind of terrifying mystery is that God?

For me, that is a God who asks you to follow even if you never see, never understand why terrible things happen—who asks you to follow even without anything like some big thing that makes it all “worth” it. A God who asks you to face up to the very worst of who you are, but who also leaves you with the hope of finding the very best of who he is. I guess lately I am thinking how much I don’t want to underestimate God, to tuck him in my back pocket and thank him for making me happy in precisely the way I wanted. Maybe I get closer to thanking him for making me unhappy if it means it grows me and shapes me to be more than I ever could be without him. There are times when it hurts like hell, but I can’t abide the alternative—being stuck in my own self with no way of escape.

A friend gave me an article from the web site of Fleming Rutledge, an Episcopal Priest, about Mother Teresa’s faith and doubt. The article (worth reading for its own merits), also contains following quote from Flannery O’Connor:

"What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you feel you can’t believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God…You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty." (The Habit of Being, p. 354)

The God who makes whips, the God who is not at all an electric blanket but more of a cross … that God is the one I reach after in the darkness. And though terrifying, he is much more satisfying than the God I fashion after myself and fit in my back pocket. The 17th century poet John Donne addresses God thus in Holy Sonnet XIV: “Batter my heart, three personed God.” Batter indeed. And teach me not fight it when you do.

Mercy

When I was a child, I was painfully shy and quiet. Not many people who know me now would believe it, but it is true. I remember horrible times in class when I would erase so hard I’d make a hole in the paper and would need another one, but I was too afraid to ask the teacher. I would sit and hope, I suppose, for something like mercy—for the teacher to walk by and notice my need and so provide for it.

For one definition of mercy, there must be some kind of power relationship. The person with the power shows mercy; the one without power receives it. In the Bible, the Pharisees had power and a whole lot of rules; they did not have mercy. There is a way of looking down on someone that would seem to have the air of compassion, but it in fact maintains the power relationship. I am here looking down on you in pity, and I, the one who has it together and understands how things should go, will lower myself to help you. It feels great to give that kind of mercy, but utterly lousy to receive it. Biblical mercy, it seems to me, is something different:

“Chesed, mercy, means the ability to get right inside the other person's skin until we can see things with his eyes, think things with his mind, and feel things with his feelings” (William Barclay, Daily Study Bible, commentary on Matthew).

Blessed are the ones that can get inside someone’s skin so much that they are able to show grace without power getting in the way. I am usually so preoccupied with what is going on in my own skin that I am half-hearted at best in my attention to those around me. And even the times when I am able to break past my self-consciousness and try to focus on another’s experience, I find myself filled with despair. There is so much sadness in me, so much more in other people. Where is God in all this? Where, indeed, is mercy?

Maybe mercy is found in that very moment of letting down your guard to another person, in having someone you can trust with your weakness. Maybe mercy is found in recognizing that though we suffer deeply, we are not the only ones. Mercy is all about relationship, not power. Mercy is what God shows to us and what we show to each other when we best live up to the example of Christ. In this way, mercy is not just a noun but a verb—not a thing, but an action. So my prayer today and always is for me to “mercy” others and for God to “mercy” me.

Disorientation

Today I was at a coffee shop with my kids. While they ate their breakfast bagels, I watched a man with dirty clothes and scruffy hair count coins on his table. He had a small coffee and he kept sorting out his change, occasionally looking up at the menu board. He counted again, looked up once more, and finally stopped. Then he put the money in his pocket and slumped over his coffee again, a tired look in his eyes.

I grew up in a large city and spent time working with the poor, so I am no stranger to people down on their luck and no stranger to the multitude of arguments people have on whether you should ever give money. What surprised me today was how hard it was for me to even look at the man because when I did I had to bite back tears.

This week at work we had a conference for the students with Dr. Gideon Strauss and the theme was “Wonder, Heartbreak, and Hope.” Part of the talk was modeled on Walter Brueggemann’s Spirituality of the Psalms in which he describes movement among the psalms through orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. Brueggemann re-configured an earlier work on the psalms for this version, which came out in response to September 11: “these tragic events suggest how urgent the descent into disorientation is for the practice of faith” (xv). It is difficult and yet necessary to reach for God in moments of disorientation. And yet so often we put all our energy into convincing others we are fine, keep ourselves so busy that we can’t hear the heartbreaking questions rolling around in our minds.

The question I most want to answer, and likewise the one I most like to ask is this: How did you survive? And sometimes I have to ask it of myself, so I remember that reorientation is not always where I live. We are all of us pilgrims in a land of darkness and sooner or later we will find ourselves in the storms of disorientation. What we need is to tell each other the stories of how we found our way back, to tell those stories loudly and with hope so we can believe.

For the man in the coffee shop, I paused slightly on my way out the door to drop a toonie on his table. Before I was even close enough, he put his hand out—a response he made automatically and without hesitation. And he said “thank you” to me as I dropped the coin in his hand and kept walking. Part of me criticized myself for giving money, something I had so often been warned against, and part of me wanted to pat myself on the back for enacting some kind of biblical parable of lost coins found and the gift of unexpected grace. Instead I found myself once again biting back tears. For all the times I want to deny my own descent into disorientation and the weakness I find there, I saw in this man what I have not yet learned: the simple act of being broken and ready to receive.

Uncreated Light

I don’t know when or why this ritual started, but it has been part of my children’s bedtime routine as long as I can remember. When I tuck them in, I say the Numbers 6 blessing over them: “The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you, the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.” I tried for a while using other blessings from the Bible, but they didn’t go for it. Their sense of ownership of these words is so complete, they still smile whenever they hear it in church and whisper, “Mom, that’s my blessing!”

Yesterday we were walking around the zoo and it was a beautiful sunny day. Sitting on a bench, I closed my eyes and soaked in the sense of warmth, well-being, and life that sun brought to me. I could almost feel my anxieties letting go, the irritation of being sick and the loneliness of moving lessening as my body relaxed. There, with the sun on my face, I felt strong, at peace, and whole. And maybe I got right then a hint of what it must be like for God to make his face shine on me. I wish it were as easy as finding some sun to soak my face in. But the light that truly cuts through despair comes from God alone, which I suppose is good news for despair that seems at times God-sized.

Today in church we sang an old Latin hymn, paraphrased here by John Dryden. The second verse addresses the Creator Spirit as “source of uncreated light.” The word “uncreated” stuck with me. Uncreated in that it is above, before, and beyond created things; uncreated in that it is beyond human strength to produce it. I think it is normal to want to find again the feeling of goodness I got sitting with the sun on my face. But no matter how determined my efforts to find it, the lesson of uncreated light is that it comes ever and only as a gift. I can’t create it. I can’t control it. I can only yearn for it, and pray for myself and for others that God would “make his face shine on us.”

Maybe the best news about uncreated light is that it is, by nature, greater than all the created darkness humans have brought forth in the world since Eden. Uncreated light that shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it. Light made not by human hands, but the irrepressible light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. So God of uncreated light, shine this day your face upon us. Cut through the night that threatens and make us believe again in light so great that no darkness created by human hands can even come close to dimming its glory.

The Soundtrack of My Life

The words that we speak and hear and think every day are like the lines in a movie. The same words, the same lines, can have a completely different meaning depending on the soundtrack behind them. A simple phrase like “Here he comes!” can conjure up dread or delight, depending on whether the music hits an ominous tone or a crescendo of excitement. So with our words, we say “Here he comes!” or whatever else and we think, perhaps, that we know what those words mean, that somehow we are in control of them. But running underneath the noise of our many words runs a soundtrack of God’s story for us, and if we do not make time and space to listen, it is entirely possible we will get the meanings completely wrong.

When we lived in Grand Rapids, I heard a few notes and thought I knew where my story was going: working with the poor, visiting prisons and homeless shelters, taking seminary classes—it all fit together and seemed like good work that God would be pleased for me to do. But into this there is a giant turn as we move far away from family and friends, cutting me off from what I think I was supposed to be doing. And in that process, I have realized how much I think there is some kind of hierarchy with God—people who work with the poor are the “coolest,” people who serve privileged white corporate places are less admirable. Is it so hard for me to let go of that instant sense of moral superiority that working with the oppressed gave me? Have I in fact moved farther from God’s will being farther from the poor in my day-to-day life? I am impatient for God to use me in some large, obvious way, but perhaps what he wants is for me to do a whole lot of small, hidden things instead.

I find myself constantly thinking of better stories than the one God seems to be writing for me, stories that even seem more in line with God’s purposes on earth. But then I go back to the idea of soundtrack and realize I have no clue about God’s purposes on earth or how I might best serve them. I have the music of my own desires playing so loudly in my head I don't "get" it even when I think I do.

During our move and just after, my son watched the movie King of Dreams over and over again. In the part where Joseph struggles to understand God’s purpose he sings a song from jail called, “You Know Better Than I.” I downloaded it because I find it so compelling. And maybe God is trying to show me even as I write that this is the soundtrack of my life at this moment. A soundtrack that tells me God does know better than I do. Do I really believe that? No. But every time I hear it playing as I drive alone in the car, I find myself weeping. Tears for what I had that I find it so hard to let go of, tears for how much I want to be able to lose myself in whatever story God is writing, tears for all the things that make it hard for me to trust, tears for recognizing that whether I am serving in prison or feeding the corporate bottom line, God loves me the same. EXACTLY the same. And when I can hear even faintly that music behind the work of my life, I finally begin to believe the story will turn out right in the end.

Where Water Once Was

Recently we hiked out into the Badlands of Alberta. Although that day it was dry and dusty, all around me were evidences that at some point in the not too distant past there had been small rivers of water flowing down the clay hills into the dirt.

As I think about my life now that I have entered what Eugene Peterson calls “the exile of moving to a new place,” I compare it to the rugged landscape of the Badlands. Not that I consider Edmonton a bad land—on the contrary, there are many things that are lively and interesting in this city. But for me, leaving an established identity connected with community, vocation, and even geography was leaving behind something like a lush and growing forest in which I was comfortably rooted. And now I find myself in an unfamiliar place, rootless and disconnected. I can either spend my days endlessly sighing and looking back at where I came from or find a way to grow through the experience.

In Under the Unpredictable Plant, Eugene Peterson describes this possibility of growth: “None of these acts of limitation or confinement in itself produces a deepened and more authentic life, but they provide the conditions that make it possible” (p. 90). So there I am with the question: Is the seemingly inhospitable environment of the Badlands actually the best place for growth? Is this time in my life, with so much more silence than I was used to, a time where I can look deeper into the person I am and find a way to live more authentically?

I believe it is, but I also know that life in the Badlands can be tough and no one really wants to stay there. So while I try to grow new life, while I nurture within me the gifts of patience and acceptance, all I can do is set firmly in my mind the image of places where water once was. And depending on the day, I may be filled with sadness—thinking of how much I wish the water were still there, or filled with hope—knowing that someday it will be back. I stand where water once was. And in the tension between sadness and I hope, I live.