Beyond knowing

Human beings are so wonderfully mysterious. We can love someone dearly and still have no idea what's going on inside their heads. Perhaps when we learn to love God, who is truly beyond all understanding, it can help us to accept the other things we do not know.

Quite by accident, I came across this lovely poem by the 14th-century Sufi poet Hafiz:

I have a thousand brilliant lies for the question: How are you?

I have a thousand brilliant lies for the question: What is God?

If you think that the Truth can be known from words,
If you think that the Sun and the Ocean
Can pass through that tiny opening called the mouth,

O someone should start laughing!
Someone should start wildly Laughing –Now!

The law of agreement

To get to the laughs, you have to go along with the joke. When improv comedians perform together, it doesn't work if one performer attempts to control the story and force it to produce his or her own punchlines. In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell gives an example from a rehearsal of the comedy group Mother. A woman says to her partner, "We need to amputate your leg!" He replies, "You can't do that. I'm very attached to it!" She gave him an opening, but he closed it. He gets in a mildly funny joke, and then the scene comes screeching to a halt. They try it again, and this time he accepts her invitation into the story. She says, "We need to amputate your leg!" He replies, "Well, I think you'd better go ahead and take both of them!" The exchange isn't especially comic by itself, but it gets them moving into new and ever more ridiculous scenarios until they find some very funny material.

In our relationships with other humans, we are constantly negotiating. We have limited time and energy, resources and talent. So as we grow up and get to know people, we learn when to say yes and when to say no. We only accept a few invitations.

Our relationship with God is different. Here we dance with an entirely unlimited partner, an infinite beloved with literally all the time and energy in the world. When God invites us into something new - or we invite God deeper into our lives - the answer is always Yes.

Start at the very beginning

The song from the Sound of Music goes, "Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. When you read you begin with ABC. When you sing you begin with do-re-mi."

No matter where I go in my faith, I keep coming back to the same place. It doesn't matter what questions I ask or what doubts I raise, what stories I read or what prayers I say. It all comes down to the simple experience of being loved and safe, the way a small child feels as a gentle hand rubs her back to help her fall asleep.

After a long and distinguished career, the theologian Karl Barth gave one of his last lectures at the University of Chicago. When he invited questions, the president of the seminary asked, "Of all the theological insights you have ever had, which do you consider to be the greatest of them all?" Barth paused for a moment with his eyes closed and then said: "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so!"

Play your own game

In an early episode of the show Joan of Arcadia, God encourages Joan to try playing chess. At the same time, Joan lets herself get caught up in the social scene of her high school, the game that determines who's in and who's out. She comes to realize that the only way to win either game is to resist the temptation to react to other people and just follow her own path.

There is a lot of advice out there about how to connect to God. Some of it assumes that everyone loves to read Scripture, or craves silence, or finds clarity in fasting, or feels at home in traditional worship. The reality is that there is no one practice that will suit everyone. Sometimes we have to ignore others' advice (even the ideas of your blogging priest) and seek our own path towards God.

We are halfway through Lent. Maybe you started a practice for this season and it's not doing a lot for you. Maybe you didn't choose anything at first, but there's something you'd like to try for the next 20 days. Give yourself permission to engage this time in your own way. All that matters is you, your God, and the love that is growing between you.

Calming the water

I spent a lovely morning at a workshop led by Brother Geoffrey Tristram from the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, the Episcopal monastery in Cambridge. Geoffrey shared with us a meditation he uses to center himself at the end of the day:

Imagine that your soul is a bowl full of water. As you've traveled through the day, the water has been stirred up. It's moved back and forth as you've been pushed and pulled in different directions. Maybe some has spilled out in anger or sorrow. Let the water stop its churning. Let the ripples become smaller and smaller, until they come to rest. Let the water be still.
Now your soul is a smooth surface, ready to reflect the true image of God.

The weight of the world

Is it really true that God never gives us a burden that we cannot bear? I know many people find great comfort in this statement. It makes me uneasy. I keep thinking of people who really are crushed by this world. Some are burdened by grave injustices, the blind or cruel choices of others. Others face diseases or forces of nature too great for them to conquer. Did God give them these burdens? Could a good God have some mysterious reason to desire their pain?

These are the hardest questions of our faith, and I will not pretend to have any easy answers. The best I can do is to say that if one person is too laden down, it may be because he or she was never supposed to carry that load alone. We are not called to be so self-centered that we ignore another person's struggle, or so proud that we refuse to share our own. The weight of the world is light if we all shoulder it together.

1 potato, 2 potato, 3 potato, 4

“Dad, why are you holding that potato?” I asked. He was rooting through the refrigerator drawers and the kitchen cabinets, doing it all with one hand. He looked down at the large russet potato that was occupying his other hand and answered, “Because I’m looking for an onion.” He wanted to make home fries, and it never occurred to him to put down the potato while he looked for the other ingredients.

I am clearly my father’s daughter. As soon as I begin one task, I notice another that needs doing and pick up the thing I need for that job. Before I know it I have too many things to carry – a toy that needs to go upstairs, a note reminding me to make a call, a dishtowel headed for the hamper, a pair of pliers to fix a broken drawer. There is nowhere to put the next thing I see.

It can be the same way with my care for people. I collect concerns about the many people I come across, so that sometimes my heart feels too full to add even one more prayer.

Jesus invites us to lay our burdens down, to give him all the anxieties we feel for neighbors and strangers, family and friends. We release our love and our fear into him, knowing his heart is big enough to hold it all. Now our hands and hearts are open, ready for the next need we encounter.