Wayside Pulpit

Bounty

harvest comes and goes
in the same way, 
God travels
through the seasons. 
sometimes abundant
sometimes absent 
but always present,
even if only a forgotten seed
waiting under a pile of leaves.

A Little Red Book

A month or so back I walked into a small stationary store and I saw a little red journal. I’ve never been much for journaling or owning fancy journals, but for some reason my soul was intrigued with this particular blank book.

I started writing in it almost immediately and its purpose took a strange turn – it became what I would call, a prayer journal. I’m not sure when I made the decision to start writing prayers, but that is what would come each time my pen touched paper. I began to write openly about my feelings, my problems and my issues with god.

I think this need to be honest to god about my feelings came from a sermon I heard at Origins in New York City. The preacher spoke about taking your tough questions to god. Now, he wasn’t exactly talking about my kind of questions, but the message stuck with me. It stuck enough that the little red book became a mediator of sorts between god and I.

Sometimes I write my entries to, “God,” sometimes to, “Goddess,” sometimes to, “Compassionate Being.” Regardless of the title, the driving purpose is fundamentally the same. I want a deeper relationship with the divine and I’ll stand through whatever conversation is necessary to get there. This tenacious desire is not new for me in relation to spirituality in general; I’ve worked diligently to build a life based on spiritual practice. Yet, this has been different. I have felt it is not just me wanting a deeper relationship with god, but god wanting a deeper relationship with me.

Honestly God

Today at the hospital I was reading a prayer book that someone had left in the chaplain’s office. It had a prayer based on a verse from Isaiah. I can’t recall the verse, but the idea was that god can be trusted for the future because god has always been there in the past.

I read the verse a couple of times and realized that this has not be my experience. I have never felt that god has been there for me. I can look back over my life and list situation after situation from which I was not saved, healed or given comfort. In fact, I cannot recall a time when I felt that god’s presence was with me during a really nasty stretch of life. I know all about the footprints poem, where god is said to carry us, but I have not felt carried. I have walked through so much in my life and I have done so basically alone.

This lament of, “Why have you forsaken me?” is timeless. It is only in this timelessness that I find any comfort whatsoever. I can read all sorts of things from scripture to medieval poetry confirming that god has left many of us feeling completely abandoned.

My response to the Isaiah reading today was first to cry and then ask god why, “Why in fact have you never been there for me?” I didn’t get an answer, but then, I didn’t expect one either. However, in the asking, somehow the loneliness that permeates all the days of life was lifted just a tiny bit.

Why a god?

Why do I want a god in my life? This really is the first question to creating a god that I can live with; a god that I can turn to when needed. Yet, even as I write that statement I feel this wave of irritation waft through my head. Even this language of turning to, of living with, of needing makes me so uncomfortable. That is one of the issues that stands in the way for me in regards to god. I don’t want to want a god. I don’t want to need a god. I just want to do life by myself.

Yet, I am not doing it very successfully by myself. I think most people look at my life and wouldn’t agree with that statement. I’ve got the house, the money, the family, the cars, the pets, the career, the education… It all appears so nice and put together. But, really, behind it all, I am falling apart. I want a god who can help me pull it together.

I rarely trust others. Actually, rarely is not the truth, I don’t trust others. I don’t believe there is anyone out there in the world that would love me and care for me unconditionally. I feel that everyone who knows me is constantly judging me, my friends, my family, the people at work, a random stranger in a cafe. Yet, I believe that they are judging the façade, therefore, if they ever really knew who I was, what was going on in my life, the judgment would be so severe that I couldn’t handle it. I want a god that doesn’t judge, a god that is compassion and understanding, a god that is the one safe place to turn.

Being alive is hard for me, most of the time I really wish I wasn’t. I am overwhelmed by small things and run from the big things. I live in a space of constant self-judgment, wishing that I was someone different, that I was a better person. I have a negative filter on the world and feel very little joy. I notice myself always expecting the worse and rarely having gratitude for all that I have. I want a god that can heal this spirit sickness I’ve had my entire life.

Does this god exist? A god that pulls things together, a god that is a safe place to bare a soul, a god that heals what medicine can’t?

I’m skeptical but hopeful.

Letting God Go

I have a mixed relationship with God. I can tell you all the things I want to think about God; all the things I want to believe about God. I want to believe that God is all energy, all possibility and all the potential in the world. God would be, in this sense, the stuff of the life, the power of creativity and the innovation that comes from being awake, aware and jazzed about the gift of living. This is the kind of God I can sink my teeth into. This is a god, beyond God. This is the god that changes the world. This is the god that lives at the deepest core of life.

See, I can tell you what I want to believe.

However, I am still saddled with the God of my childhood, the God of the presses, the God of masses, the God of my country, the God who lives and reigns in all those old-time hymns. This is the God that controls; that punishes wayward children. This is the God who smites the wicked and teaches the faithful through hardship. This is the God who already has a plan for me and for you and our job is simply to live it out without much say on our part. We are part of this God’s plan and there is nothing we can do about it. God is in control. God gets what He wants. He kills and heals at a whim. He is the ultimate authority. There is the idea that this God loves, but it is a rainbow kind of love. It comes mysteriously, infrequently and vanishes quickly.

It was so incredibly easy to write that last paragraph. This God is so big in my spirit that the diatribe just pours out without a thought. It is my conditioned response to God and it is this response that is holding me back like you would not believe. I cannot move forward spiritually, professionally or personally with this monkey on my pigtails.

How to let this God go, that is the question.

As Mourning Doves

A number of days ago I found a baby dove in my front yard. I watched it for a number of hours, wanting to see if its parents were taking care of it. The bird was not quite a fledging, meaning that it left the nest a bit too soon. It was still covered in its downy infantile feathers. It just sat huddled in the sun.

The same day I found the dove I also had a visit with a patient whose leg had just been amputated. When we talked about it she told me, “I just can’t believe the leg is never going to come back. That is the hardest.” My visit with her was followed by another in which the patient is slowly dying from an infection that can’t seem to be stopped. He and I talked at length about his wish to die; the suffering is just too great.

As I watched the dove I thought of Matthew 6:26,“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” There was no food for the bird in my yard. Just as god did not save the leg or ease the suffering of the patients in the hospital.

I ended up bringing the bird in for the night. I fixed up a box, made a nest and decided that I was providing hospice care for the evening. The dove was small, barely moving and making no sounds. I had no assumptions that the bird would make it through the night. When I woke in the morning I opened the box and it was still breathing. I called a vet and figured out how to feed it.

Life is just plain awful sometimes – and god doesn’t always fix it. Yet, still, life takes care of itself. In this process of life, of god, some legs are saved, while some infections can’t be cured. Just as some birds die before they fly. The truth is, on a flat semantic level, god does not feed all the birds. However, if god is bigger than semantics, food is always being had.

God in All the Strange Places

I have returned from spending a week at a Zen monastery. The Zen Monastery Peace Center is in Murphy’s California and is involved in many aspects of transforming lives around the world. The retreat that I attended was based on the book by Cheri Huber titled, “There is Nothing Wrong with You.”

The environment was so different than “out in the world,” that it was difficult to adjust for the first couple of days. We didn’t talk. We didn’t make eye contact. We ate in silence. We meditated. I walked for hours a day sometimes. There were three workshops a day where we worked on developing skills to deal with the conditioning that haunts each and everyone of us.

I had an experience the last night where I was finally able to see the world from Center. It was an experience that I cannot describe. I think I can’t describe it because it wasn’t an intellectual experience and it wasn’t an emotional experience. It was an un-experience, which is what made it so powerful. I looked up at the stars and I saw something I had never seen before, I saw myself. There were no bounds of social conditioning, there was simply nothing. Which means, in the same breath, there was everything.

One thing I can tell you though, I got god in the experience. Really got “it.” I knew unequivocally that god was not without, god was within, while at the same time knowing that there was no out and there was no in. Everything was god.

What a trip.

Stagnant

I distract myself from things that I really want to do. If I was avoiding doing things I didn’t want to do, well, it would make more sense. But, these are things that I want to do, but seem to continually find reasons for not doing them.

I turn my attention, instead, to the internet, reading the newspaper, napping, going for walks, cooking elaborate recipes and doing “busy work.” These are tasks that are not moving me in the direction I wish to go, rather they are things, the minutiae that keep me in place. Still, I can’t seem to remove myself from their grasp, their hold on my life is stronger than I would like to admit. This all reminds me of Paul’s writing in Romans, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

What is it that runs much of what I do? I’m not exactly sure but I do know that when I start to push against “it,” with ideas of creativity and moving my life beyond the status quo, it pushes back. It makes dreams and desires seem unimportant, while the nap is the best I can do. It takes the fun out of most activities and labels them a waste of time. I sense it will do whatever it can to make sure that I do not carry out my creative ideas or even enjoy the life I am living.

What to do about all of this? I think, as in most things spiritual, the first step is awareness, knowing that this is how I have been conditioned to operate. I’ve been formed by society, by my upbringing and the structures in which I exist, to meet the norm, to stick with the way things “ought” to be, rather than moving toward a new kind of “could.” Seeing this is the first step to moving beyond it. Because it is hard to turn onto the road less traveled when all you see are the old sidewalk cracks beneath your feet.

The second step is walking beyond the conditioning. It is hearing the pleas for the naps, the extended surfing times, the myriad of distractions and simply letting them be. It is giving them no energy, no opposition, but also no agreement.

Paul asks, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” The answer for him was simply, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Center to Paul was Christ. Center for me is the breath. Center for some is god. Whatever you call it, it is your divinity that has the ability to transcend the limits that imprison you.

A proper God

God is a process, a phenomenon. Is the process natural? Is the process created by humankind? I really don’t know the answers to these questions. A part of me is perfectly okay with not knowing, because knowing isn’t all that important. In fact, as I’ve said before, true theology does not rejoice in knowing, it rejoices in seeking. Knowing may come, but it isn’t the goal.

However, I struggle with not capitalizing god. Yet I know as I go forward writing and reflecting on my faith, I want to stop capitalizing God. However, tradition runs hard, even for someone like me who is focused on recreating how a Christian life is understood and undertaken. Something looks wrong with that little “g,” it looses, it seems, its grandeur and magic. It becomes just another word in the sentence, rather than falling full force into the reading eye.

Yet, I also know that I cringe every time I capitalize God, because I know that god is not a proper noun. Making god a proper noun limits the meaning behind the symbol. It is like trapping all the mountains of the world into one single color snapshot. It takes your idea of god and my idea of god and assumes that they are exactly the same, that we are talking about the same proper God.

The argument I hear is that god must be capitalized to show respect and reverence. Do we capitalize the phenomenon of gravity? Do we turn the abstract notion of time into a proper noun? No. Yet, god is no more or less important than many improper nouns like these; nouns that have a direct bearing on how we carry out our daily living.

There is no proper God. There is only god.

Indefinitely Christian

Those speaking for Christianity, and those speaking against it, love to use the definite article. In fact, if I were to go back and reread many things I’ve written, I would suspect that I do the very same thing. It seems to come out something like this, “The Christian view of such and such….” I’m hear to tell you, and to remind myself, that there is no one Christian view.

It is often said, “Well, I don’t believe in the Christian God.” What is the Christian God? What defines it? What makes it so definite enough that it deserves a “the” before its capital G? If by “the” you mean the big white guy with the beard in the sky, then I’m sorry to say that many Christians I know don’t hold that view. If by “the” you mean a God that has a hand in how things come to play in our lives, I’d again have to tell you this view doesn’t fit all Christians. Simply, there is no one view that can sum up how God is understood from one end of Christendom to the other.

This same semantical play works for other theological and political statements as well. There is no one Christian view on Jesus, abortion, Christ, sex, communion, LGBT issues, afterlife, the death penalty, peace, war, evolution, marriage, guns…. It isn’t the monolithic structure that appears creeping out of newspapers, court cases, tomes decrying Christian faith and glossy television pulpits. It is infinitely multifaceted and to sum it up in a single “the” takes its beauty and turns it into a beast.