I have been trying, since my thirteenth year, to pray. Sometimes it has gone well, sometimes not. But always my ability or nonability to pray has been directly related to my everyday life and to my knowledge of myself. When I begin to experience my difficulty in prayer, it is usually because I am refusing to let go of my present understanding of who I am and preventing a new understanding from emerging.
For example, if I have clung to some ideal picture of who I should be and have denied another part of myself that is struggling to be born, then I am inauthentic; and the God I have been praying to is no longer real, because he was fashioned from that idealizing part of me that is now dying. As my former self dies, so does the inadequate god who is fashioned out of the need to have a divinity who conforms to whom the self thinks it should be.
However, when I let go and let myself grow and emerge by embracing all sides of myself, God is again accessible, because the true God is he who loves and affirms and redeems who I really am and not just who I would like to be. In otherwords, the acecptance of the truthe about myself opens the way to the truth about God, and both truths are one at the prayerful center of the person.
True prayer demands honesty with myself, for it is only the real "I" who can talk with God. And I do not mean to imply here that only the integrated self can pray, but simply that honesty with myself enables me to pray correctly. If, for example, I need to be "worthy" or "perfect" or "holy" before I can pray, then I will probably not pray at all, or if I do, it will be a pseudo, self-satisfied self talking to itself rather than with God. We commune with God as we honestly are and not as we would like to be.
The idealized self is always dying in prayer, because it cannot bear the truth. And if we let it die and pray from who we are becoming, then our image of God changes as we understand more clearly who we are.
And our prayer changes accordingly. It may move from the adoration of the all-good God to bitter complaining and bickering with an unjust God who is letting me suffer or who is abandoning me for some reason. If I experience God as betraying me but say instead how wonderful and good he is, then I am praying a lie. God will only be who he is objectively if, while trying and wanting to believe that, I pray to him as I am experiencing him subjectively, for the good God redeems and corrects my honestly expressed but false understanding of who he is.
I believe this sincere wrestling with God is what Francis experienced during that torturous year in the cave at the beginning of his conversion and at other times through his life, culmination in the fifty days of darkness that preceded his singing of The Canticle of Brother Sun. He felt abandoned and betrayed by God; and because he let himself pray what he truly felt, God showed him that He is faithful to who He is and to His promises, even though at the time we might experience Him otherwise.
Because Francis was honest enough to acknowledge his doubt and despair and God's infidelity, as he experienced it, the true God at the center of his heart again rose to the surface of his consciousness to affirm the truth of Francis' perception: God had abandoned him, that he might once again give back to God the privilege of being God, independent of Francis, outside his control.
Whatever God deigns to give us of himself is pure gift and not something we earn or deserve by becoming that "perfect" person we think we should be. We are who we are, and any perfection, or completion, in us is the work of God responding freely to our honest prayer that he change in us what we previously thought we could change by ourselves.
Who we become in God is then his work and not our own success in conforming to some ideal. The self we become in true prayer is seldom the self we envisioned, but it is a new and marvelous self that God fashions out of the gradual redeeming of the false self we now acknowledge as the work of our own misguided idealism. We then know God in what he has done in us to enable us to discover our true face. And in that face only do we see the reflection of God as he really is."
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Sleepless in the South
There really ought to be rules about this. Like, your reason is handicapped, your inhibitions are down, your faculties are impaired, and you definitely should not be allowed anywhere near a communication source of any sort. So, all that being said, the non-functioning, non-rational part of my brain says, “Meh! You’re totally sleepless and exhausted, so why not write a blog post!”
You know, cures for sleeplessness are sort of like cures for every other common ailment. They range from the disgusting to the absurd, to the boringly and quietly practical:
• Drink a glass of warm milk. This is only appealing if you are seriously pregnant, and not really then.
• Count sheep. My record is 1749….I had all sorts of psychedelic sheep but I never got a lick of sleep out of it.
• Write letters. I tried that once….my unfortunate correspondent wrote me back, “Um, how late at night did you write this? Did you know your handwriting gets illegible after a while?”
• Relax. Have you ever tried to consciously relax? Normally it makes me tense, but maybe that’s just me. It also tends to make every random thought that ever occurred to me all month decide to prance through my brain all at once and get tangled with each other. It’s a little weird to have your brain leap from “can I get away with bright yellow, bumblebee, pillowcases?” to “How come every time I have an insurance crises I can never get a human being on the phone?” Mostly it leads to very weird visions of local insurance agents harassing the local bee population for documents proving their estimated flight time for month or risking de-winging.
• Deep breathing. Last night I tried that as a cure for sleeplessness, I passed out from an overindulgence in oxygen. For the record, passing out and falling asleep are not the same thing. They are about as related as Loki and Thor.
• Take a walk. Walking is good…problem…my average walking speed is 3.5 mph, and once the heart gets pumping, sleep tends to run away.
• Drink a lot of vodka. It would probably work, but see point about passing out being fundamentally different than falling asleep.
• Get sleep meds. Never tried em’, probably should at some point. But, I just have an issue with forcibly inducing a natural reaction.
• Get totally exhausted. This is a terrible method, but unfortunately the one that tends to work best for me. Go sleepless, and in a night or two without good sleep, your body will be so tired out that you will eventually sleep.
• Do some simple, repetitive exercise. Knitting yourself to sleep! Good plan. Except, I don’t want to rip it all out the next day when I see what happens when I knit half asleep.
Okay, so the moral of the story is, if I get sleepless, I’m pretty much stuck. So all y’all get stuck with a blog post at 4 A.M. about nothing in particular.
You know, cures for sleeplessness are sort of like cures for every other common ailment. They range from the disgusting to the absurd, to the boringly and quietly practical:
• Drink a glass of warm milk. This is only appealing if you are seriously pregnant, and not really then.
• Count sheep. My record is 1749….I had all sorts of psychedelic sheep but I never got a lick of sleep out of it.
• Write letters. I tried that once….my unfortunate correspondent wrote me back, “Um, how late at night did you write this? Did you know your handwriting gets illegible after a while?”
• Relax. Have you ever tried to consciously relax? Normally it makes me tense, but maybe that’s just me. It also tends to make every random thought that ever occurred to me all month decide to prance through my brain all at once and get tangled with each other. It’s a little weird to have your brain leap from “can I get away with bright yellow, bumblebee, pillowcases?” to “How come every time I have an insurance crises I can never get a human being on the phone?” Mostly it leads to very weird visions of local insurance agents harassing the local bee population for documents proving their estimated flight time for month or risking de-winging.
• Deep breathing. Last night I tried that as a cure for sleeplessness, I passed out from an overindulgence in oxygen. For the record, passing out and falling asleep are not the same thing. They are about as related as Loki and Thor.
• Take a walk. Walking is good…problem…my average walking speed is 3.5 mph, and once the heart gets pumping, sleep tends to run away.
• Drink a lot of vodka. It would probably work, but see point about passing out being fundamentally different than falling asleep.
• Get sleep meds. Never tried em’, probably should at some point. But, I just have an issue with forcibly inducing a natural reaction.
• Get totally exhausted. This is a terrible method, but unfortunately the one that tends to work best for me. Go sleepless, and in a night or two without good sleep, your body will be so tired out that you will eventually sleep.
• Do some simple, repetitive exercise. Knitting yourself to sleep! Good plan. Except, I don’t want to rip it all out the next day when I see what happens when I knit half asleep.
Okay, so the moral of the story is, if I get sleepless, I’m pretty much stuck. So all y’all get stuck with a blog post at 4 A.M. about nothing in particular.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Washed and Waiting
I just finished reading an excellent book. That is not especially shocking, what is surprising, is that the book is not several hundred years old. The book was published last year, it was written by a young man in his twenties, and it is going to sound incredibly controversial even though it isn’t.
The book is called Washed and Waiting and it is written by a young man named Wesley Hill. He is a homosexual divinity student who believes and affirms the biblical concept of marriage—one man with one woman, with no room for homosexual practice. So, being solely attracted to young man, he sees but one route for him…to continually resist temptation, and to live a completely celibate life.
He claims, and I believe him that there are a great many people in the conservative Christian church today who continually struggle with gay and lesbian desires, but affirm solely the biblical view of marriage. This book is written as an encouragement both to them and to the church at large in how to help them.
But, I found that the book has a wider application for heterosexuals as well. Or maybe it was just me. The book addresses everyone who is called to celibacy. That includes men and women who are heterosexual but have no yet found a spouse. That struck me is how very real he is about the depth and breadth of the burden of celibacy. It is not just abstaining from sex, though that can feel almost impossible some day in our sex-soaked and obsessed culture, it is the lose of the small intimacies, the lose of a person to build a home with, the constant reminders that you are missing out on the highest example of God’s love manifested in community. He is very real, and accurate about the loneliness, the struggle, and the despair. If you’ve ever struggled with your singleness, you need to read this book.
Another thing I appreciated about this book is his profound understanding of the theology of brokenness. It may seem odd that brokenness is consoling, but in showing the flaws, the beauty of redemption can become even more clear.
In all, this book is very simply and very powerfully written and provides a much-needed perspective on a set of very complicated issues. Y’all should read it.
The book is called Washed and Waiting and it is written by a young man named Wesley Hill. He is a homosexual divinity student who believes and affirms the biblical concept of marriage—one man with one woman, with no room for homosexual practice. So, being solely attracted to young man, he sees but one route for him…to continually resist temptation, and to live a completely celibate life.
He claims, and I believe him that there are a great many people in the conservative Christian church today who continually struggle with gay and lesbian desires, but affirm solely the biblical view of marriage. This book is written as an encouragement both to them and to the church at large in how to help them.
But, I found that the book has a wider application for heterosexuals as well. Or maybe it was just me. The book addresses everyone who is called to celibacy. That includes men and women who are heterosexual but have no yet found a spouse. That struck me is how very real he is about the depth and breadth of the burden of celibacy. It is not just abstaining from sex, though that can feel almost impossible some day in our sex-soaked and obsessed culture, it is the lose of the small intimacies, the lose of a person to build a home with, the constant reminders that you are missing out on the highest example of God’s love manifested in community. He is very real, and accurate about the loneliness, the struggle, and the despair. If you’ve ever struggled with your singleness, you need to read this book.
Another thing I appreciated about this book is his profound understanding of the theology of brokenness. It may seem odd that brokenness is consoling, but in showing the flaws, the beauty of redemption can become even more clear.
In all, this book is very simply and very powerfully written and provides a much-needed perspective on a set of very complicated issues. Y’all should read it.
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