A man came into the office to talk to me about God. It was one of those privileged conversations that I get to have as a priest – he was very open and vulnerable about how he had been sober for several months after having spent many years being addicted to drugs and alcohol. We talked about the disease of addiction and how he was taking care of it, by going to meetings, seeing a therapist, exercising, etc. And then it came out: “Well, I’m here because I want to have a more spiritual life, to know more about God, to have a sort of road map for belief.”
How refreshing! A person that actually wants to talk about the very stuff that I went to seminary for, the stuff that I spend hours in my day praying and meditating and studying and mentally masticating on in order to live out my vocation!
And here’s what I told him: “Do you know how much I know about God? Can you envision that little bit of air that’s left behind when a grasshopper jumps? Just a little whisspp! That’s how much I know about God.”
He looked at me the same way that I probably looked at the young woman working behind the counter at Pizza Hut the one time I went there to order a pizza to go and she said she could not make the pizza because the computer was down. Does the computer make the pizza? Turn on the oven? Knead the dough?
This is the truth, though. Some parishioners may be reading this and thinking, “Uh oh!” But like Jesus said repeatedly to those who followed after him, “Fear not!”
It’s true that I’m pretty well acquainted with scripture. I’ve read the entire Bible several times through. I love it. There are some great, terrible, joyful, sorrowful moments in the collected books of the Bible, both in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. I read and pray with the Holy Scriptures every day, imagining myself into the heart of the stories and lessons that pop out from the page. Oh, sure, there are a lot of boring parts. Endless geneaologies. Lots of “And then this group of people went here, and they fought with these people, then they went there, and there was a drought, etc., etc., etc.” You know, history. But what about Samuel? His mom dropped him off to be raised by a priest, he started to actually HEAR GOD SPEAK TO HIM, and then lived a long life as a prophet and helped Israel to eventually get a king that was worth a damn and the whole time he’s afraid that he’s going to mess up somehow and has two sons who no one trusts to be anything like him least of all good. What an awesome story! Or the entire book of the Acts of the Apostles, where all kinds of things go down in terms of Peter or Paul preaching about the Son of God dying on a cross and raising to life again and some people saying, “Well, that’s cool” and they go and get baptized and others saying “What a bunch of crazy s*&t” and throwing them in jail or torturing them or flat out executing them. It’s amazing stuff!
And yet, sometimes I ask “Why doesn’t God talk to me the way that He talked to Samuel?” or “Why aren’t my sermons rattling the walls of the church and bringing in thousands of converts on Sunday morning?” Maybe I should just be grateful that what I say isn’t offensive enough for the folks in the pews to throw rocks at me, right?
The answer to those questions, though, is painfully obvious: “Why? You ask. Because you don’t know much about God!”
It’s also true that I spend time each day in prayer, talking to God, getting quiet enough to listen. I’m lucky enough to have a guidebook, at least to start out with. Every morning, I read the daily office from the Book of Common Prayer. It gives me selections from the bible, as well as prayers that have been around for centuries. Now, hear me, it’s not as if every morning at prayer I have a deep, spiritual epiphany. Some mornings, it’s like eating a good meal. You feel satisfied and ready to begin your day. Yes, on some occasions, you can’t imagine being anywhere other than deep in prayer. You become transfixed and have entered into a real cosmic mystery. Every part of your body tingles with expectation. That’s not as creepy as it sounds. It just means you’re locked into the source of life. You’re close to those mountaintop experiences like Moses had. Sometimes I find myself so deep in prayer that I wouldn’t even notice that the house was on fire. At least until my two year old comes to ask me for chocolate milk. But those occasions are few and far between. More likely than not, I might as well be a reading a VCR repair manual. Instead of a mountaintop experience, I’m getting that experience of Moses being lost in a desert, dry and waterless. Or any conscious thought goes directly to what I think I have to take care of that day. Maybe what bills need to be paid or what I’m going to have for lunch or what time the Braves are on TV. Anything except for God or holiness or how to be a better person.
But that’s OK.
See, prayer time isn’t so much about trying to get a greater understanding of God. It’s more about trying to be faithful to God. Because the God that I don’t understand is faithful to me. Probably more than I know.
Now, one of the places where I look exactly like I know a lot about God is on Sunday morning. I love Sunday morning. I love the traditions that are embedded in my own Episcopal faith. I love the rituals. I loved the vestments. I love the Book of Common Prayer. I love the organ and the choir. I love standing behind the altar and praying for this thing that we call the Holy Spirit to come and take bread and wine and turn it into the Body and Blood of the Son of God. I stand in front of the people and make proclamations about God, relying on my own study of the Holy Scriptures and then the volumes and volumes of theology that I read and learn from and try to make sense of. Every time I read a theology book I feel at a disadvantage, as if the person who has written this book understands a lot more about God than I ever will. But that doesn’t matter. Because in reading some deliberate study about some aspect of God, it helps to give me a broader and deeper vocabulary about just what it is we talk about when we talk about God. The added benefit is that it makes me look like I know a lot about God.
And here’s the thing: the priesthood is my road map for belief. I’ve been called to this vocation and I live it out faithfully and it helps me to understand things. Each day I grow in assurance that something really happened on that Easter morning. Each time I say the creed I truly believe the words that I’m reciting. I’m never going to be the type of Christian that will get into arguments with people of other faiths or atheists and try to defend in some logical and rational way why I believe what I believe. I believe what I believe because I have faith. And I have that faith because I let go of everything and followed faithfully where the road map was leading me. My faith is far from certainty and close to Truth. It’s not always been easy. It’s not always made sense. There have been times of tremendous sorrow and heartache. But there have also been times of immense joy. I often times find myself at the edge of a greater understanding of God, and just when I think I’m going to grasp it all, God pulls a quick one on me and I’m left with more questions. And it doesn’t scare me. Because I’m not afraid. Fear is the opposite of faith and I’ve got faith.
I don’t give up on the spiritual life. Because God has never given up on me.
In essence, what I told this man who was just given a new lease on life and is wanting to make it more rich and relevant on a spiritual level was that he’s got to find his own road map. And God will help him. And I will help him. I will invite him into the community of believers and doubters and strugglers that we call the church. I will speak from the vast resources of our tradition, the Scriptures, and reason. I will speak honestly about the limits of my knowledge. But I will also encourage him to let go and let God in. He may, like me, wonder why bad things happen in the world or why he may have had to suffer with such an awful disease or why there’s famine or poverty and all sorts of bad things at work in the world. And I will remind him about the gift of free will. About how that runs so deeply within creation, how God made us, that even the molecules and chromosomes that are written into the fabric of our being can choose their own path and while for the most part they go with the way that they were perhaps designed to do, sometimes a little kink or little hiccup happens and biology takes over from there leading to things that aren’t optimal or the way we think they should be. And I will remind him that in spite of that, God is still with us. That God loves us for who we are. That God understands us better than we will ever understand ourselves, much less grasp anything about Him. That God loves us and God needs us and God gave himself for us. A gift of his Son. A gift of salvation, a road map out of pain and into wholeness. There are accidents of nature and there is evil in this world but God is bigger than all of it.
How do I know all of this? Maybe I don’t. Or maybe it’s called faith. Regardless, it’s beautiful.
The Rare Word 