Have you ever had a great sneeze in the early morning? Quite a unique and wonderful feeling, I must say. For over 40 years, I never acknowledged such a thing. But the other day, I couldn’t help but notice that the sneeze that had just coursed through me was quite remarkable. I’ve had sneezes that seemed to produce sparks in front of my eyes. As my family can tell you, I’ve sneezed embarrassingly loud at times, because of the funny turn of a head it creates in someone else as they stifle their unfiltered expression of “what in the heck was that?” But this recent morning, my sneeze was just amazingly sudden, strong, clean (fortunately)…and though the words start to thin out here, but it was also clear, clarifying even. For one half-second, everything in the world was amazingly clear and bright. …and then, of course, my body drafted back into itself the sleeping haze of waking up from which it was emerging just a few minutes before.
What is it like to see things clearly? As kids, our perhaps as teenagers, we thought we had such clear moments, or perspectives even. As adults, though, we realize that such times of clarity are surprisingly few and far between, if they really ever occur at all. But when we allow ourselves again this child-like possibility, we realize that we do long for is the ability to see clearly again. We wish we had a good sneeze to blow away the haze of our lives. I wish, for example, that I could see what is really going on in my life…as if there is something going on, beyond what is just happening. I wonder. I suppose. I ponder. I basically want to know that I haven’t just fallen, and can’t get up. Such desire on our parts as men and women of earth often dump us off to the larger and deeper questions that both enliven and terrify us. …and, I believe, they lead us to God. What is God doing anyway? What is he doing with me? Who is he, in the first place? How do I even know? And suddenly we are miles into another universe, away from what is a rather simple question about what the substance is of what is happening in my life…other than a few surprising sneezes here and there.
Ever notice that it seems rarely possible to make a great sneeze happen? I’m being a bit coy now on the sneeze analogy and soon it will break down altogether. But I suspect there is more than irony in this simply acknowledgment. We don’t make a great sneeze happen, it happens to us. And I wonder if there isn’t a clue here to the dilemma we often create for ourselves over the questions of God I mentioned earlier. God is not hostage to my verifiability of him, is he? How could he be? Verifiability, though perhaps always of perpetual interest to some throughout time, has likely only been deified in the recent centuries. But my experience with understanding and knowing God has almost exclusively been his revelation to me, not the other way around. Even as much as I don’t like the discomfort of this notion, it holds the water; it remains true. And, I suspect, because it does so, it seems to fit with the observably long train of historical faith in him on the part of believers. The very faith that has been handed down to me, that I believe in…despite our own collective inability to see God.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Prayer
We enter most appropriately into [the revelation of who God is] when we listen and tell stories to one another and listen and speak to God in prayer.
And, of course, silence. Silence is indispensable. It is a commonly overlooked element in language, but it must not be: Especially it must not be overlooked in the language of prayer. It is not as if Jesus speaks the revelation of God in his stories and metaphors, and now in prayer we get to say our piece. Silence, which in prayer consists mostly in attentive listening, is nonnegotiable. Listening, which necessarily requires silence on our part, is as much a part of language as words. The colon and the semicolon, the comma and the period—all of which insist on silence as part and parcel of speech—are as essential to language as nouns and verbs. But more often than not, silence gets short shrift in our prayers. Yet if there is no silence, our speech degenerates into babble…
Prayer is our first language. Anybody can pray. And everybody does. We pray even when we don’t know we are praying. “Help me” is our first prayer. We don’t have it within ourselves to be ourselves. “Thank you” is our last prayer. When everything is said and done, we realize that all that we receive has been a gift.
But there is irony here. Prayer, the most natural and authentic substratum of language, is also the easiest form of language to fake. We discover early on that we can pretend to pray, use the words of prayer, practice the forms of prayer, assume postures of prayer, acquire a reputation for prayer, and never pray.
-- Eugene Peterson, Tell It Slant
And, of course, silence. Silence is indispensable. It is a commonly overlooked element in language, but it must not be: Especially it must not be overlooked in the language of prayer. It is not as if Jesus speaks the revelation of God in his stories and metaphors, and now in prayer we get to say our piece. Silence, which in prayer consists mostly in attentive listening, is nonnegotiable. Listening, which necessarily requires silence on our part, is as much a part of language as words. The colon and the semicolon, the comma and the period—all of which insist on silence as part and parcel of speech—are as essential to language as nouns and verbs. But more often than not, silence gets short shrift in our prayers. Yet if there is no silence, our speech degenerates into babble…
Prayer is our first language. Anybody can pray. And everybody does. We pray even when we don’t know we are praying. “Help me” is our first prayer. We don’t have it within ourselves to be ourselves. “Thank you” is our last prayer. When everything is said and done, we realize that all that we receive has been a gift.
But there is irony here. Prayer, the most natural and authentic substratum of language, is also the easiest form of language to fake. We discover early on that we can pretend to pray, use the words of prayer, practice the forms of prayer, assume postures of prayer, acquire a reputation for prayer, and never pray.
-- Eugene Peterson, Tell It Slant
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Olympic Cermonies - Us and Them, Me and Us
Despite another late night, I am awaken early today by a couple of sets of thoughts that perhaps I just need to get out of me and down on paper. The thoughts revolve around the proximity of relationships with members of my family and the magnitude of mass humanity represented last night in the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic games. As I roll out of bed in anticipation of another beautiful rise of the sun, my nose is full of a tingle coming from an expectedly cool August breeze and my heart is full of my humanity – a humanity that is so limited and one in which I am aware that I want so much more. So full of want and finitude that I feel crushed by the weight of my longings, my wonder, my fears, and the things I feel I must get done.
Oh, God, you and all that you have made are so beautiful and so much larger than all of my understandings…though I can’t sleep enough in the physical world, how can I rest in you?
As I watched the opening ceremonies last night with my family, I heard one of my kids mutter something to the effect that massive use of people in the production of the many scenes was creepy. One of the commentators used the word intimidating. I wonder about what appears to be the deep differences of our cultures. Ours, informed by the beauty we perceive in our own individuality and the Chinese, informed by the beauty of the masses of ‘people’ as one. As the drumbeat of 2008 performers in unison illuminated the stadium simulataneously with both sound and light, my mind couldn’t help but anticipate heaven. It seems true that something inside us all longs both for our participation in something much larger than ourselves and for our own rightful and right-sized place in it all – one of many drummers, so to speak. Each time I see masses of people doing something intentional in unison, I am deeply moved internally. The opening ceremonies did this to me; worship does this to me more. I want both to be a part of something like this, and I want to lay down the weights that I normally carry around with me as I try to do so many things myself. We all want to part of something, something bigger than ourselves, something good, something that is aimed at a kind of glory that attributes to God what is due him.
Even as I consider this magnitude that I want to be a part of, I also recognize that I live much of the time so far away from the 4 or 5 individuals who are right around me. We live in proximity to each other. We share intimacies from time to time. But often, we live as if our very own skin, the thing that symbolically we so long to have touched by another person, were a wall that separates us from each other, even as we lay or sit together closely. There is so much inside us that we long to have reached into, that we long to reach into, that we just can’t find a way to do. And, so, even in our closeness to each other physically, we often feel far away. Perhaps this is why something big, something involving the masses of people, something that becomes the object of our shared attention together is appealing to us – because we hope that it will bring us into something, into each other in ways we often have great difficulty doing in the ordinariness and simplicity of our daily lives. And perhaps this is the soil out of which faith grows.
After such an early awakening, the sun has now risen on another day, one again full again of anticipation of the great hope in each one of us that we might participate in the beauty of each other together and each other personally, whose weight is only lifted by the same love that lifts that sun each day.
Oh, God, you are so beautiful and, thankfully so much larger than all of my understandings…I can rest in the warmth of your day, today.
Oh, God, you and all that you have made are so beautiful and so much larger than all of my understandings…though I can’t sleep enough in the physical world, how can I rest in you?
As I watched the opening ceremonies last night with my family, I heard one of my kids mutter something to the effect that massive use of people in the production of the many scenes was creepy. One of the commentators used the word intimidating. I wonder about what appears to be the deep differences of our cultures. Ours, informed by the beauty we perceive in our own individuality and the Chinese, informed by the beauty of the masses of ‘people’ as one. As the drumbeat of 2008 performers in unison illuminated the stadium simulataneously with both sound and light, my mind couldn’t help but anticipate heaven. It seems true that something inside us all longs both for our participation in something much larger than ourselves and for our own rightful and right-sized place in it all – one of many drummers, so to speak. Each time I see masses of people doing something intentional in unison, I am deeply moved internally. The opening ceremonies did this to me; worship does this to me more. I want both to be a part of something like this, and I want to lay down the weights that I normally carry around with me as I try to do so many things myself. We all want to part of something, something bigger than ourselves, something good, something that is aimed at a kind of glory that attributes to God what is due him.
Even as I consider this magnitude that I want to be a part of, I also recognize that I live much of the time so far away from the 4 or 5 individuals who are right around me. We live in proximity to each other. We share intimacies from time to time. But often, we live as if our very own skin, the thing that symbolically we so long to have touched by another person, were a wall that separates us from each other, even as we lay or sit together closely. There is so much inside us that we long to have reached into, that we long to reach into, that we just can’t find a way to do. And, so, even in our closeness to each other physically, we often feel far away. Perhaps this is why something big, something involving the masses of people, something that becomes the object of our shared attention together is appealing to us – because we hope that it will bring us into something, into each other in ways we often have great difficulty doing in the ordinariness and simplicity of our daily lives. And perhaps this is the soil out of which faith grows.
After such an early awakening, the sun has now risen on another day, one again full again of anticipation of the great hope in each one of us that we might participate in the beauty of each other together and each other personally, whose weight is only lifted by the same love that lifts that sun each day.
Oh, God, you are so beautiful and, thankfully so much larger than all of my understandings…I can rest in the warmth of your day, today.
Saturday, August 02, 2008
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