In the Open

So I said goodbye to the boy and in simultaneous joy and relief I've said goodbye to another thing. It was a sort of fantasy I've harbored for way to long. You know the kind, shameful and inappropriate and the sort that threatens to ruin every joy that you've managed to acquire. That's the silver lining in it all. The boy helped me get over the fake thing while I was faced with the possibility of a real thing.

So I find myself in the open unnameable, where I don't know anything, but am asked to hope. I'm taking up a cross again and it hurts. I wonder if I can hold on to my own revelation that Jesus is in this insufferable open with me, the place where his heart resides. The fantasy took a lot of time and space to navigate, to keep it from actually poking its head into reality. But now I'm again in the space of total dependence, in total need of mercy for a real and holy thing to show up.

I know my track record for filling in that open space for latching on to something that I can name and handle and settle for. I find my heart pleading with myself and with God, "not again, not this time, not another few years of misguided, tainted hopes."

Last night I was naively hopeful that something holy and new would come along, but it was all thwarting and strain and me looking around asking "what's going on?" The words of the Pharisees I read yesterday, in that book I carry around with me, came to mind. "Didn't this man come from Galilee? Isn't the Christ suppose to come from David's family and from Bethlehem." They knew all about what was suppose to happen, they where so sure and in that sureness they where actually blinded to the real thing when it did come. I wonder if I am so sure I know that I am set up to keep missing it.

This morning I tried to relay the tension I was feeling to a friend. Someone who has never handled me in a way I like, but when you start to feel desperate even a smile your way can lead you into folly. I tried to relay that I had an odd and disappointing evening, that there was so much expectation on my end and then it was stopped over and over.

She came through the way she always does."Well we don't always get what we want," she said then left me there, as if that was the greatest truth in life. Momentarily I spiraled back into a lonely isolated feeling, still looking around for a commiserate companion, for some one who knows that the "valley of trouble is the door of hope," someone who knows that it's the same place where the devastated "will sing" again.

All Together

There is a certain moment in the Sunday morning liturgy that captures me every time. Pastor Ken takes the bread in his hands, raises it up and breaks it in two saying,

“We break this bread to share in the body of Christ.”

And all together we respond,

“Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread.”

What I’ve just heard is that I am no longer an outcast. No one can trump any one with their suffering, or with their success, with their goodness or with their badness. Christ has united all in their suffering and sin and need for redemption. In this act and with these words we humble ourselves to share in the one bread.

All together we share the bread of suffering. Lately I’ve been thinking of the suffering of waiting. There are many things that we wait for. We wait for clarity, or health, for a place to rest or a direction to travel, for a loved one to return or for justice to be done.

But the deepest waiting we do is for the unnamable, as John says, “what we will be has not yet been made known.” And it is here in the open unnamable that we are called to be. To remain open to what the Lord hasn’t yet made known is also to remain empty and inherent in emptiness is pain. Emptiness is unnatural. The soul, as nature, abhors a vacuum and so it aches in the emptiness. Everything in me and you wants to avoid the ache, to be full, sated and at rest. We are willing to fill it with anything and even God has said to us that “your desire will be for . . . and . . . will rule over you.”

So, to remain open is to chose suffering, but it is a holy suffering and one we share with Christ. As he groans for his return we share his groan and that draws us into his very heart. There is the cost though of those often compelling, but lesser desires, but when we are drawn into his heart we know the exchange of the rule of desires for the presence and rule of his love. This is the kind of suffering that the faithful of Hebrews chose for “none of them received what had been promised” before they died, and yet God loved them and celebrated them for continuing to want and wait on God’s fulfillment.

And so we also share in the bread of redemption. Redemption now, but also in the end. It’s striking what Hebrews says in the next breath. “God had planned something better” than the faithful getting what they desired in their time. God’s plan is that “only together with us would they be made perfect.”

All together we will share in the final redemption. That is something better. I don’t know what you expect when the Lord returns, in the moment that we “see him as he is” and in the split second it takes for us to be transformed into his likeness. I expect to be stunned upon seeing him and exclaim, “It’s him!” and then turning around to tell someone else, only to be stunned again, “It’s you!” and then the dawning realization “oh my, it’s me too!” I can’t wait to see Abraham’s face or Jacob’s face or David’s face as they finally see, finally receive what they have always longed for. I can’t wait to celebrate all your dear faces, having known your specific pains and longings, having endured the openness together, in that moment of you and everything becoming what it truly is.

The Waiting

It's been one of those days. I actually pleaded with God at lunch to not have to come back to work. I tried to argue that I've been responsible and I’ve faithfully come back at least a thousand times. Couldn't he come up with a legitimate reason for me not to return this afternoon? Please, please . . . pretty please?

Well I'm back and the whole thing reminds me of something I saw yesterday.

I took a little walk in the afternoon to try and wake myself up after a nap. I was walking down one side of the street and from the other side of the street, down at the other end of the block, I could hear a child wailing and crying. It was immediately recognizable as a sort of self pitying, I didn't get my way, my life is ruined, cry. I looked around thinking there would be a few children hanging about; maybe they had gotten in a fight or something. As I tried to make out where and what tyranny might be unfolding, I saw a lone boy riding his bike up the street toward me. The more I looked and listened the more I realized that all this noise was coming from him. As he wailed and peddled and shouted his way closer, I began to make out what he was saying. "I hate her, I hate her, she's the worst mother in the world, I hate her!" He spewed it all the way by me without a flinch. I don’t know if he didn’t see me or he just didn’t care.

Along with all sorts of other things bubbling around in me as I witnessed this, was the cringe of recognition I had as I felt his strain to find a curse deep enough to match the disappointment. In someway too, there was the bolstering to try and convince himself that she really was the worst mother in the world, maybe evil incarnate.

What a relief it would be if she was. There would be no requirement, no responsibility to obey or honor such a person. He could be free to disregard her and go and do or be whatever he liked without question.

So as I drove back to work today under the unction of responsibility to my employer this little boy’s cry leapt to life in me. There was this seizing of self pity and anger. I actually shed a few tears as I drove onto the premises and walked very slowly back inside. I might have been tempted, like the boy, to accuse God of being unloving and even cruel if it hadn’t of been for something that happened about forty minutes earlier at the beginning of my lunch hour.

I left for lunch in a hurry eager to get away from the phone and to hear myself think without interruption, maybe even to hear what God might be thinking about my situation.

And here’s the situation, as best as I can say in a short space. It’s really more that I’ve been in a state of intense longing lately. I won’t try to name the nature or circumstances of it all, but you could say I’m in a state of meta-longing. One of the keenest things I’m longing for these days is for a deeper intimacy with Jesus. Which I’ve been cultivating for awhile, but the longing has gone deeper than what I can get at and so I’m waiting. I’m waiting for God to do what I cannot. By the lunch hour today I was distressed by it all and bordering on exhaustion with it. I left work and went to Whole Foods full of my angst. As I’m wondering up the prepared foods aisle I hear Tom Petty singing this refrain,

The waiting is the hardest part
Every day you see one more card
You take it on faith, you take it to heart
The waiting is the hardest part

Everything in me looked up, expecting God to be right above my head. And the dawning came over me. "I’m not lost to you? You know? You know, you see and you know and now I’m crying, I’ve got actually tears in my eyes right here next to the sushi. You love me and you haven’t left, you followed me to the grocery store and you know about the waiting. Thank you . . . thank you."

The Lord is relentless and He loves me, even if I have to go back to where I don’t want to be and do what I don’t want to do. One day I won’t, but God knows that the waiting is the hardest part.

Almost There

This is the picture in my mind about life most of the time. Just over the hill, just through the trees I can almost make out that thing I've been longing for. Everything wells up inside as I look out to that horizon, but I feel like I've been standing in this same spot a long time never quite making it. It's getting harder to let hope well up into the open air.

But here comes the salty damp breeze and the rushing waves of the sea and I am betrayed again into the longing. Nothing in me can help it. Nothing in me wants to when the sand touches my feet. I run like a fool till I fall in a hole or hit a tree and lie there waiting for another breeze.

I've done this enough now to fear it, but know that if I'm going to get anywhere I have to give in and follow the hope in the next wind.

Lord have mercy.