Face to Face with God

My father's a mountaineer.  He doesn't hike; he saunters.  He'll quote Thoreau on this, refering to his essay, Walking, and what it means to go a la Sainte Terre---to "saunter."  Like Thoreau he walks slowly and lovingly upon the Earth and sees what my first- and even second-glance cannot see. As a saunterer, he's a Holy-Lander. He doesn’t just see the granite that forms these peaks, he discerns the mighty forces that belched all this from Earth’s belly; he senses the achingly long, painful processes that twisted and tilted these rocks into these splendid mountains. He sees more than meets the eye. He doesn’t just look at the Earth; he experiences every blessed part as holy. Spiritually, you must do the same.

When I say you must hold loosely to form, I mean that you must be able to look beyond words and doctrines, rules and rituals while still honoring them, and discern the substance they bear. In the case of Holy Scripture, you must be able to look deeply into and beyond the words to behold the Word. You seek direct, first-hand spiritual experience, not indirect or second-hand. At some point, you must stop thinking about words and behold the Word.

Isn’t this what Holy Communion requires you to do? Heaven help you if you cling to the Bread and Wine and miss the One they bear. But I’m sure you don’t do that. In prayer you let the forms—these signs of Christ—point the way, then you enter the silence and mystery. And as you do, the grace of the Holy Spirit carries you in faith beyond the elements themselves into the Elemental—the Holy Trinity.

In the presence of the One the Bread and Wine bear, the forms vanish and you’re face to Face with God.

If you have eyes to see.

Run

As essential as Holy Scripture is, the Book itself is not the goal. While you must never depart from it, you must also never get stuck in it. The life you seek is not in the Book. Jesus warned the religious of his day about just this: “You’re so devoted to the scriptures, thinking that they’ll give you eternal life; but you’ve missed Me” (John 5.39). Everything they were looking for was standing right in front of them, but they were so attached to the words they missed the Word, so fond of the goads they lost sight of the Goal. You don’t want to do that. But don’t judge them. It’s easy to become merely religious. Merely religious is what you’ll be if you get attached to the outward forms of religion but miss its interior power (2 Timothy 3.5). It’s also easy, even fashionable today, to be “spiritual, but not religious.” Go this route and you’ll seek the interior power of religion but you’ll want nothing to do with religion’s exterior forms. Both extremes are mistakes. Look, if the Incarnation means anything at all, it means that form and Spirit are one; you can’t have one without the other. Jesus embraced the mortal human form and made it divine, but didn’t hold it so tightly he couldn’t let it go when the time came for something new (Philippians 2.6-8). You too must learn to “let go” of what you know and cherish. Unless you do, you’ll never see the fullness of God (John 20.17).

So, don’t get attached to the forms of religion and get stuck in them. But don’t reject them either. Instead, hold them loosely, honoring them as Jesus did. Scripture, in particular, has one purpose—to unite you with God, to gather you into life eternal. The prophets, sages, and apostles are pointing the way.  Now go, eagerly—or better, run desperately . . . as desperately as you’d run toward water if suddenly you found your head was set on fire.

The Goal is Everything.

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Scripture

Prayer is more than words, but it’s got to start with words if it’s to go beyond them and into the Great Silence, which is the language of God. So, as you seek the Ineffable, consider well the words you gather yourself. You’ve chosen the psalms as a guide to prayer. They’ve involved you in the particular style of language used by those who’ve found trustworthy paths into the Mystery. So now, having spoken—or better, sung a psalm—gather yourself around a little fire made of the words of God’s prophets, sages, and apostles and dwell there for a awhile.

Your time with them needn’t be long. Just a few minutes, attentive before this fire you’re building for yourself is enough to warm you up to God. But take care that you don’t overdo it. You need kindling, not the branch of a tree. These words are incendiary, and just a few will kindle a blaze. But that doesn’t mean more is better—drop too much Scripture onto this traveler’s fire, and you’ll do more harm than good. Your religious ego might tell you that you ought to read a whole chapter and study it thoroughly, while the irreligious part of you hollers that you don’t have the time for any of it; you’ve got a project to get to or kids to take to school. Truth is, you do have time for what your heart needs most—just a twig is enough to keep this fire of your faith burning.

My practice is to read very slowly through, say, the Sermon on the Mount, or the Song of Songs . . . one or two verses a day. My aim is just to gather around Scripture, awakening my heart to God, feeding the flame of devotion.

So, take a little text, and let it first rest in your mind. Then draw the words down into your heart and let them dwell there. Allow a single word or phrase or image to focus your attention. You may be intrigued by it, confused, or even repulsed. The point is not to do anything about your response, but rather simply to experience it. You’re not to think about this encounter as much as you are to look at it and sit with it, dwelling with these written words that come from someone else’s living encounter with the One you seek. You’re reading is intentionally different from how you read other words; read for intimacy not for information, for love not for knowledge.

This is sacred reading. Just light a little fire and wait for God, you never know when a nearby bush, or something else, may go up in flames (Exodus 3.1-6).

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The art of prayer and love: on flirting

Each Sunday this fall, our congregation is sitting with the Song of Songs (or Solomon) and listening for the ways this racy, erotic, playful love poem seeks to awaken our love for God and to arouse love within marriage and dating. We're calling the series of sermons, "Romancing God: The Art of Prayer and Love." It's a daring enterprise, trying to hold together the summons to spiritual and relational love, but in the history of spirituality, it's just these two that must go together if we're to experience the health and vibrancy we seek. Here's a link to a recent sermon on the second chapter of the Song of Songs. And below is a little sample of the message that focused on flirting and fantasy (with God and your beloved):

First, here's a little about the flirting commended by the text. Note the playfulness. 2.1: she speaks, minimizing her beauty, fishing for a compliment. 2.2: he’s not too dull to notice and artfully (and wisely) replies. 2.3-4: she reciprocates, returning and magnifying the compliment and is aroused by the interchange. (In this we see that love requires a game, playfulness, flirting takes tact). 2.5: she becomes faint and asks her friends to give her nourishment; passion burns energy. 2.6: she yearns in her heart for him, and then warns her jealous girlfriends against pushing for love prematurely; wait, ladies, it’ll come to you (2.7).

In these days of seriousness, rocky marriages and romances need to recover the playfulness of flirting. Flirting keeps you in the game, and when you’re playing the game, the relationship is interesting. Here flirting is different from being a “tease.” A tease seeks to arouse in order to hold power over the other. Teasers make bad lovers; they are unwilling to give themselves away for love. They only want attention. But flirting is a genuine invitation to dance, a gesture of openness, a willingness to give-in to love. In romantic flirting, there’s a tenderness, a warmth, a humor, a vulnerability. This kind of flirting is a blessing extended to the other.

So, why has honest flirting within marriage virtually disappeared? Why does marriage often seem like the end of courtship rather than the beginning of a lifetime of play? How does this biblical text and the thousands of years of lovers who’ve read and cherished it invite us to renew the game, learn to flirt again, and awaken love?

Continued in the online sermon.

Psalms, part 2

When you want to ascend too quickly, the psalms will grab you by the heel and pull you back to earth. With the psalms there’s no posturing or pretending before God—no tidy language offered to God, no flowery nonsense. Angry? There are psalms to help you voice your rage. Confused? There are psalms for that too. And there are psalms that’ll give you words when you’re holding a newborn, when your bank account's overdrawn, your lover’s betrayed you, cancer’s trying to kill you, the government’s a mess, or you’re standing in awe before a sunset. The psalms pull all the anatomy of the human soul onto the path toward God—nothing inappropriate, unwelcome, or excluded. They'll penetrate your pretension and puncture your denial; they'll make you more human, and therefore more nearly divine. Pray a psalm a day. If it’s long, pray part of it. And I suggest you chant or sing it. After all, the word, psalm, means “song.” Merely speaking a psalm is inconsistent with its nature—a little like using a spoon as a mirror; sure, you’ll see yourself, but poorly.

There are, of course, techniques for chanting the psalms, and there are many good books to help you. But I urge you to simply try it. Just gently let your voice interpret the words you’re singing—in your own way, a simple, even faltering little tune. Look, you’re not giving a performance; you’re sitting before the One who takes great delight in whatever you offer; and you’re offering these old words just as they instruct you to offer them, as a “new song” rising from your heart (Psalm 96.1).

And as you do, God smiles. Guaranteed.

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