Last night the Executive Board of First Church in Cambridge voted a resounding YES on a pilot program to open a Friday Café for homeless and low-income neighbors during the winter months, a plan I’ve been hard at work on for 6 months. They included a small stipend for my ministry, some operating funds, and a whole lot of love, showered on me with applause and beaming smiles when they brought me back in to hear their decision. There’s nothing to me as good as God’s goodness alive in God’s people.
I wonder how many of those kind people were thinking what I was thinking—especially the ones who remember me when. “I sure didn’t see this coming!”
There are so many moments I could point to where I thought I was going somewhere completely different from where I ended up, so many surprising plot twists. From church to seminary, from seminary to a dwindling church in a beat-up neighborhood in an out-of-the-way town, to a muddy Occupy encampment in the financial district, to the basement of an Episcopal cathedral, to the streets of Cambridge, and this new thing coming into being.
And what about the plot twist of God calling me to begin with? I don’t mean to ordained ministry. I mean out of atheism to faith. Now, there’s one I really never saw coming.
I never saw any of it coming. Never saw it, never could have imagined it, never knew there was such life as the life God was drawing me into. How could I have even known what to ask for? What I didn’t know, what I couldn’t begin to imagine, was so much deeper and richer and truer and better than I knew how to want.
If you had showed me a snapshot of the ministry I have now when I was 20, or 30, or even 40, I think it would have scared me out of my wits. How strange that this would turn out to be the path God would choose to begin leading me out of fear, and deeper into love. But somehow here I am.
I don’t want you to hear me saying that everything we go through is part of God’s good and wonderful plan for our life, and that everything happens for a reason. I don’t believe everything happens for a reason. That’s way too simple for me, too formulaic. It doesn’t honor the magnitude and mess of our actual losses, our heartbreaks, our betrayals, our hurt and our shame, to slap theological platitudes on them.
But still, somehow, out of the real life I’ve lived, I’ve come to this moment of gratitude and opening out into new life. I know, without being able to say how, that God has been within each movement and moment of my journey. And that enables me to trust that God will be within the movements and moments yet to come.
I will not fear, because I am coming to know God in the midst of my fear, greater than my fear, with a presence and goodness that is realer than what we are used to calling real.
So in prayer I dare to turn to, and turn myself over to, what I do not know, the Divine Mystery, the Cloud of Unknowing. Or at least I am trying to to. The meaning to turn myself over, and the actually turning myself over, the letting go, are a journey apart, and I am on it. Where it’s going I can’t imagine. But—I know it’s good.