WHO ARE YOU?
As a progressive who prefers to hang out with my own kind, in person and online, I run into a fair amount of God snark.
God snark isn’t the same as religion snark, in my book. Religion snark I can take. Human folly—fair game.
I feel differently about snark directed at faith. It's hard not to take it personally when people assume that condescending tone toward something so close to my heart. I understand that not everyone shares my experience of God. I don’t expect them to get what it’s about. I just wish they could be a little more open, a little less dismissive. "Wait a minute," I think, "You've got me all wrong! You think you understand me, but you don't!"
Which must be how God feels ALL THE TIME.
Isn’t it odd," my late beloved pastor Allen Happe used to say, “how we always talk about God in the third person, as if God weren’t in the room? Doesn’t that seem rude?”
This really is the heart of faith, what Allen was talking about. It’s not about belief. It's not about whether we can prove or disprove God's existence, or whether an "intelligent designer" is necessary to make a complex structure such as an eye. It’s about the shift from discourse to encounter. From talking about God to talking and listening to God.
It is only when we surrender our definitive statements about God and what we “believe” and “don’t believe” and ask, “Who are you?” that we can begin to know what the whole “God thing” is and always has been about. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, full of fire and fury against Jews who were spreading wrong ideas about God—only to come face to face with Someone alive and blindingly real, calling him by name. “Who are you?” Paul asks then, the only question that matters when it comes to God. Or if fact to anyone.
Who are you?
Let me set aside my assumptions, my opinions, my knowing expectations, and try as best I can to welcome you with an open heart—friend or stranger, intimate or enemy… undefended, vulnerable, open to discovery, willing to be moved and perhaps changed.
This is what I’m practicing when I practice meditation: simply opening heart, mind, breath, spirit to the Unknown Other. In prayer I do not claim to know who God is, or what God is like, or even whether “God” is—I mean the God of my knowing and teaching and preaching… I surrender all this, and simply pray, Yes. Welcome. Amen.
Whoever you are.
Last week’s reading was from David Frenette, The Path of Centering Prayer.
Contemplative prayer is like being in a dark room, knowing that another person is present with you, but because of the absence of light, you are unable to see them. You practice by turning toward them in the darkness. The turning, the glancing, is not meant to penetrate or illuminate the darkness, but rather to consent to the presence of the other hidden within the darkness. In line with the teaching of The Cloud of Unknowing, deepening the sacred glance in centering prayer is a contemplative practice of “unknowing” to the intellectual mind. The unknowing means not trying to see God clearly through the sacred symbol.
The Scripture verse was from Psalm 18:
It is you who light my lamp, O God; the LORD, my God, lights up my darkness.
Our closing prayer, with thanks to Hilary Hopkins, was a teaching of the Dalai Lama.
A PRECIOUS HUMAN LIFE Every day, think as you wake up Today I am fortunate to have woken up. I am alive, I have a precious human life. I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others I am not going to get angry, or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.