First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Finding Our Way...
Salvation
Granted, the choir
is an embarrassment. Those faces
are too simple to be true. Take
Mrs. Beamon, our soprano, whose
perfect smile might warm some
into admiration, if they can forget
how she daily cows her skinny
alto daughter into tears.
The choir master himself
is ridiculous; the way he stands
tells everyone how short he thinks
he is. That alone could help you
like him, but when he takes every solo
like a general at war, you'll
probably change your mind.
Those two alone can make forgiveness
a nearly impossible thing. And each
of these singers has a similar story,
a sad quirk that tries each week to shape
those smiles into something lovely.
If you glance over this scene
too quickly, or without enough
real humor, you might write off every other scene
it touches, every kindness that allows such comic abuse
to abound. You might see
those hilarious faces and believe
they are the whole show; you could miss
the real act. The comedy
is this: despite the annoyance
of grace, and this tired music
of salvation, it is what we all expect.
--Scott Cairns
You may have to start by cleaning up your language a little bit. "God" and "Love" are the two words that get layered so deeply with sentiment, misunderstanding, abuse, confusion, fuzziness and mystification that you may not even be able to dust them off and find anything recognizable underneath. You may just need to stop using them for a while if they're pointing you upwards, outwards, downwards--somewhere outside your own experience. You may need to create some new images, find some new words to help you find your way to resurrection--for a time, at least.
You won't find God until you get into your own experience. And the words sometimes get in the way.
They point you everywhere but into your own intuition. As long as your eyes are looking outside, beyond and above, you won't be able to hear the voice that is speaking within.
Paul Tillich called it the Ground of our Being. And until you encounter that Ground, you're always going to feel a little in trouble. A little fragile and defensive and on guard. You may express it in anger or violence or depression. Or you may keep it at bay with productivity and routine. But until you find your Ground of Being, you're not connected. When we don't know what we're living for, we often define ourselves by what we're living against.
Christians have a word for that kind of destructive stance in the world. We call it "sin".
And "sin" isn't a judgmental word so much as it's a descriptive word. It describes a disconnected, incoherent way of living. A person disconnected from a sense of Spirit or Being is called a "sinner" and will do a lot of stupid, destructive, contradictory things. For Christians, being a sinner doesn't mean being a bad person. It has to do with living a disconnected life.
True religion ("re-ligament", in the Latin--to be "connected") reconnects us with our Center,
with our Ground. Spiritual mystics do the best job describing what that reconnection feels like. They describe this encounter with the Center of Life as being an experience of incredible joy. In Psalm 94, God is described as a playmate who "rolls me over with rollicking delight". St. Bernard describes God as "honey in the mouth, music in the ear, joy in the heart."
Rollicking delight. That's not what most of us expect from God. And it may not even be what we
want. Most of us want fire insurance more than we want a love affair. We've made God distant and angry, judgmental, rule-bound, a jailer, a cop. Some people see God as being a Giant Santa Claus, "making a list and checking it twice--gonna find out who's naughty and nice."
We can do better than this. And many people have.
How? They pray. They let go. "Prayer" is another one of those words we need to dust off and re-encounter. Prayer isn't something we do so much as it's something we are. We are Union; we can experience ourselves that way. Richard Rohr tells us that to pray is to "live consciously inside of God". To pray isn't to become perfect or to become dispassionate or to become pious. To pray is to find the Center Point, the still point. To go inside and find a new Center--a Center of life, not ego; a Center of belovedness, not competition.
Certainly, when you start, prayer feels like a "doing", like something that you're engaging in. But the longer you do it, what you find is that it becomes a "non-doing", a "non-performing", a "non-thinking", which is why it's so difficult at first. It's humiliating to realize how little you can affect the process with right technique, right discipline or right attitude. It's out of your control.
Prayer isn't a technique. It's an encounter, a collapse. To pray is to have the courage to reject your fears, your sense of "cut-offness", the fear of rejection you carry. To pray is to recognize yourself as God's voice, as the Being in whom God wants to make a home. To pray is to let Love overwhelm you.
Prayer, faith, religion, spirituality . . . . they all lead us to a way of living in which all things hold together--light and shadow, death and life, failure and wholeness. In the life of Jesus, we see a path to follow that leads us to this reconciliation, this experience of joy and integration.