Shhhh.

Silent.

Quiet.

Still.

Peaceful.

Not synonyms, although there is quite a bit of overlap to their meanings.  I am finding that not-talking is not the same as quiet, and that silence is no guarantee of stillness.

I come from a rich tradition of words – beautifully crafted, mentally stimulating, deeply expressive words.  Words to explain, to clarify, to enlighten, but also words to shape, to influence, to steer.  Sometimes words that obscure, words that camouflage, words that sanitize.  And when the evangelical movement is having a bad week, its strength is its weakness, and this facility with words becomes weaponized – barbs and rebuttals and shotgun blasts of language that leave gaping holes in targets and observers alike.

Let me be clear – I don’t want to cut myself off from this tradition.  As long as I have mental capacity and breath in my body, that breath will be voiced in words that make sense.  I simply am not wired for “God is good, God is great, Hallelujah (repeat 47 times)” – I am wired for words.

I think, though, that I might do well to take a cue from my musical life, where the rests are nearly as important as the notes.  If there is no silence, the notes quickly become a barrage of noise.  The quiet passages are necessary for the loud ones to be appreciated, and the softer melodies have beauty all their own.

I need this quiet.  I have come from so many years of noise – church services where I am cowed into unresponsiveness because of the deliberately constant noise.  (God forbid there be “dead air” on a Sunday morning.)  My “quiet times”, not too surprisingly, have come to reflect this constant motion, and my prayers and reading are so full of words that there is no space left for listening.

I want to find out what is in the silences, and perhaps more importantly, what is not.  I need stillness more than I need words sometimes.  Now if only I can get myself to stop talking…

Holy Scrub-brush, Batman!

When I first started looking into the Friends tradition, the concept of sacramental living made immediate sense to me.  Even as a child, I had a sense of lingering holiness about everyday things like trees and fields and books, although I couldn’t possibly have articulated what I felt.

Making laundry a prayer seems obvious, if I just remind myself.  The folding and sorting can be a quiet, domestic form of worship.  The feel of the cloth is soothing under my hands, and the rhythm of folding becomes a liturgy of socks and shirts.

Balancing the checkbook takes a little more thought, but I can find God there too.  The numbers and logic are satisfying, and it’s not a huge leap to imagine that God must find an exponentially greater satisfaction in the ordered rhythms of molecules and planetary systems.

Even driving can be its own meditation (as long as I pay attention to the road, of course).  I am learning the welcome discipline of shutting off the litany of work-related concerns, and replacing it with a conscious gratitude for the trees and fields and open sky on my way to work.

That said … if anybody figures out how to sacramentally scour burned rice out of the bottom of a pot, come on over to my house.  I will give you a scrub-brush and let you meditate the hell out of my pots and pans.

Echoes of Mercy, Whispers of Love

One of my favorite things about exploring the concept of sacramental living is that all of a sudden, God is everywhere.  Not just in the usual way of being everywhere at all times – I can see him all over the place now.  Strange places, like in novels and on back roads and in cups of hot tea.  (Not literally IN my cup of tea – although if I’m going to take the omnipresence thing seriously, I guess he kind of is, so I’ll just let you work out your own theology on that one.)

Tonight I heard echoes of God in my rehearsal for a classical concert on Sunday.  I’ve worked with the mezzo-soprano many times before, so she’s used to my ability to follow a soloist, bending my musical interpretation in that dance of give-and-take that all good music should be.  The viola player has heard me play, but we’ve never performed together.  He is phenomenal, to the point that he scares me a little, and I was nervous about working with him.

Then he drops this compliment on me.  (I’ll give it to you verbatim, and then I’ll translate.)  He says to my singer friend, while eyeing me, “She’s really good at that, the [he sways in place for a second, waving his hands back and forth with his viola tucked under his arm] – you know, instead of counting.”  If you don’t speak Musician, that probably didn’t impress you as much as it did me, so here it is in normal-person English:  “She knows when to follow and when to take the lead, and she values the line of the music more than staying precisely on tempo.”

Coming from the principal violist of the local symphony, who is not generally known for scattering compliments around, that completely made my day.  I appreciated it partly because I was so relieved that it had gone well, but also because that is one of my core values as a musician.  All of my professional piano playing is with other musicians, and I want that flexibility to be a hallmark of my playing.  It’s important to me that people be able to play the way they want to play, without having to fight me for it.

I’d never heard it phrased that way, though:  “Instead of counting.”  When I thought about it, I realized he was right.  Once I’ve learned a piece well enough that I can keep half my attention on the other performer instead of my own hands, I’m not really thinking about “ONE-two-three-four” any more – I’m hearing lines and shapes and tone colors, making the music dance and bend, never quite the same as the last time.  When we reach the end of a piece and we have to play the last few notes together, I really don’t care how many beats Brahms said to play them – I care about these three notes with this violist at this performance, and if that turns out to be 3.4 beats instead of 3, that is fine.  If we decide that it just needs to hang there until he runs out of bow, even better!  (That’s what we settled on, incidentally.)

As I drove home from rehearsal, the words “instead of counting” kept rolling around in my head, and eventually I remembered where I’d heard them.

Love keeps no record of wrongs.

Love doesn’t count.  Love bends and flexes and dances, so that this love for this child, this friend, this hurting colleague or joyful neighbor or hungry stranger, is exactly as it’s meant to be at this moment.

Count less.  Listen more.  Find God where you least expect him.

My Do It!

“The opposite of faith is not doubt; rather, the opposite of faith is believing you are in control.”

– Tom and Liz Gates, quoted in “Plain Living: A Quaker Path to Simplicity”

When my daughter (now 13) was a toddler, she wanted to do everything for herself – put on her socks, feed herself, put on her own seatbelt, and she probably would have plunked her tiny little backside in the driver’s seat if I’d have let her.  Her constant refrain was, “MY do it!”

It’s embarrassingly easy to see myself in her, but as adults we’re encouraged to be self-sufficient, self-reliant, self-motivated, self-centered … whoops, scratch that last one.  Independence is seen as a virtue in our culture, and “My do it” sounds a whole lot like “I did it my way” and “Have it your way” and “Army of One”.

I had never really thought until today about how this independent streak informs my prayers.  I feel like I’m asking God for strength, wisdom, and guidance.  The words sound like I am.  But I wonder how many of my “God, grant me guidance” prayers are actually a thinly-veiled “God, I’m gonna run things now, OK?”

I don’t want to minimize the importance of action and responsibility – I’m not advocating passivity.  I wonder, though, if my faith might be healthier if my prayer was simply,

“Dear God: YOU do it.”

Ecumenical Monday – Disagreeing With Desmond Tutu

Today’s post comes from the key quote in the Huffington Post article “God Is Not A Christian: Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama’s Extraordinary Talk on God and Religion.”

I’m going to start right out by disagreeing with Archbishop Tutu.  I get where he’s headed with his deliberately, delightfully provocative statement.  I don’t agree with all of his conclusions, but I don’t disagree with every one of them either.  I do, however, take issue with his attention-getting statement that God is not a Christian.

In one sense, it’s true.  God isn’t a Christian, in the sense of someone who has accepted Christ’s salvation, because God can’t get saved.  God hasn’t sinned, so he doesn’t need Christ’s salvation, and also he IS Christ, and if your brain is starting to feel a little pretzelish then you’re on the right track.

But the statement is meant not only to challenge thought processes but to make a statement:  that God is somehow “above” Christianity, greater than Christianity, more than Christianity, more than … Christ?

And that’s where we run into trouble.  “Being a Christian” isn’t a state one can be born into, or randomly drift into because of a move to a new city or a change in the weather.  It is a becoming, a change, a decision.  To those who understand the term as “Christ-follower”, not “person who was brought up in a Western society and is nominally Catholic or Protestant and probably American”, it is a result.

God can no more become a Christian than dirt can get dirty or water can get wet.  Try to explain it, and you end up laughing and shaking your head in confusion because wetness IS water, water IS wet, you can’t separate them.  Dirt would not be dirt if it wasn’t made of dirt.  (Yes, thank you, brilliant bit of rhetoric, I know.)  It’s not like it can get MORE dirty if you rub dirt on it – it just continues being its wonderful earthwormy nutrient-filled life-giving self, regardless of the silly people standing on it and talking philosophy about it in the brief span of years before they return to it.

I disagree with Tutu’s statement, and with his unfortunate conclusion that God is bigger than everything including Christianity, since in doing so he reduces Christianity to another human philosophy that tries to point in the general direction of God.  However, several paragraphs into the article he describes God in a way that makes my hair stand on end, so I’m just going to paste it in verbatim and let him speak in his own words.  I might disagree with him, but there are some good reasons he has a zillion people listening to him and I only have about six.

He weeps when he sees us do the things that we do to one another.  But he does not send lightning bolts to destroy the ungodly.  And that is fantastic.  God says, “I can’t force you.  I beg you, please for your own sake, make the right choice.  I beg you.”

When you do the right thing, God forgets about God’s divine dignity and he rushes and embraces you.  “You came back, you came back.  I love you.  Oh how wonderful, you came back!”

Practical Thoughts on Quietness

The Thumper Principle:  “If you can’t say somethin’ nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.”

The Blogger Coming Down With a Bug Principle:  “If you can’t say anything coherent, don’t say anything at all.”

Looks like this is an evening in which to crawl in bed and dwell on the concept of “rest”, hopefully finding an immediate application for any insights I may have.  I’ll try not to snore too loudly while I meditate.

Little Things, Big God

Does God give us the best parking places?  I’m gonna have to say a reluctant “no” on that one.  It’d be nice to imagine that he stuck his divine finger into the traffic patterns and made all the people at Safeway just not notice that one really great spot, but somehow it doesn’t really mesh with that whole free will thing.

At the same time, there are occasions where you have to sit back and think, “Well, HUH.  Sure wouldn’t have figured that to happen by chance.”

One of my responsibilities at one of my university jobs is getting the student accompanists lined up with the student vocalists for their weekly lessons.  Trying to get a nearly immovable voice studio schedule coordinated with five student schedules, making sure that every vocalist has an accompanist and every student accompanist has enough hours … well, it makes those little Chinese triangle puzzles seem like a BREEZE.  Oh, and none of the piano players who are also taking voice lessons can accompany themselves.  Yes, it crossed my mind.

This evening I finally had to call it quits after a few hours on the computer dealing with scheduling, emails, and a bunch of other stuff that’s really boring to write about.  Nobody was available in the late afternoon, and those are the times when I either can’t be there at ALL because of another commitment, or when I want desperately to be home with my children on the two days a week I always have them.  Yes, I could cover those lessons, but oh my goodness I didn’t want to have to stay an hour late two days a week while my children let themselves into the house and waited for Mama to come home!

And then at 11:30 p.m. I got the last student schedule in my email inbox.  She only wants three students.  She’s available every afternoon until 4:00.  Problem completely solved, in less than two minutes.

God?  Maybe not.  But I’m going to thank Him anyway, just in case.

Seekings and Findings

“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find…”

“I should like to change the name seekers to explorers.  There is a considerable difference there: we do not ‘seek’ the Atlantic, we explore it. The whole field of religious experience has to be explored and has to be described in a language understandable to modern men and women.”

– Ole Olden, Norwegian Quaker, in the Faith and Practice book for the Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain

I love this image of exploring, not just seeking.  I certainly don’t speak or read Koine Greek, but I took just enough of it in college to know what to look for online – and indeed, it seems that my suspicion was correct that the original word for “seek” has the sense of “keep seeking.”

I think back to my childhood and the 2-acre field behind our house.  If somebody had told me, “Go find the field”, I’d have looked at them oddly, set my book down and turned halfway around on the couch in the living room, pointed out the window and said, “There.”  Done deal.  Sought and found.

But if they’d said “Go explore the field” … well, that would be a different proposition entirely!  My sister and the neighbor girls and I did exactly that for many hours every summer.  We explored that field up one side and down the other, got stuck in the mud, jumped out of trees, got stung and bitten and scratched and scraped, and had a generally wonderful time.

We made tunnels in the tall grass, and hollowed out nests to read in.  Our dad built us a fort, which served as a home base until it was knocked down in the process of clearing more pasture land.  We spent that summer playing “war nurse” (I think I was on a Cherry Ames kick that year), and took turns huddling beside felled trees and bravely dodging imaginary air raids to get supplies for the imaginary wounded.

We spent a LOT of time back there, but there was always more to do, more to find, more to see.  All you had to do to get a completely different perspective was clamber on top of the little well house, and you could see the entire field (now your royal domain, of course) stretching out at your feet.  Or you could lie down in the late summer and look at the rectangle of brilliant blue sky formed by your sturdy little body’s impression in the waving green forest of grass.  There was always more.

It’s too easy to say, “Here’s the field – I found it!” and set up a neat, comfortable little house on the edge where you can see it every day, think happy thoughts about it, and have “by the field” printed on your address labels, and maybe a little field bumper sticker on your car.  That is not enough for me.  I want to be out IN IT, tramping around through the woods and the grass and the blackberry brambles if necessary.  I want to look at it from another perspective, climb up and survey it, lie down in the middle of it, and find out the hard way if I’m allergic to any of it.

I want to wake up every morning eager for more exploring, and to stay up a little too late at night finding out just a little more.  I’m one of those women who can lose her car keys in her own purse, so I am that much more delighted by the promise that I will keep receiving, keep finding.  Maybe, like U2, I still haven’t found what I’m looking for – but I keep finding all these wonderful things I’m not looking for, and that’s worth getting a few scrapes and bruises.

Ecumenical Monday

Mondays are my least restful, least peaceful day of the week.  I hit the ground running when I wake up, and by the time I put in my work day at one job, take my daughter to her cello lesson and my son to Cub Scouts, get home at 8 p.m. and wrestle them through homework and baths and stories and tooth-brushing, and then spend another couple of hours dealing with emails from all three jobs while I’m pushing the laundry through as fast as possible …

… well, I don’t even get to sit down without working until about 11:30 p.m., and quiet restful meditation is a fast-fading memory.

So I think that on Mondays I’m just going to roll with it.  My gradual exit from the fenced world of conservative American evangelicalism has given me the sneaking suspicion that maybe, just maybe, a few non-Baptists (and dare I think some non-Christians?) might have some darn good insights on faith.  Instead of bashing my tired head against my Kindle trying to get all inspired by George Fox and Hannah Whitall Smith and other people in interesting hats, I’m going to write about something from another faith tradition or lack thereof (including, like today, morally-questionable motorcycle-riding lunacy).  Today’s thought comes to you courtesy of novelist Erika Lopez, who was – entirely coincidentally – raised by a pair of lesbian Quakers:

“We all want to be remembered but we’re not going to be.  Even Bette Midler and Zsa Zsa Gabor will rot and eventually become obsolete like some sort of movie star during the Egyptian age.  And if you do happen to become remembered, you will only become chipped stone with pigeon s*** all over you like a statue of Marcus Aurelius.  No one will remember how good your chicken was or that your house smelled like strawberry incense or throw up.  None of that will matter.

No one has any pull, and I realize no one’s opinion of anything really matters more than yours until they figure out how to stay alive forever.”

There’s probably something slightly wrong with me that I find this thought so comforting.

Hangin’ Out with the Spirit

The Holy Spirit.  I hadn’t given Him a lot of thought in recent years until the summer of 2011 when God said in no uncertain terms, “See this guy you know?  Guess what – you really are the only Jesus he sees.  He wants to know Me.  Start talkin’, honey.”  And in my first really honest prayer in several years, I said, “God, You’ve got to be effing kidding me.”

(I apologize – sincerely –  if the profanity offends you, but that IS the edited version, so let’s call it a compromise.  God didn’t strike me down, so I’m assuming it wasn’t a fatal error to cuss at Him.)  He said He wasn’t kidding, I grumbled and shared the Gospel, and the guy accepted Christ.

So I kind of couldn’t ignore the Spirit, given that He’d just splashed down in the middle of my life and made a big exciting mess, but I also wasn’t quite sure what to do with him.  Can you talk to him?  Pray to him?  Worship him?  What does he DO, exactly?  Get up in your business when somebody needs God, obviously, but what else?  Is He what gives me the heebie-jeebies when I’m driving home from work late, and something in my head says “TAKE A DIFFERENT ROAD TONIGHT” and I say “OKAY I WILL” and feel like I’ve dodged a bullet?

Now, I know I wouldn’t do too well as a full-blown charismatic.  (Somebody will have to tell me some day if you can be introverted and Pentecostal at the same time.)  When people sway too hard during the song service, I’m always thinking, “Steady there.”  People shouting “Preach it!” and “Truth!” during the sermon make me want to thump the back of their heads because I can’t hear the pastor.  The one time I attended an Assemblies of God service, a guy started twirling in circles and hollering in tongues.  It scared the living daylights out of me.  Mostly, though, the service made me sad.  They spent half an hour singing the same songs over and over, begging the Spirit to descend on them / be present there / set them on fire, and I just stood there thinking, “Guys!  He’s ALREADY HERE!”

As time went by, though, I didn’t make a very good Baptist, either.  We talk about the Holy Spirit, and we – funny, that collective pronoun is a hard habit to break.  It’ll do for now … I’ve only been officially non-Baptist for three days, so bear with me.  We believe in the Spirit, no doubt about that – He’s the one who makes all the believing happen, and reminds us to do right when we’re tempted to do wrong.  But we’re just not very comfortable with Him.

I wish I was joking about this, but my just-barely-former church actually made the decision back in the 90’s to not sing the third verse of “Glorify Thy Name”, a simple and lovely modern hymn that mentions all three members of the Trinity.  “Jesus, we love You, we worship and adore You / Glorify Thy name in all the earth.”  That’s fine for Jesus, and it’s fine for the Father.  But they just weren’t sure that it was kosher to worship the Spirit [insert long debate about how the Spirit always directs attention to the other members of the Godhead and there’s no Biblical precedent for worshiping him], so we just sang two verses and skipped to the next song.

That’s an extreme case of literalism run amok, I grant you.  But even on the best days, I always felt like the third member of the Trinity was a little like that one uncle who lives in California.  He’s a great guy, we love him a lot, and it’s a blast when we get to visit him.  We send him pictures and Christmas cards, and sometimes we call him up just for fun.  He loves us, and we love him, but we don’t live together or anything.  Also, he’s a little odd, you know?  Not BAD or anything, don’t get me wrong, but he’s just a little offbeat.

So you can imagine my bemusement when I started my gradual drift into Quaker readings and church services.  They talk about the Spirit a lot, but not like I’ve ever heard him talked about.  No fanfare or excitement, but he’s not the invisible elephant in the room, either.  He’s just … part of things.  Like the air, and water, and food.  When the church I’ve been attending had a business meeting recently, they started it out with a few minutes of silence, in order to open their minds and hearts to whatever the Spirit had in mind for the meeting.  Nothing woo-woo about it, just “Hey God, we’re having a meeting, wanna start us off?  Thanks!”

If I’ve been used to the Holy Spirit as somebody who comes to church just a little overdressed and never stays for the whole service, this view of the Holy Spirit has him in jeans and work boots, getting there early to turn the lights on and staying afterwards in case anybody wants to go to lunch and hang out for a while.  And you know, I think I just might.