Recently, a client/patient (patient/client) was talking to me about God. At least–to quote AA–the God of his understanding. In fact, an understanding not all that different from my own.
Except that I’ve spent more time over more years than he–how shall I say it?
“Wrestling,” in the fashion of ancient Israel’s patriarch, Jacob, with this God (Genesis 32)?
Or is it, according to Isaiah 55:6, “seeking” such a God?
Is it, rather–in that soaring doxology of Isaiah 40: 31–a “waiting upon the Lord”?
Or how about the “resting in” image of Psalm 37:7?
When it comes to “God talk,” the implicit may be even more profound than the explicit; when silence trumps sound, and divine absence is more present than necessarily apparent.
Like the sun, which is shining–however many hours a day–whether or not we see or feel it.
To quote the late Carlyle Marney, “All God talk must be in the dative case; that is, with a proper stammer on our lips.” Our affirmation as much a question as an exclamation.
For after all, speaking anthrpomorphically, is it not seductive to claim that “we have our hand in God’s,” when rather we may merely “have God’s hand in our own”?
My client/patient (patient/client): his life is, these days, in many ways–important ways–as unsettled and dislocated as anyone who has ever faced such circumstances. And not necessarily of his own doing.
Is that when whom or whatever God is seems most urgent? I’d like to think otherwise, but my experience at least suggests it is so. And I seem hardly alone in this respect.
May God be even more vitally present in our vulnerability than in our illusions of competence and control; when losing rather than winning; when, in our myopia, things aren’t going as we would wish?
Does one’s temperament influence one’s theology/spirituality more so than the other way around? My client/patient (patient/client)–he and I–we both struggle with the liklihood of such truth. Being “do-ers,” we prefer a God who responds better to our effort and activity. We prefer a cause-and-effect God whom we can summon on our terms, not to mention a God whose response is reliable–at least according to our calculations.
So we’re forever seemingly scandalized–he and I–by the God we both believe in: the God who isn’t always when and where and how we may want such a God to be. Were it otherwise, God wouldn’t be God–we would.
My client/patient (patient/client)–he’s become, on occasion, my muse. I’ve written other installments of this blog which our encounters have evoked. As in this instance, when I found myself searching for a poem that’s been packed away for awhile. It having been posted on my office wall for many years.
The poem grasped me when I first read it in a periodical entitled Christianity and Crisis, a journal that ceased publication some years ago. The eminent American theologian/ethicist, Reinhold Neibuhr, disagreed with Charles Clayton Morrison, a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) minister and editor of the revered Christian Century. Morrison was an avowed pacifist and opposed America’s involvement in World War II. In response, Neibuhr founded Christianity and Crisis which argued, from a different perspective on Christian ethics, his support of America’s “lesser of evils” intervention into the war.
This may have been merely one poem from a collection by Frederick Morgan, as the title printed in Christianity and Crisis was “Poems from a Book of Change.” I never pursued this question, since the poem itself–whatever the title–standing alone, it says quite enough.
Theologically speaking, the poem might be considered, technically, more Jewish than necessarily Christian. Since, for Christians at least, the most and best we know of who God is, we see in the patient and painful, the beautiful, bruised and bloodied face of Jesus. If this poem may not, however, be explicitly Christocentric, it is so at least implicitly. Most definitely in the latter stanza which, from a particularly Christian perspective, is so profoundly incarnational. And I can’t think of another witness to the God of the Bible–the God of Jews and Christians–that has ever spoken more deeply or profoundly, at least to me.
To live in the moment, each day as it comes
Requires a discipline and cleanliness, it’s
Not quite giving up hope,
But hope becomes
An extension, merely, of the day’s awareness,
Or an accumulation of pledges falling due.
God speaks from the whirlwind: “Count on
Nothing at all
But that I will love and try you hard
And bring all things to an end,
Including you
As you have known yourself
All these days past.
Your root is in me, child,
And the root is here always,
And I am here at the golden heart of
Each frail moment passing–always new.
It’s death to cling to me,
But life to find me”
Although he deals hard blows
And gives great boons,
God does not wish to punish or reward
As though he sat with answers in his hand
Waiting to mark us either sheep or goat.
It’s not so simple. Somehow he’s mixed up
In all this with us; cares, participates,
While holding all the while his ancient realm
That goes beyond our knowledge now.
This, though,
We may share with him, if we let ourselves,
As he shares our flesh when we deeply know.
Yes–what befalls us here is part of him,
And what we make of it is part as well,
And through this painful sharing,
Which is love,
He works within us to establish meaning.
