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Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

October 2, 2022

Two Today

“Ashes, Dust and Mom” 

and

 “On Contemplation…How Your Ship Has Finally Come In”

Sunday, September 18, 2022

Ashes, Dust and Mom

“You turn us back to the dust and say “Go back, O child of earth” (Psalm 90)

Mom was cremated yesterday. Back to dust. Back to the earth. Back to Earth. In Psalm 91 we hear how God will deliver, protect, rescue, show salvation those “who have made the Lord your refuge.” To that I say to the Lord today, “you had better do what you promised to Mom!” She, one who awakened to the dawn each day assured and certain that God provided that new day’s light and time to live and breathe. She, one who made God her daily refuge. And so, O God, do not lie. Take her, keep her, give her the eternal joy you promised her. Do not lie.

Thursday, September 22, 2022

On Contemplation…How Your Ship Has Finally Come In

On the quest, the spiritual journey, the search for God….

It’s actual, but at its core more self-serving and self-aggrandizing than anything else. What we want is not really God, but rather peace and security, safety and security. If God will help us get there, all the better.

What I want to say here is that God does in fact get us there, but not through assistance in our quest. God gets us there by announcing to us, in an auditory and audacious way, that our quest is over and done and that because God has arrived, we have arrived. 

Announcement. Auditory. Audacious. Arrival. 

Thomas Merton’s wisdom for us is that the Contemplative doesn’t need to be cloistered. Rather, like Frederick Buechner, listen to your life, and, just as importantly, like Martin Luther, listen to God. 

And, so, just there, the search for God is not completed as if you have reached your goal of finding.  It is rather interrupted and destroyed. It’s what Paul meant by “Christ is the end of the law.” (Galatians). 

If we are lucky, the search for God is over before it gets started. If we are lucky, we hear the cacophony of the noisy God that God is, from a baby crying in the manger to the young man crying out on a cross, rather than hear only the dead quiet of a silent God that hides and waits for us to find her as if we are playing hide and seek. 

Who would have thought this daily search would be put to death, put to rest, in such an unassuming and certainly not beautifully sleek and perfumed by incense and set apart from the world kind of way in literal mountains like that trip we are so eager to share or the figurative mountains like enjoying doing nothing or even the best conversations over wine with friends. 

Who would have thought this daily search’s flame would not be emboldened but instead extinguished, and that by, well, such a pedestrian and available thing as a sermon. By sermon I mean a literal word spoken to us and provided in that local pulpit down the street. But you have to be fortunate here. Not every pulpit provides the word that puts our search to rest, stops all the nonsense of spiritual calisthenics. Most do the opposite: set us up for another try at it in the coming week. 

When you listen to your life and listen to God at the same time there can be what Paul calls “the peace that passes understanding” (Philippians). But you have to be lucky enough to have found a word from God that regularly and without reservation tells you contemplation, this listening to your life and to God,  is not a taking you out of the world but deeply into it and regularly and without reservation tells you that You Do Enough, You Have Enough, You Are Enough…..all instead of claiming the word from God, of God, takes you out of the world and sets you on a path and gives you tools and traveling gear to find another world, a world, the world, of God.

Wanting peace, safety, security is only natural. I am not saying it is something to be denied or avoided. We cannot and we will not.  I am only saying we don’t have to treat it as if it’s not already ours and we need to go and find it.

However, the normal, which is to say, religious, way to getting to “not searching anymore” is to stay on the search by doing something like “humbling ourselves” to the point where, we are so often told, we will finally find it. The abnormal, religion-less way to peace, safety, security is to let the truth happen to us and not try to hide from it: God, any divine being with destiny and control in their hands scares us down to the bone and this God, so the Christian story has it, knows this and calms us down and settles our souls by showing up at our doorstep and holding on to us for dear life (the Tradition calls all this truth-telling this: “we are to fear and love God.”). 

There is no way for us to be humble. We are, rather, humbled. 

To be Contemplative is to be humbled by our life and God. 

And there it is, right there in the middle of your busy life: peace, safety, security. 

Announcement. Auditory. Audacious. Arrival.