But who’s listening?
Prayer, before it’s talking, ought to be listening. Before it’s petition, it should be audition. Before it calls for eloquence, it requires attention. God speaks. We listen. Prayer’s best posture is ears cupped, head tilted toward that Voice.
And what does the Voice speak? More often than not, a question. God’s curiosity is his most underexplored attribute. He’s downright inquisitive, brimful with questions—some childlike blunt, asked in seeming naiveté, others lawyerlike shrewd, asked with stealthy cunning. Many he asks at odd or awkward moments, moments of heightened danger or giddy elation or riveting shame, moments when my impulse—especially were I God—would be to command or announce.
But God asks. He’s a God of wonder in more ways than one. Indeed, the very first thing out of God’s mouth, after a sustained monologue in which he speaks all creation into existence and declares aloud his pleasure over it, is to ask a question—three, in fact. “Where are you?” “Who told you that you were naked?” “Did you eat from the tree I commanded you not to eat from?”
Does he not know?
I ask questions to discover things. I’m puzzled, so I ask. I’m lost, so I ask (but only when I’m desperately lost, and hopelessly late from being lost, and have just circled the same gas station for the eighth time). I’m incomplete, so I ask. To me, questions are nets for dragging the lake. They’re hairpins for picking locks. They’re hooks for hauling up deep quarry; they help me get at buried, elusive things. I ask questions because I am vastly ignorant and incurably forgetful, and because the alternative—to live in my ignorance and amnesia— is worse than the trouble of asking.
I ask questions out of my ever-present need and my never-banished folly.
But not God. What does God need or need to know? He lacks nothing: not light, not insight, not knowledge, not power, not love, not the cows on a thousand hills. He has no need for personal growth, anyone’s favor, fresh information. He possesses all things in all fullness.
God, strictly speaking, has nothing to ask.
But he asks anyhow. And this, I think, is why: nothing hooks us and pries us open quite like a question. You can talk all day at me, yet it obliges me nothing. I can listen or not, respond or not. But ask me one question, and I must answer or rupture our fellowship. God’s inquisitiveness, his seeming curiosity, is a measure of his intimate nature. He desires relationship. He wants to talk with us, not just at us, or we at him.
So a key attitude of prayer is listening, and what we listen for most are God’s questions. “Where are you?” “Where is your brother?” “Where are the other nine?” “Why do you call me good?” “Why do you call me ‘Lord’ and not do the things I say?” “Who do you say I am?”
One day, long ago, a blind man named Bartimaeus was sitting at the roadside as Jesus passed by. Bartimaeus heard the commotion— for his ears were good, maybe sharper than most people’s—and he cried out to Jesus. He begged for mercy. Many—“those who led the way,” according to Luke—told him to shut up. But Jesus has big ears and a big heart. He stopped and had Bartimaeus called to come.
“Cheer up! On your feet!” they told the blind man. “He’s calling you.”
Indeed. And more than calling you: he’s asking you too. “What is it,” Jesus says, “you want me to do for you?” (See Mark 10:46–52.)
There it is: a whole new world about to be unveiled, just floating up on the smallest spore of a single question.
He who has ears, let him hear.
For this Sabbath Liturgy, find any one of the questions God or Jesus asks: “Where is your brother?” “Why do you call me good?” “Where are the other nine?” “Who do you say I am?”—there are many.
Choose one.
Ponder it until you hear God asking you the question personally. And then ponder it until you can give an answer.
THIRTEEN
REMEMBER:
Stopping to Pick Up the Pieces
Calgary, Alberta, sits between the endless flatlands of the prairies—at sunrise, the horizon curves along earth’s rim in a wide, smooth line—and the jagged heights of the Rockies—at sunset, their peaks print blue shadows across the city. The geographical combination makes for tempestuous weather: an impossible midwinter cold can break, in the matter of an hour, into a summery balm that turns ice sheets to swamps; or an Arctic front can swoop down on a heat wave in August and close roadways with blizzards. Tornadoes skip and reel across open fields, plucking up heavy things at whim, flinging them loose like confetti. Hailstorms hurl down stones large as fists, flattening crops, dimpling car metal, shredding forests, shattering clapboard. Sometimes rain falls and falls, week on week, until the earth slithers with mud and even tractors wallow and get stuck in it. Other times, the sun blazes and blazes, days without end, until that same earth dries and breaks to potsherds, and the wind scoops it away in clouds of dust.
I was born here. Of all Calgary’s fickle weather, what I remember best are the thunderstorms. You could see them gathering all day, over in Saskatchewan or down in Idaho: dense, muscular clouds with a deep, dark purple on their underbellies and an incandescent brightness at their crowns. They were in no hurry, those thunderheads— an army that knew its superior strength, that flaunted it, took its time to assemble in full view, as part of its strategy. By midafternoon, the rumble of the storm’s encampment reached us. Bolts of lightning fissured the deepening blackness of those clouds.
By nightfall it was on us: a great fury unleashed, biblical in proportions. The rain usually held off, so the atmosphere was both crackling dry and oppressively humid. The lightning was so close it sizzled the air and left a burnt smell, and right on its heels the thunder crashed, so loud it shook the ground. And the wind: a capricious thing that dropped to a dead calm, eerie still, and then rose up wild and unruly, buffeting cars into ditches, dismembering trees, shearing and unraveling street wires. It needled down chimneys and sluiced through breezeways with a ghoulish shriek.
One evening, as one of these storms began its siege, my parents gathered my brother and me on our front lawn. We all sat together on a blanket, wrapped up together in another one. We watched. My parents were, I’m guessing, oblivious to how dangerous this was: that any one of those lightning bolts, hunting for some upright thing to skewer and char, could easily have picked us, the convenient little bundle of us, and turned us all to a handful of ashes. But that didn’t happen, and what I remember is the sheer visceral thrill of being in the midst of that storm, sitting huddled with one another while all that raw power and implacable wildness hurtled about. Whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten I could never make up my mind.
I think, because of it, one of my favorite psalms is Psalm 29. Every time I hear it, something leaps in me:
The voice of the LORD is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders,
the LORD thunders over the mighty waters.
The voice of the LORD is powerful;
the voice of the LORD is majestic.
The voice of the LORD breaks the cedars;
the LORD breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon. . . .
The voice of the LORD strikes
with flashes of lightning.
The voice of the LORD shakes the desert. . . .
The voice of the LORD twists the oaks
and strips the forests bare.
And in his temple all cry, “Glory!” (vv. 3–5, 7–9)
Glory, indeed.
I have carried the memory of the night from then until now. I think I will carry it, tucked up high in a place amnesia won’t touch, hidden down deep in a cave dementia can’t reach, until I die. I have kept that memory as carefully as I have kept other mementos from my youth—my collection of Britains Limited molded figures, tiny replicas of Union and Confederate soldiers, frontier cowboys, medieval knights, that I bought with my allowance piece by piece, week by week, from the cluttered toy shop my mother drove me to every Satur
day morning when I was a boy; the agates I gathered in the gravel pit behind our house, walking for hours in a kind of tranced stoop, training my eyes to pick out their amber glint; the photo of me at four years of age, helping my mom and dad whitewash the back porch, a stubby brush capped with paint held aloft in my hand, my mom next to me with a dripping roller, my dad, I suppose, taking the picture. I have passed, several times, the memory of that stormy night to my own children, just as I have passed to my son most of my Britains Limited figures, to my daughters my agates, and one day will pass along that photo, and many more besides.
Memory is identity. Memory grounds us in who we are, where we’ve come from. Memory shapes us and guides us. “The LORD said to Moses, ‘Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered, and make sure that Joshua hears it’” (Exod. 17:14, emphasis mine). Future identity and destiny, in other words, flower from a remembrance of things past.
To remember is, literally, to put broken pieces back together, to re-member. It is to create an original wholeness out of what has become scattered fragments. At times it traps us, I know, memory holds us hostage, demands we pay some impossible ransom. But just as often it frees us, reminds us of something we know in our bones but forget in our heads, only to remember it again in the nick of time, before we seal an identity not truly ours.
The movie The Kid is about that. It’s the story of a man (played by Bruce Willis), a callous and jaded and ruthless man, who makes piles of money spinning people’s images. His success depends on his hardness. It depends on his lack of feeling. But, in the alchemy of movies, he meets himself as a chubby, timid, tenderhearted kid. In the exchange, he rediscovers who he really is, who he was meant to be. His childhood self helps his adult self recapture his true identity, and his adult self helps his childhood self become that. The encounter becomes redemptive.
But first he has to remember. He has to piece his broken self back together.
There is a terrible cost to our busyness. It erodes memory. Or worse than that: it turns good memory into mere nostalgia—memory falsified and petrified—and turns bad memory into bloodhounds that chase us to rend us, that keep us ever running, dodging, backtracking. Busyness destroys the time we need to remember well.
In the confusion, we forget who we are. The broken pieces remain strewn.
The Swahili word for “white man”—mazungu—literally means “one who spins around.” That’s how East Africans see Westerners: turning ourselves dizzy, a great whirl of motion without direction. We’re flurries of going nowhere.
Sabbath time invites us to stop turning around and around. It invites us, among much else, to remember. And remembering— remembering well, without nostalgia or self-pity or bitterness, but in a way that reminds us of who we are—is the necessary groundwork for reflecting well and anticipating well, the subjects of the next chapter. All these—remembering, reflecting, anticipating—are Sabbath practices.
They are also Eucharistic practices, the ways we approach the bread and the cup of Communion. Jesus told us to eat and drink in remembrance of him, and to do it in anticipation of that day we will eat and drink with him in heaven. He told us, in other words, to look back and to look ahead. The apostle Paul adds one thing to this: when we eat and drink this meal, we ought to examine ourselves and our relationships with others. We ought to look around and look within. We ought to reflect.
Both Sabbath and Eucharist join all three: remember, reflect, anticipate.
This linkage between Sabbath and Communion is not accidental. Eucharist, after all, is the Christian embodiment of the Jewish Passover, and Passover is the High Holy Day of Judaism, the lord of Sabbaths. Just as we approach the Communion table with reverence and awe—we sanctify it and don’t treat this as just another meal, another chunk of bread or mouthful of wine—so we ought to approach Sabbath with a sense of its sacredness—that this is not just ordinary time, chronos time. This, rather, is kairos time, time as sanctuary, time as holy ground.
This is God-given space to remember, reflect, and anticipate.
Let us speak of remembering.
Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, wrote a novel in the seventies called The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Sometimes I think an alternate title for the Bible could be The Book of Remembering and Forgetting. A constant scriptural refrain is to remember. Our faith is rooted in memory, so much so that one of the key works of the Holy Spirit is the ministry of reminding (see John 14:26). The day we forget the works of God, from ages past until this very morning, is the day our faith starts to deform into something else—mythology, ideology, superstition, dogmatism, agnosticism, fanaticism. Remembering well is essential to an authentic, living faith.
Equal to this is the capacity to forget. “Forgetting what is behind,” Paul writes, “and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:13–14). Only by forgetting, Paul says, can he “press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me” (3:12). Taking hold of God’s call on our lives depends on this quality of forgetfulness. God’s future entails a relinquishing of some of our own pasts. God himself wills a holy amnesia in regard to confessed sins: he “will remember their sins no more” (Jer. 31:34).
Certain memories clamor for preeminence but must be denied it. They are bully memories, despotic and spoiled. These are memories— we all know this—that seek to use up all the energy that might otherwise be invested in remembering well, or reflecting truthfully, or anticipating joyfully. This kind of memory is gluttonous, never satisfied with its share. It wants, not just the day it had, but every day, today and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, until the end of all days.
As a pastor, I’ve spoken to hundreds of people held hostage by these kinds of memories. Old wounds they keep reopening. Old glories they keep reliving. Old grudges they keep nursing. Old taunts they keep rehearsing. Old fears they keep reviving. Their minds curve back to and curl around these with virtually no provocation. These memories are a prison they’ve lived in so long they don’t know how to live outside it.
They’re stuck.
True remembering gets us unstuck.
Do you remember well? “Remember those earlier days after you had received the light, when you stood your ground in a great contest in the face of suffering. . . . Do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere” (Heb. 10:32, 35–36).
Do you remember those earlier days? Do you remember the moment you knew you were loved with a love that could not be taken or broken or lost? Do you remember the day the Voice broke into you like a storm, terrifying and healing all at once?
Hold that memory until it’s alive, until it assumes its true size and weight and shape. Persevere.
Until it reminds you who you really are.
But our lives consist of more than the abundance of our remembrances. If all we do is remember, the past will not guide us: it will ensnare us. Loss of memory is called amnesia, the condition in which life narrows to mere impressions and sensations, without touchstones to interpret them. But the conquest of memory, when memory holds sway over all our thoughts, reduces life to a museum.
The gift of Sabbath is to recollect, yes, but as I’ve already suggested, it is also to reflect, to pay attention to the present. And it is to project, to nurture expectancy about the future. Those two things, added to memory, allow us to live in the three dimensions of time: then, now, and when. It takes an active, avid participation in all three to be fully human, fully alive, and to fully know the rest of God.
So to reflection and anticipation we turn in the final chapter.
SABBATH LITURGY:
Remembering
One of memory’s strange mysteries is that we can recall, with vividness, events from a lifetime ago yet forget why we walked into a room. The name of the person standing right in front of you, six inches away, whose hand you just shook—his name slipped you already, didn’t it? While t
he name of the wizened old woman who lived at the end of your street when you were three, whom you saw rarely and talked to never, is as present to you as a stone in your shoe.
There are explanations for all this, explanations that have to do with neurology and developmental theories and other complex things. Even if I knew and grasped all that, even if I could articulate it, I would not do it right now.
I’m thinking about something else. I’m wondering why most of us exercise such poor stewardship over the kingdom of our memories. Why, when memory has such power to make us or ruin us, do we practice it so seldom?
One of our first Sabbath Liturgies was paying attention: stopping to notice what is right in front of us. Loss of attentiveness plays into loss of memory. They are blood brothers, we simply don’t remember what we never stopped to notice. Some memories, early ones especially, we hold with such tenacity or reject with such ferocity because we couldn’t help but pay attention. The memory of the event or person got imprinted on us indelibly through trauma or ecstasy, surprise or revulsion. It burned itself into us, like it or not.
But most won’t. This is not an altogether bad thing, to remember everything and everyone would be a disaster, a landslide of image and sensation that would overwhelm us. But neither is it an altogether good thing, for somewhere in that inattention and forgetfulness, we lose that which could ground us and shape us most. If the Israelites ever forgot the Exodus, they forgot who they were. If Christians ever forget Jesus’s death and resurrection, we come unhinged from the story that defines us, the story that frames and explains all other stories.
Here is a Sabbath Liturgy borrowed from an ancient Christian practice. It is called the prayer of examen. One way to practice this is to review your days at the end of each and to ask two simple questions: Where did I feel most alive, most hopeful, most in the presence of God? And where did I feel most dead, most despairing, farthest from God? What fulfilled me, and what left me forsaken? Where did I taste consolation, and where desolation?
The Rest of God Page 20
