Lanes And Patterns And Oh, Forward…

Most of us experience brief flashes in our lives during which we are aware of the singularity of a particular moment. This is special. This will never come again. I have never experienced this before. These flitting glitters of awareness have usually vanished before we can fully form a thought about them.  The weather this week has been so astonishingly gorgeous….I have exhausted all the daylight hours staring like a lovestruck schoolboy out through the pollen-painted panes of the windows and doors. It has been special. And this particular weather pattern will never come again. I have never before experienced this exact pattern of light and leaf and life.

For some time now, I’ve been indulging in a spiritual hissy fit aimed at God. It has done me precious little good. I won’t detail all the reasons this has happened, but will simply say that this stalemate of the soul has come about because of a convergence of things, a great shaking of earth, an upending of things taken for granted, a sweeping, a threshing, a winnowing. Right now certain circumstances in my life have harrowed my expectations of some things, and the scratched soil of my mindset has brought about some re-thinkings, some long, long 3:00 am ponderings.

And yet…. I’m not really ready just now to make nice. I’m still very vexed and unsettled about several things.  I have no clerical authority figure I trust enough with whom to comb out these interior burrs. My wife is — as always — my true confidante and counselor, and is aware of every clod of the soil I’ve been working lately. But still… I’m all over the place and have no branch on which I can roost.

One thing that bothers me about the so-called “community of faith” is the Jesus-Jargon of the thoroughly churched. For me, it is off-putting and shuts down conversation because of the vapidity of its contents and also the breezy rapidity with which it is employed. Browsing through a book this morning, I read this passage:

It interests me to find so little God-talk in monasteries. This sometimes disappoints the more pious (or romantic) candidates who assume that monks spend all their time discussing visions and are shocked to find them evaluating the World Series instead. I suspect that the ample spiritual wisdom to be found in monastic communities comes not from pious chatter but the discipline of psalmody. Immersing people so completely in poems that speak vividly of the human in relation to the holy seems to serve as a corrective to religious code language.

To be sure, jargon does rear its ugly head in the monastic world. Sometimes the word “community” functions that way; people seem to use it when they can’t think of anything else to say, and everyone pretends that they agree on what “community” means. And the secular equivalent of God-talk creeps in. I once read a mission statement from a Benedictine hospital that opened with a promise “to enable the personhood of patients and their families.” The wonderful, mysterious phrase in Benedict’s Rule that has undergirded Benedictine hospitality for over fifteen hundred years, “let all be received as Christ,” was relegated to a small space on the back page.

Normally, however, the monastic life seems to mediate against God-talk in all its forms. If, as I believe, God-talk is a form of idolatry, a way of making God small and manageable, then God’s presence in the Benedictine rhythm of work and prayer is too large, too various, too unpredictable to be contained by it. The idolatry of God-talk, like all idolatry, is a symptom of our desire for control, and Benedictines admit too much of the Bible into their daily lives to keep God neatly packed into their comfort zones. One so often hears people say, “I just can’t handle it,” when they reject a biblical image of God as Father…as Lord…or Judge: God as angry or jealous, God on a cross. I find this choice of words revealing, however real the pain they reflect: if we seek a God we can “handle,” that will be exactly what we get. A God we can manipulate, suspiciously like ourselves, the wideness of whose mercy we’ve cut down to size.

from Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith by Kathleen Norris (1998, Riverhead Books, New York, NY)

I can say flatly that the majority of serious professing Christians I know — dear friends, some family members, several longtime acquaintances — draw the God-talk like a pistol in even the most mundane conversations. It’s as if I can hear their brains whirring, and the whirring says I have to say something to appear pious, or learned, or holy…something to demonstrate that I fit in…and even if I don’t understand what’s being discussed, I have to say something that fits the accepted pattern. 

God save us from God-talk. It is neither holy nor helpful.

~ S.K. Orr