Dark and Cramped

"My soul is too cramped for you to enter it," lamented Augustine. In walking through the story of his life, I’m confident he found this statement a definite answer from God at the beginning of his personal confrontation with Him. The more I converse with folks my age, the more familiar these initial attempts to approach God with a dreaded sense of failure seem to be.  I have been ruminating for a long time on the question….is it God who first approaches? Or do I have to first clear the way....as illustrated by Augustine's cry. Might God approach in the darkness of my restless longing, even as my soul is cramped with baggage and the journey at times seems more a fight with myself than a means of meeting the Other? 

Over the course of the last month someone recommended the reading of Traveling Mercies, a small, quick, five or six hour read, in which the author Anne Lamott begins her story with borrowed words of W.S. Merwin: "We are saying thank you and waving, dark though it is."

She describes darkness in a broken world and an unpredictable childhood, the dimming affects of self-loathing, addiction, fear, guilt, and grief. And she somehow describes the presence of one to thank regardless, one whose light gradually appeared through a world that slowly cracked into a thousand pieces—maybe even cracking mercifully?

Whether the journey of faith is a miracle or it is more like a gift that requires some assembly, I'm not sure. "Man is born broken," quotes Lamott. "He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue." How else does one come to know the Father of Light in the house of a father who despised Christianity, their family codes solemnly holding everyone to unbelief? "It was like we all signed some sort of loyalty oath early on," she writes, "agreeing not to believe in God in deference to the pain of my father's cold Christian childhood."  Mercifully or ironically, there was also a sense of moral obligation preached in her household, a clear (even disheartening) scale of good and bad, acceptable and insufficient. Thus, "I bowed my head in bed and prayed, because I believed—not in Jesus—but in someone listening, someone who heard." Apparently, the cosmic umpire so many know and fear lurches even in atheist households.

Yet from the beginning, there were clues that this someone was relational—in the differences she saw in the social structures of her and her friends' houses, in the Catholic family who offered images of God both compelling and odd, in her need to please the one who listened, like one might a foreign, unpredictable king. "This God could be loving and reassuring one minute, sure that you had potential, and then fiercely disappointed the next, noticing every little mistake and just in general what a fraud you really were."

And yet maybe even broken images of God somehow matter, as God approaches to shatter even these. Lamott describes a life of encounters with God in places of desperation—in a drunken haze, in a broken vehicle, on the bathroom floor, in deaths and in birth and in dying, in her own vehement denials. When the English teacher she loved became a born-again Christian, she wept at the betrayal and challenged this teacher on everything—"every assertion, even when she was right." She willed not to believe, even as her own rebellion held the sneaking suspicion that God might be near.

Sitting, after a meal, with my sisters, the day our mother died, reflecting and rehearsing our childhood, I offered, as a momentary thought that; perhaps faith really is, as John Calvin insists, more a gift than a discovery. If so, I like Lamott's' image of it better than most: "like a sloppily wrapped package that repulses with absurdity yet somehow compels you to claim it for its beauty nonetheless." Wholly unable and unwilling to see or seek God, a reluctant Lamott would yet claim the gift of faith. "I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus," she said as the one who came so near she eventually stopped denying it. "And I was appalled."  

This morning, I’m thinking that: dark and difficult, holy and absurd though it is, Lamott is more than likely right: It's funny where we look for salvation, and where we actually find it.

Father, God, I am not worthy because of my sin, but in Your love, full of worth. Amen