Posts Tagged ‘desolation’

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Why Would God Laugh?

· Thursday, 6 Aug 2009, 11 pm · Saints Justus and Pastor, pray for us

The song “Laughing With” is haunting me in a good way. When I searched for the lyrics yesterday, one of the first sites that came up was one of those song meaning sites. I read through some of the comments. Some were debating if the song was really about God or if it was a jab at atheists or a jab at a certain style of believer. Even the religion of the singer was discussed. Some comments went deeper in wondering about how and when their own attitude of God changes.

These levels need to be examined, but I left a somewhat different, and hopefully a much deeper comment:

I think the key [to understanding the song] is the title and its last line. Why would God laugh?

Figure that out and you will know why we are laughing with God.

I should have added, “…despite all that is referenced in the song.”

“Figure that out” may be a poor choice of words because it is not a problem to solve. It is a question and a mystery to live with, to grow deeper in understanding.

Obviously, God would not laugh at anyone, especially at the people who laugh at Him like those in the chorus. And God would not be laughing at or about the other situations concerning war, illness, poverty, etc. I can see a skeptic with a twisted image of a revengeful god laughing smugly at people when they prayed to Him in need, “Ha ha, now you call me! I knew you would.” This god is too small. It is not the image of Jesus.

Why God would laugh? The only insight I have to this question is joy. That’s all I got, and yet it seems to be more than enough. God would laugh because of joy.

And yet, the strength and shock of the song in my opinion is that joy is never mentioned or implied in the lyrics. (Laughing at cocktail jokes or put-downs is not real joy.) The contrast is so striking that it is paradoxical. This leads to another question with no earthly answer. Where is joy in all those desolate situations described in the song? It must be there. The song ends in a note of joy, “We’re all laughing with God”.

(For further thought, every saint recognized or sensed joy in all situations. That does not mean they were happy in times of desolation, but they never lost a sense of underlying joy in God’s presence. This must be true of every saint, or else they would not be a saint. This is often easier seen in the stories of martyrs.)

I have an answer, but to a skeptic it might appear as circular reasoning. What, or rather who, is the source of all joy? It is God. This now puts a heavy emphasis on the preposition with. (See previous parenthetical paragraph.)

Maybe that is another way to say what separates hell from heaven—those who choose to laugh with God and those who won’t?

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Laughing With

· Wednesday, 5 Aug 2009, 10 pm · Saint Afra, pray for us

A song by Regina Spektor (listen):

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God when
     they’re starving or freezing or so very poor

No one laughs at God
     when the doctor calls after some routine tests
No one’s laughing at God
     when it’s gotten real late
     and their kid’s not back from their party yet

No one laughs at God
     when their airplane starts to uncontrollably shake
No one’s laughing at God
     when they see the one they love
     hand-in-hand with someone else
     and they hope that they’re mistaken

No one laughs at God
     when the cops knock on their door
     and they say we got some bad news, sir
No one’s laughing at God
     when there’s a famine or fire or flood

Chorus

But God can be funny
     at a cocktail party when listening
     to a good God-themed joke, or
Or when the crazies say He hates us
     and they get so red in the head
     you think they’re ‘bout to choke
God can be funny
     when told He’ll give you money
     if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie
     who does magic like Houdini
     or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket
     and Santa Claus
God can be so hilarious, ha ha

Ha ha

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God
     when they’ve lost all they got
     and they don’t know what for

No one laughs at God
     on the day they realize that the last sight
     they’ll ever see is a pair of hateful eyes
No one’s laughing at God
     when they’re saying their goodbyes

chorus

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God in hospital
No one’s laughing at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God
     when they’re starving or freezing or so very poor

No one’s laughing at God
No one’s laughing at God
No one’s laughing at God
We’re all laughing with God

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Birdwings

· Thursday, 28 May 2009, 8 pm · Saint Germain of Paris, pray for us

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you’re bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.

— Rumi, from The Essential Rumi

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Walking on Water

· Monday, 30 Mar 2009, 12 am · Saint John Climacus, pray for us

God is everywhere. That’s easy to say, but do we really believe it? Are we willing to admit that God is present even in what looks nothing like holiness or love, i.e. in our sin—before, during, and after?

Here’s a powerful poem from Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction, September, 2008.

After the storm, clouds like blown
milkweed lie in the widening sky.
I still don’t know how we survive

our youth, how in a matchstick boat
we cross the wind-clawed sea. When I
look back, I see no boat. I must have

walked on water, holding fast to false
beliefs: that I was strong;
that the worst

had already happened; that to commit
suicide would disgrace
the memory of my grandparents,

who had survived Auschwitz,
so what excuse might I give
for not surviving America?

Maybe it’s not truth that save us,
but a half-remembered image:
dimly seeing in the dark

a luminous, familiar
figure walking on the sea.
And like Peter, you step

out of doubt as out of a boat,
and start walking across the storm—
not on water, not on air,

barely even on faith—
toward what you don’t dare
call love.

— Joanna Warwick

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Advent Longing

· Friday, 24 Oct 2008, 9 am

It feels like I’m in Advent, waiting. (I never seem to be in sync with the current liturgical season.) I feel like an old dog trying to find a comfortable spot to lay down—he circles and circles around the same spot, but no angle quite looks comfortable enough to settle on.

I am uncomfortable in my own skin. And there is no where to go or run or do anything. Just wait.

I am not comfortable waiting. But there is no other choice. Only God can fill this God-shaped hole in me. It felt like I was standing on His shoulders back in the summer, now it feels like I’m standing on the edge.

Advent Longing

In the darkness of the season,
     in the silence of Mary’s womb,
     new life waits and grows.
     Hope is shaped in hidden places,
     on the edges, in the depths
     far from the blinding lights
     and deafening sounds of consumer frenzy.

In the darkness and silence of my own life,
     I wait,
     Iistening for the whisper of angel wings,
     longing for a genuine experience of mystery,
     hoping for a rekindling of joy
     and the establishment of peace.

I lean into the darkness
     and silence.
     Expectant.

— poem by Larry J. Peacock

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Just Wait

· Wednesday, 23 Jan 2008, 10 am

I heard this song by Blues Traveler on a retreat I was directing for students. The second stanza caught my attention for a friendship that is drifting apart. But the more I listen to the whole song, it sounds more like Jesus singing to me, reminding me of some of my past and that we don’t need to go there again.

If ever you are feeling like you’re tired
And all your uphill struggles leave you headed downhill
If you realize your wildest dreams can hurt you
And your appetite for pain has drinken its fill
I ask of you a very simple question
Did you think for one minute that you are alone?
And is your suffering a privilege you share only?
Or did you think that everybody else feels completely at home?

Just wait…just wait…just wait…it will come

If you think I’ve given up on you, you’re crazy
And if you think I don’t love you, well then you’re just wrong
In time you just might take to feeling better
Time is the beauty of the road being long
I know that now you feel no consolation
But maybe if I told you and informed you out loud
I say this without fear of hesitation
I can honestly tell you that you make me proud

Just wait…just wait…just wait…it will come
Just wait…just wait…just wait…and it will come

If anything I might’ve just said has helped you
If anything I might’ve said helped you just carry on
Your rise uphill may no longer seem a struggle
And your appetite for pain may all but be gone
I hope for you and cannot stop that hoping
Until that smile has once again returned to your face
There’s no such thing as a failure who keeps trying
Coasting to the bottom is the only disgrace

Just wait…just wait…just wait…and it will come (x3)

— Blues Traveler

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Among All That Debris

· Friday, 28 Sep 2007, 11 am

Some quotations from Crisis of Faith, Crisis of Love by Thomas Keating that have been lanterns of hope along the path through the valley…

The absence of the felt presence of The Lord is his normal means of increasing our faith and of getting us to the point of believing in the power of his word alone, without “signs and wonders,” that is to say, without the feeling of his presence or external props. [cf John 4:46-54]

(Fr. Keating assumes that one is trying to avoid sin. God knows one will not be successful in avoiding sin, but resistance to temptation should/must be there. Stubborn attachment to sins, by definition, can also cause an “absence of the felt presence of The Lord” for fairly obvious reasons.)

In reference to the story of the Canaanite woman begging for help in Matthew 15:21-28 (emphasis added below):

Who is this daughter who was so “sorely tempted by a demon?” It might not be too farfetched to consider the daughter as a symbol of what Paul calls, “the physical part of our being,” [2 Cor 4:16] which is truly tormented by a demon at this crisis in our lives when we go to God, and his former tenderness, sweetness, and whatever else we may have received, are turned to dust and ashes. The more we plead, the less we seem to be heard. The lower we crawl in the dust, the more he seems to suggest getting lower. It is the cry from a heart that is really serving God which Jesus seems to turn down here. Why? Because we are “unprofitable servants” and have no right to the “food of the children.” We have no true right to anything in order of grace. It is precisely by facing up to this reality that we pass from confidence in our own merits to faith in his mercy. As soon as she acknowledged that she had no right to food, she got not only a crumb, but the whole banquet. That is really the substance of the crisis of faith—and it’s resolution.

A few pages later (emphasis added):

Ask somebody whom God is trying to jockey into this kind of crisis, and he usually will say something like this: “I’m going backwards. God doesn’t love me anymore. He doesn’t listen to my prayers. He never gives me what I want. I can’t find him in books. Prayer is a mess, one distraction after another. Temptations of every kind abound.”

And yet underneath all that debris there is the same kind of perseverance and longing for contact with God which shows grace is secretly at work. What is actually being destroyed is our dependence on our own ways of going to God. Actually these much loved souls are being invited by Christ to the same kind of expansion of faith that the Canaanite woman experienced. Remember what the grand finale was. At a certain point, when her confidence reached the degree Jesus was waiting for, he acquiesced and said to her, “Woman, great is your faith. You can have anything you want!”

What we really want and what the Holy Spirit is inspiring us to long for in the crisis of faith is a confortation with the Word of God in or inmost being. It is contact with the divinity of Christ. It is to be brought inwardly face to face with the living God, who, faith assures us, dwells within us, and who, hope reassures us, will reward those who seek him with his presence.

O Father, I hope this is where I am. I do not know. I cannot see. I trust You. Lead me where You want me.

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Nothing Satisfies

· Wednesday, 26 Sep 2007, 8 pm

Found myself with a rare free moment during the day. After a quick check on the internet for something, I found this little signpost for encouragement. It is a strange signpost, but one none the less. And the trick to remember with signposts is to follow where they point, not to collect them or stand around admiring their form or cleverness in design.

I do not know if I have found answers. When I first became a monk, yes, I was more sure of “answers.” But as I grow old in the monastic life and advance further into solitude, I become aware that I have only begun to seek the questions. And what are the questions? Can man make sense out of his existence? Can man honestly give his life meaning merely by adopting a certain set of explanations which pretend to tell him why the world began and where it will end, why there is evil and what is necessary for a good life? My brother, perhaps in my solitude I have become as it were an explorer for you, a searcher in realms which you are not able to visit … I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man’s heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and in which one learns that only experience counts. An arid, rocky, dark land of the soul, sometimes illuminated by strange fires which men fear and peopled by specters which men studiously avoid except in their nightmares. And in this area I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is.

— Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love [via]

I am, or at least think I am, in this desert. Oddly enough, part of me wants to be here because I know or sense that it will strip me of my conceptions, my things and objects of God—my God who is objectless. What will remain? My mind still searches for explanations, at times desperately seeking something to hold on to, but only finds dust or thin wisps of smoke. Nothing satisfies. Emotions crave feelings to feed upon and to foster the illusion of a reality, almost any reality, of some solidarity to grasp. But more nothing, no-thing. Nothing satisfies.

Merton says, “…in which one learns that only experience counts.” I wonder. Explanations are like concepts, objects of the mind. God is beyond objects, beyond things. The mind takes experience and makes memories out of them, forming objects out of them. They become things, things to hold on to, to use and to manipulate. Experience is collected like others objects. It is not experience I can depend. But what? What remains? Nothing satisfies.

Pure relationship is what I think I seek. There is no certitude. In relationship, there is no object, no I-It. There is only I-You. There is no object to stand on. There is nothing, no-thing. And in there lies the despair, and the hope. One leads to death, the other to life. Oh! the thin border between the two. Some how, nothing, or no-thing, must satisfy.

On the thin border,
between faith and doubt walks Christ,
calling all to trust.

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You in My Desolation

· Wednesday, 5 Sep 2007, 4 pm

I feel like a fraud, a fake.
I want to pray, but I don’t want to.
My words are so shallow, empty, nothing.
I am shallow, empty, nothing.
My thoughts are divergent,
     flittering between this and that,
     between nothing and no-thing.
My emotions are worn out—
     the same spinning of wheels in dry dust.
To label this dryness, this emptiness, this blah,
     only semi-satisfies my mind.
The mind likes labels, categories, and judgments.
The label does nothing to help my heart.

There is only You.
Yet I cannot sense You, know You, feel You.
I feel presence-less,
     even though I know You are present.
All that I depend on internally tells me nothing.
My mind, my heart, they are useless.
There is only You.
You are in my desolation,
      but I do not recognize You.
Help me to see You in all things.

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Emptiness and Doubt

· Monday, 3 Sep 2007, 1 pm

I ventured out of my blog hermitage yesterday afternoon to find much discussion on the spiritual suffering of the Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa).

It reminded me of something I had written awhile ago. The words are mine but I do not claim credit. The inspiration, and the meaning between the words, comes from elsewhere.

As flowing water falls to seek the lowest point,
     it gives all its energy away until none remains,
     and then returns to its source to fall again.
What does the water gain from this falling?
What does life gain?

It seems many people were surprised to learn of her spiritual emptiness and dryness. It just goes to show you that we all take different paths. (And that you shouldn’t read too much of pop religious material. It is just candy, nothing too deep.)

The opportunity to love is the reward for loving. Loving is its own reward. We just don’t see this very well on this side of heaven. Giving goes with receiving. And Bl. Teresa gave almost everything she received spiritually and everything materially. It follows that she would feel empty. She held nothing for herself.

There was also much discussion about her doubt. Again, I am not too surprised. She was after all, human. Doubt is a cold-hearted fact of the spiritual journey. Although that person sitting next to you in church looks confident in their faith, they have had to struggle with doubt as much as you, maybe even more. Ask them? Everyone must face doubt, but not alone. Jesus is right there with us in our doubt, whether we know it or not. From a post the other day:

On the thin border
between faith and doubt walks Christ,
calling all to trust.

Jesus calls for a total and complete trust. A total and complete giving over to Him. A total and complete emptying of oneself of dependence on things of this world, even dependence on oneself, so that one can depend totally and completely on God. If that does not involve doubt—doubt in what is not seen, doubt with oneself—then it is not faith; it is something else. “Narrow is the gate…”

Bl. Teresa is an example for me in answering a question anyone serious about their spiritual journey must face: Do I love God for His consolations? Or do I love God for God’s sake? Do I want to be with God because of what He can give me, or do I want to be with God just because? Although she may have wished for the consolations, Bl. Teresa has shown everyone that she would rather love God (and others) for God’s sake.

A commenter on another weblog noted that sometime ago before this recent round on Bl. Teresa’s suffering, Fr. Cantalamessa, the preacher to the pope, outlined three purposes for her suffering: to provide the humility necessary to inoculate her against the fame and praise the world would shower upon her; to enable her to experience the isolation and desolation of the sick and rejected she ministered to; and as a special gift, a share in the Lord’s spiritual suffering during His passion.

Whether we are married or not, we all sleep spiritually alone until the Wedding Banguet in heaven.

FYI — This Wednesday, September 5th, is Blessed Teresa’s annual memorial day.

Thank you Father for the timing of this. Although I am no where near the levels that your Blessed Teresa experienced, this has helped to put a handle to some of my own experience with dryness and doubt. Thank you for reminding me to remember that it is You I seek, not your consolations. The opportunity to love, to give, is my reward. From You, in You, through You, all is gift. You are in my emptiness. You are in my doubt. Even if I do not see You, You are there. I love You.

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